Tag: metaphysics

23. Kant’s Third Antinomy and the Metaphysical Barn

Kant’s Third Antinomy seems to be about the possibility of freedom. But his arguments apply much more widely; if he had never published anything else, the few pages of the Third Antinomy would have made Kant the most important philosopher since Aristotle.

An “antinomy,” according to Kant, is a pair of propositions which contradict each other, yet can both be proven. According to the Third Antinomy’s thesis, if there is no such thing as freedom, then everything that happens, happens according to causal laws, and so by modification of a previous state of affairs. So any event E must come from a previous event D, and must have done so according to a law of nature. But then that previous event D must have come from a still earlier event C, and so on—to infinity. The number of events which must have already occurred prior to any given event is therefore infinite; but infinity is precisely that which can never be reached in this way. Therefore, at some point, we must accept an event which springs from no prior events—a free act.

According to the antithesis, let us suppose that there are such free acts. Such an act must be produced by the will at a specific time. This means that there must be a change in the will itself, by which it begins to cause that act: in Kant’s parlance, the will must “determine itself to produce the act.” So we have one thing—the will—in two successive states: not-yet-determining itself to produce some given act, and actually determining itself. But these two states cannot be connected to each other by any law, for then the will’s producing of the act would be determined, not free. So the will’s “determination of itself” must be a wholly random change. But such randomness (in addition to being mere spontaneity, not true freedom) would reduce nature to, at bottom, a series of random, disconnected events.

These arguments are not very plausible, either in my short summaries or in Kant’s cumbersome German; whether they can be made plausible is a huge question. But I am after their structure, which is that of a reductio: each side of the contradiction is proved out of the other side. The thesis begins by assuming that no act is free and proves that some must be; the antithesis begins with the view that some acts are free and proves that none can be. P implies not-P, which implies P.

This has metaphysical implications far beyond issues of freedom. For the thesis is Platonic (#11): it argues that if you claim that everything has the principle of its being in a cause other that it, you must eventually, to avoid accepting a completed infinite series of causes, posit something that has no principle of being beyond itself: the free act plays a role akin to that of Plato’s Form of the Good.

Unsurprisingly, the antithesis is Aristotelian (also #11), positing that there are things which, like Aristotelian ousiai, have their principle of being within themselves; in free acts, the moral law plays a role akin to that of Aristotelian immanent forms. But any given form, for Aristotle, comes into its matter at a certain time and place—its beginning is an event, such as the arrival of a seed in a particular patch of soil—and this must be explained by something beyond that thing. But this in turn requires the existence of things like the sun warming the earth, the alternation of night and day, the change of seasons, and other features of the natural order.

And where does the natural order, the kosmos, come from? For Aristotle, it comes from the Prime Mover—pure Form, existing apart from matter. For Kant the natural order is the causal sequence of the entire universe, in which every event is caused by previous events.

Kant has thus revealed, for the first time, the structure of the Metaphysical Barn. He has shown, in about ten pages, how Platonists and Aristotelians have been chasing one another around that barn for 2000 years—and that neither approach provides a way out.

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains:  to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.

4. Philosophy’s Watery Beginning

Western philosophy is traditionally held to have begun with Thales of Miletus, which was a city on the Ionian coast of what is today western Turkey. According to Aristotle, who is our main source for the little we know of Thales, he held that all things were basically water. Not exactly promising as the first philosophical utterance. But, as Aristotle points out in Metaphysics I.3, pregnant all the same, for Thales is at least trying to find a single principle behind the impossibly varied material of experience. Just why he settled on water is perplexing even to Aristotle, who speculates that it was perhaps because seed and nutriment in general, the two things that begin and maintain life, are moist.

Kirk and Raven point out that none of the ancient discussions of Thales’ views enables us to decide whether water is an immanent principle of things, that which they somehow really are, or merely their source and destiny in the sense that they come from water and resolve back into it, without being water themselves.[1] Aristotle himself, to be sure, holds the former; but Kirk and Raven point out (loc. cit.) that the few actual quotes we have from Thales do not say this—and Aristotle’s whole project here, as he makes abundantly clear, is to read his own doctrine of material causes into his predecessor.

Either way, most things don’t look or act like water, and we see that Thales agrees with his fellow Ionian Heracleitus that “nature loves to hide” (Diels-Kranz, “Heracleitus” B123): since nature is not obviously water or from water, nature’s true nature is hidden from us. Indeed, we do not even know the true nature of water itself, because we do not experience it as what it really is: the underlying principle of everything else. The true unity must be wrested from the manifold of experienced facts; the true nature of the nature of nature, we might say, is hidden in them.

Once, we saw, such wresting-of-unity was done by poetic similes. We don’t know how Thales does it, for Aristotle’s account by way of seeds and moisture is, we saw, speculative. At the very least, however, it requires, like similes, an act of what we would call the mind, which turns different things into one thing.

It wouldn’t take much to read Thales as formulating a simile: when Aristotle says Thales claimed the underlying nature of everything to be water, ὕδωρ εἴναι,  all we have to do is prefix ὡς, “as:” then Thales is claiming that all things are as water, or like water, or watery. This reading has zero textual support and I am not advocating it; but thinking about it shows us some things about similes.

If he had included ὡς in his formulation, Thales would be presenting, not an identity but a resemblance. The aspect in which water and other things resemble each other would not lie in the things themselves, however, but in how we are to take them. Its justification would then be pragmatic: Thales would be suggesting that we would do well to treat all things as water, even though they do not seem to be water. The suggestion would not be a predication, which tell us how something is, but a case of what Heidegger, much later, will call “apophansis:” an utterance which bids us to treat something as something.

But what does it mean to “treat” something as something? Answering that would take us deep into the Teutonic thickets of Heidegger’s Being and Time (and eventually we may come to that); for the moment we can say, minimalistically, that we “treat” things when we try to do something with them. A treatment thus has a future, the goal we are seeking to realize with our doing, and a past, which produced the thing we are presently treating.

When we read Thales’ utterance, not as a simile but as a predication, pasts and futures drop away. What we want to do is irrelevant to the fact that Thales asserts, and what brought us to the assertion is as well. ”We” too, without past or future to define us, drop away. The utterance loses its pragmatic dimension and is viewed as something spoken and understood by people who are not “treating” anything, people who, as far as the utterance is concerned, do not act at all. An emphasis on predication is thus part of the appropriation of thought by what Aristotle calls the “leisured” class (Metaphysics 981b20-23).

Aristotle holds that philosophy resulted from that appropriation, and so was that way from the start; I will be claiming, off and on, that philosophy was almost never that way. Philosophy has, from the start, been a way of “treating” things, working them over, making them amenable to a certain set of projects.

The above tells us, I hope, some things about similes as a mode of thought. As a reading of Thales, it does have one thing to recommend it: Thales’ silence on the “location” of water with respect to other things. If things are not necessarily water, but are to be taken as water, we don’t need to worry about whether they really are water or merely come from it: our treatment of things should resemble our treatment of water, and that’s the end of it. Philosophy is not an absolutist set of identities, but traffics critically in the resemblances our language deems important enough to have names.

But Thales didn’t say this. Philosophy sets off on an anti-Homeric track very different from the pragmatic/apophantic one I have just indicated. Just who put it on that track remains a mystery: Thales or Aristotle’s account of him?

Or Plato?

[1] G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven The Presocratic Philosophers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 pp. 89-90