The . Antinomies . of . Kant

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

Values
The process of childhood growth into adulthood produces a person who has acquired, voluntarily or involuntarily, many fixed beliefs and prejudices. The involuntarily- accepted beliefs are just another name for social conditioning. These fixed beliefs enable a person to structure his character, since they create values. Values are the standards that he bases his identity on. But these values have usually been created either mechanically or subconsciously, and hence are usually enshrouded in confusion and self-deception. So simultaneously this fixed structure produces determinism ; that is, a person usually acts in a present situation in a manner that was first established in the past of long ago. The more that he centres himself in these confused beliefs and values so the more he finds that he is subject to determinism and fate. Psychology is the investigation and understanding of this fixed structure.

Meanings
In contrast, the existentialist tries to live a very different situation. He accepts his limitations from the past ; his character is his present starting point. And from this starting point he tries to live a life of meaning, a life of choice, a life of free will. This is the important difference between standard man and existential man. Standard man acts from values. Existential man seeks meanings. Meanings become the way that life is lived, lived in all its drama. The meaning of anything is just what that thing can teach him. Meanings are just the idealistic ideas that are important to him.

Values give structure and an element of rigidity to a person’s character, and help determine his actions and behaviour. Hence they are objective. Whereas meanings are always subjective, since flexibility of character and ability to change are of prime importance. However, values and meanings are not isolated from each other. They are tied together through relativity.

The world is a relative world. The world is relative because consciousness is relative. Anything that is relative has both a subjective and an objective component. Self- consciousness, as pure relative subjectivity, arises from its relationship to social reality, a relative objectivity. Within language, the objectivity of the world produces a subjective interpretation of it. The standardised sameness of the world is tied to the uniqueness of the individual.

I digress for a moment
Now language is a system of signs, and by using signs we can communicate ideas. The sign has two parts : a name plus an idea. These parts are termed the signifier and the signified. The sign is a compound of a word that signifies, and the idea in the mind which is the signified. [¹]

The signifier is the name, which includes the sound of that name.
The image of the object in the mind is called the signified.

Language is modelled on consciousness. Hence I view consciousness as a sign system too. The major difference between them is that language is primarily a static structure (it is difficult to change), whilst consciousness includes both dynamic structure (it is changeable) and static structure. [²]

For the normal person, the dynamic aspect of consciousness is the ego, since the ego is unstructured ; the static aspect of consciousness creates structure from the person's past, which centres on determinism or karma. Ego is the signifier, and karma is the signified. [³]

Now I return to meaning and value.

The subjectivity of meaning is tied to the objectivity of value.

The signifier produces subjective meaning.

The signified produces objective value.

However, this viewpoint can be weighted to emphasise just one factor, so there are two ways of valuing relativity. For the introvert, the subjective mode, arising from self-consciousness, produces meaning. The objective mode, arising from social reality, has little value. The extrovert reverses this format : the subjective mode is unimportant and only the objective, social mode is desired and valued. [4]

Being and Becoming

How do these views relate to Being and Becoming ? . Traditional philosophers preferred Being as the primary feature of reality. However, my view of relativity implies that neither is more important than the other. Being is objective. Becoming is subjective. They are relative to each other ; that is, the relation of Being to Becoming is the ground of all relativity. Relativity gives rise to sign systems, so therefore Being and Becoming can be considered to be the primal sign system in creation, from which human consciousness is formed. The relations within consciousness are :

Karma = Being.

Ego = Becoming.

This view means that the individual can focus on either mode in his spiritual practice. Being and Becoming form a binary, so neither is ultimate. The difference is that the person who focuses on freedom and choice needs to follow Becoming, whilst the religious person who focuses on duty and purity needs to follow Being. Being is the path of value. Becoming is the path of meaning. These paths are separate in their requirements and separate in the way that they structure the world. Each path leads to a distinct manner of making sense of reality : the person can focus his life on either the pursuit of truth or the pursuit of goodness.

Each person oscillates between these paths over his cycles of reincarnation. But ultimately the seeker has to gravitate to ethics as the centre of his/her practice. The pursuit of truth is too hard, so that only a little truth can be discovered in any era. But this little ration of truth is enough to enable the practice of ethics to be updated to meet new conditions of society and individuality.

These examples of meaning and value illustrate the solution of philosophical paradoxes. Each person has two sources of influence acting on him/her : these being subjectivity and objectivity. Hence the solution of a paradox must reflect this fact.

By taking consciousness to be a sign system, then the opposed concepts needed to solve a paradox are associated with the two determinants of signifier and signified.

The Nature of Paradox

When consciousness is thought to be a unitary phenomenon, then understanding the relationship between binaries such as Being and Becoming becomes problematical. Usually such relationships are relegated to the status of metaphysical paradoxes, which cannot be made intelligible by rationality. This lack of success in intellectual effort enables the seeker to downgrade reason and thereby justify his sole reliance on faith as the basis of his spiritual life.

However, all traditional metaphysical paradoxes can be understood once consciousness is accepted to be a sign system. Such paradoxes came to the foreground in philosophy through the ideas of Immanuel Kant, who called them the ‘antinomies’. For example, one paradox is : do we have free will, or is determinism all-powerful ? . The solution to a paradox is that one premiss resides in the signifier and the contradictory one resides in the signified.

I look at four paradoxes :

identity and difference
free will and determinism
essence and non-essence
cause and effect

In the article Logic of Consciousness, I presented my ideas on the four forms of relative consciousness. I analysed binary relationships in order to derive the nature of relativity. If X is a variable and A and B are the two possible choices in a binary system, then there are four ways that X can have value. This led me to the following result : relativity implies that in a binary relationship, X is neither A nor B.

