Kant's first Critique: Noumenal and Phenomenal; Antinomies.

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Objectivity, Noumenal, and Phenomenal

• Kant claims that the transcendental investigation has shown our judgments can be objective.
• For example, when we make one of the kinds of judgments discovered in the transcendental logic, we are making a judgment about things as objects.
• Kant claims that at this point, we have discerned the principle limits of the synthetic a priori.
• The categories of understanding, and the necessary conditions of sense experience (time and space) are all the elements that are necessary for all experience.
• For Kant, then, there is a world independent of us, but we can only know it through our experience, and therefore only through the synthetic a priori conditions of experience.
• The world "in itself" is called the noumenal world.
• The world as experienced us is the phenomenal world.
• Kant means therefore to not be an idealist of the usual sort, since he asserts that there is a world independent of our ideas.
• Kant also means not to be either a classical empiricist nor a rationalist: he asserts all knowledge depends on experience, but also analyzes what is known prior to experience and says that these things are absolutely necessary for there to be any experience.

Kant, Idealism, and Antinomies

• Kant's claim that there is a world independent of the synthetic a priori elements of experience is what prevents his philosophy from being a form of idealism.
• The noumena also has other roles, including explaining the paradoxical nature of some of the Ideas.
• Example: the "third conflict of transcendental ideas," which is that we appear to be both free and unfree.
• Kant discusses this in a kind of dialogue, placing side by side two coherent but incompatible arguments.
• The two different views that he contrasts are
  • Thesis: there must be spontaneous causes, which are causes other than the normal causes of nature (which extend back indefinitely)
  • Antithesis: there can only be the causes of nature (which extend back indefinitely)
• Kant lays these arguments out side by side, with
  1. A thesis statement
  2. An argument
  3. A commentary
• The argument and commentary for the thesis
  • Kant observes that every event or state of affairs is the product of an earlier state of affairs.
  • At first glance, it would see that this chain can stretch back forever.
  • However, he argues, if we cannot have a first cause in our chain, we have contradicted the synthetic a priori knowledge that there must be a "completeness" to a series of causes and effects.
  • By this, Kant means that every chain of causes and effects is required to have a beginning, or it violates our sense of cause and effect.
  • (It seems that Kant thinks that it makes no sense to talk of a series of events without also being able to talk about what caused that series.)
  • In part as evidence for this, Kant points out that all the ancient philosophers thought there had to be a "prime mover."
  • Thus, there must be spontaneous causes, which are not themselves caused.
  • Note that this argument only shows that there must be at least one spontaneous event (the beginning of the universe, say). But Kant argues that once we have one spontaneous event, then there is no in principle objection to many such events.
• Argument and commentary for the antithesis
  • Suppose that there were spontaneous events.
  • Then, obviously, there would be at least one event that had no prior cause. This contradicts the synthetic a priori knowledge that all events are caused.
  • The notion of freedom is a notion of breaking the laws of nature. No rules apply to freedom.
  • In commentary, Kant notes we need not think of time as having a beginning, and so need not think of the chain of natural causes and events as having a first cause.
  • Kant claims we cannot comprehend this (but that maybe there are many truths which are not comprehensible).
  • Besides: if we admit into nature lots of spontaneous events, then it is not clear that the laws of nature matter much anymore, since there will be constant interference with them.
• Kant makes one important observation in his comments of the antithesis, namely that if there therefore is in fact any spontaneity (any uncaused causes) it must be in some sense outside of nature.
• But note that anything outside of nature is outside of the phenomena. That is, it is the noumenal.
• Kant's conclusion of the antinomy, then, is that there is spontaneity (elsewhere he observes that we know this because we know that people can be morally responsible for their actions), but that we cannot see it in the phenomenal world. It is a feature of the noumenal world.