This idea can be generalised.
All philosophical statements of the form :

X is neither A nor B

where A and B are the only apparent alternatives, indicate the presence of relativity. This means that object X cannot be defined completely either by its similarities to A or by its differences from B. The signifier indicates difference and the signified indicates similarity.

A sign has two aspects, the signifier and the signified. One aspect is defined by difference and the other one by similarity. In this way the totality of the sign cannot be reduced to either similarity or to difference. A sign is a relative construction. The signifier indicates difference and the signified indicates similarity. So another way of expressing relativity is that it holds together similarity with difference.

a) Identity and Difference

Relativity holds together similarity with difference. Or, relativity means that identity is inseparable from difference.

What is distinctive ? - identity or difference ? . The answer is : neither, because each is tied to the other. Identity is inseparable from difference because they are both part of the same relative consciousness.

John Blofield recounts an experience with an hallucinatory drug that verified for him several aspects of Buddhist doctrine. In particular he felt the truth that colours and forms, whilst differing from one another, yet were nevertheless the same even in their difference (Blofield, page 33). This is a fine example of the meaning of relativity : to be the same as others yet also to be different from those others.

b) Free will and Determinism

A standard problem in ethics is that of free will versus determinism. Does a person have free will or not ? . The answer is that the will is neither free nor determined. Why ?

The use of free will within an ethical idealism has the function of removing weakness from the ego. But free will alone is inadequate for solving ethical issues. A psycho-analysis is also needed and it has the function of removing self-deception and determinism from the person’s sense of identity.

c) Essence and Non-essence

These ideas apply to the problem of essence. Does a person have an essence ? . Consider the baby’s task of creating his ego. He constructs it partly from the desires, attitudes and abilities that he incarnates with, and partly from the mother’s attitudes and emotions. If he constructed his ego solely from himself he would grow up to be a complete individual in any manner that he chose, and therefore have no pre-determined essence. If he constructed his ego solely from the parents’ influences he would become completely social, and thereby have an ordained essence (essence = his objective structure of fixed beliefs and fixed values). The factor of transference means that when the baby grows up he will be neither a complete individual nor completely social. [5]

The signified mode (or karma) is the objective aspect of consciousness ; it can be considered to be ‘essence’. Whereas the ego (the signifier) has no essence since it is pure subjectivity. Consciousness is neither completely essence nor completely non-essence. Hence :

The person has neither essence nor non-essence. So the concept of essence is a relative one. This is a variation of Sartre’s idea that existence comes before essence. All that a person has which is completely his own is his existence.

d) Cause and Effect

The concept of cause and effect can also give rise to an apparent paradox. Reason is used to analyse things into the categories of difference and identity. Is the relation between cause and effect a relation of difference or of identity ?

If the effect is the same as the cause, then that effect is a duplication of the cause, since nothing new has been created. Therefore the idea of causality loses its meaning.

If the effect is different from the cause, then something new seems to appear ; but where is the continuity ? . How can one thing give rise to another thing which is different from it ? . There is a disjunction between cause and effect.

In both cases, the idea of cause is problematic. However, the idea is problematic only because it is tacitly assumed that cause and effect should be a unitary phenomenon. When we make it a binary phenomenon, the paradox disappears. Cause is a relative objectivity and the effect is a relative subjectivity.

If something is a relative phenomenon then it can never have a unitary reality. It always has to be binary in its nature. The whole of creation is a relative product. Hence there is nothing in creation that can have a unitary existence.

Limitations to Logic

Kant considered that the antinomies were natural contradictions in our reason. This view is false. The apparent contradictions arise from the attempt to apply non-relative logic to relative concepts.

Because modern analytical logic was ‘liberated’ from the psychological ideas of theorists such as John S. Mill, so it has to face the necessary consequences : it cannot analyse metaphysical and ontological issues. Non-relative logic (that is, analytical logic) can handle mathematics and technological requirements, but not meanings, nor values.

Analytical logic is primarily based upon two operations :

either X = A

or . . . . . . X = not A

These operations cannot always be applied to relative propositions. To argue that two relative terms are identical is often fallacious, and to argue that two relative terms are different can be fallacious as well. They may be identical in the signifier but different in the signified, or vice versa. Conversely, if a logical argument leads to contradictory results then we are likely to be dealing with relative terms.

The world is a relative world. The world is a world of relationships. Therefore causal processes are relative processes. Since cause is relative then so is the effect. The problem for a logical analysis is that relative objects have no distinct beginning and no distinct end. Relative things are neither completely objective nor completely subjective.

What a relativistic argument implies is that from any particular perspective then either X = A or X is not = A.
But as the perspective changes, so too does X.

Logical analysis cannot deal with terms that are changeable. As the term changes so it slips free from the confines of analytical logic.

All past philosophical ideas, all past philosophical solutions to problems, are subject to change and reformulation as the intellectual vocabulary develops.

The traditional view of the ego is redundant to modern needs.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it.

[¹]. The terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced in the article Semiology. [1]

[²]. The idea that consciousness is a sign system is presented in the article Structuralism and Sign Systems. [2]

[³]. The idea that a person is the sum of ego and karma is first presented in the article Sexuality and Ethics, and then in the article Existentialism and Psychology. [3]

[4]. See also the article Meaning and Value. [4]

[5]. Issues that face the infant when it is trying to create its ego are described in the articles Bonding and Transference, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, Discover Your Mind, and The Subconscious Mind. See the Links page for the addresses of these sites.

Fixed beliefs and fixed values produce psychological structure, which can be considered to be essence. See the article Existentialism and Psychology. [5]

Books

Blofield, John. The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. Causeway Books, USA, 1974, or Allen and Unwin, 1970. [footnote, page 33 ].

The articles in this section are :

The Antinomies of Kant

Charge & Feeling

Waves & Particles

Causality & Change

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

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Ian Heath
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