Alina Wang

November 19, 2017

Kant's Paralogisms and Antinomies

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that all experience and knowledge depends on a
priori conditions of cognition, and empirical laws and transcendental concepts are not derived
empirically from the contingencies of experience but are rather grounded in these a priori
conditions. In the first part of his work, the Transcendental Analytic, Kant showed that experience
is made possible by the a priori condition of the pure concepts of the understanding. In the second
part, the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant argues for how knowledge is made possible by the a priori
condition of the transcendental ideas of pure reason. In this paper I will begin with a summary of
Kants theory of transcendental ideas. Then I present two particular transcendental ideas that help
show the profundity of his overall theory; transcendental ideas are irresolvable, paradoxical notions
for us, which have given rise to heated dogmatic disputes in both rationalist and empiricist
traditions. But in fact, they stand in for noumena, which we simply cannot ever access due to our
cognitive limitations.

Transcendental Ideas
Transcendental ideas are pure, or empty of any empirical content, and are the idealistic aims
of any explanation or formulations of knowledge. As how imagination synthesizes the intuitional
manifold according to the pure concepts of the understanding to make empirical experience, the
understanding makes inferences according to the teleological ideals of transcendental ideas to make
explanations and knowledge. There are three kinds of transcendental ideas, which stand for three
possible kinds of explanations or bodies of knowledge: (1) the categorical, or the pure subject that
has no predication, which gives us psychology (2) the hypothetical, or the absolute unconditional
that is the condition of all appearances, which gives us natural science and (3) the disjunctive, or the
totality of all beings, which gives us theology. Whenever we try to explain any phenomenon, we
make inferences about immediate observations and connect them to more abstract, universal
judgements. Then we can make further inferences about these abstract judgements, and this process
amounts to an inferential chain that idealistically arrives at one of these three transcendental ideas.
However, our reasoning can never arrive at the actual referents of these transcendental ideas, due to
limitations on our cognitive capacities. Because these transcendental ideas stand beyond the limits
of reason, whenever we try to make sense of them, we inevitably encounter irresolvable paradoxes.
Kant presents the paradoxes of each transcendental idea, the empirical and rationalist
dogmas that try to resolve these paradoxes, and the deficiency of these accounts. The problem with
these philosophical dogmas is that they take the inevitable tendencies of our reasoning processes as
either logical or empirical fact and neglect that these tendencies are in fact determined by
transcendental ideas, which are unknowable. These transcendental ideas are like noumena, which
refers to anything in itself, as independent of our experience and cognition. By definition we could

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never fathom the noumena, but we know that they exist, due to their necessity in defining the limits
of our sensibility and in making synthetic knowledge objectively true relative to the world within
our sensible limits. Likewise, transcendental ideas are necessary given the nature of our reasoning
processes, and at the same time, they are impossible to be understood given the nature of our
reasoning processes.
Kant compares his project of presenting the transcendental ideas, and explaining how the
limits of reason force us into the appearance of paradoxes, to the case of optical illusions, where we
can become aware that they are merely illusions, and yet the appearance of the illusion subsists and
it is impossible for us to remove them from our visual experience. In both cases, there are
fundamental limitations to our cognitive capacities that present to us apparent realities, and when
we realize that these realities are mere illusions and tricks of the mind, they still persist in our
experience. Nonetheless, by recognizing these transcendental ideas are incomprehensible and
unknowable noumena, we can become aware of how all the appearances and knowledge in our
experience are relative only to our experience and have this limitation, and resist the temptation to
pursue our concepts as literal truth (the fault that many philosophers make).

Paralogisms
The paralogisms correspond to the transcendental idea of an absolute subjectivity
independent of all predication or particular determination. There are four paralogisms, or distinct
ways that we can possibly make sense of the self when we reflect on it and try to formulate
systematic knowledge about it. Each way has its own inherent paradoxes. They are (1) the subject as
substance, or eternal and unchanging while only surface representations change, (2) simplicity, or
that the self cannot be divided or destroyed, (3) unity or numerical identity, or that the self that
appears at different times is the same self and not a plurality, and (4) in relation to objects, or how
the self interacts with external objects. All four are related, and crucially, they are not empirical
realities but rather merely transcendental ideas. The problem with the history of theorizing about
the self or soul is that philosophers take these four paralogisms to be literal truths, existing
independently of our thought, rather than noumena that are unknowable. The pursuit of these
inherently paradoxical concepts forces philosophers to assume dogmatic positions, which then
compete with each other without possible resolution, because they refer to transcendental ideas that
are simply beyond our limits of reason. But how can Kant claim that the transcendental idea of an
absolute subjectivity necessarily exists, if it is impossible to access? Given all of our thoughts and
experiences, there must be a unifying ground that enables us to relate thoughts and experiences
together, and this unity is the self. Although we can never experience it, this transcendental,
absolute subjectivity does exist.
I will focus on the second paralogism of simplicity. This paralogism refers to the absolute
subject that is indivisible, the same agent behind all the diverse thoughts and appearances, and the
unification of these diversity of representations. There is not a multiplicity of subjects responsible
for the multiplicity of thoughts that occur. This understanding is intuitive and obvious in our

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reasoning and experience, and yet formally, neither rationalist nor empiricist approaches can
account for it. General logical reasoning and examination of experience alike cannot arrive at this
conclusion. The rationalist approach at best can take the concept that there exists an aggregate
substances of inner sense (e.g. representations or appearances). But then there are two possibilities
in ascribing subjectivity to these thoughts; either there is an absolute unity that represents this
aggregate, or this aggregate truly stands as a collection of discrete substances. Logical reasoning
alone cannot give more weight to either option. But it is commonsense that only the former
possibility is true; there is a single continuous stream of consciousness is composed of diverse
thoughts. Furthermore, if a number of people stood near each other, and each person had a
different thought, these diverse thoughts would not come together to form a single unified self. So,
a purely rationalist approach fails to account for the absolute simplicity of the subject; a subject is
indivisible, and so thoughts occurring in one subject are strictly unified in this single subject and
cannot be divided and distributed among different subjects.
Kant also points out no matter how much rationalists wish to disassociate themselves from
empiricists and forward their theoretical foundation as distinct, the rationalist approach to
psychology is still fundamentally empirical. For example, Descartes introspective method that
arrives at the cogito ergo sum is restrained to empirical representations of the self. When we sit back
and reflect on who we are, apart from engagement in any particular thought or experience, we are
still confined to sensing ourselves through our intuitive faculties. Every conclusion about our
subjectivity is synthesized according to the pure concepts and gives us an appearance of self, or a
mere empirical representation.
The empirical approach likewise cannot account for the paralogism of simplicity. An
empirical approach would take experience as the basis of knowledge. But in direct experience alone,
when we have thoughts in the present moment, we cannot directly experience that there is one
simple, indivisible subject that has these thoughts. Simplicity of the pure subject cannot be known
through empirical investigation. Also, if we try to imagine this simplicity, our imagination would
only produce more representations that distances us further from the true simplicity of the subject.
There is an inescapable circularity in thinking about the self. At best, when we reflect carefully on
inner subjectivity as apart from empirical experience, we are constrained to have thoughts about
this subjectivity and not touch the subjectivity in itself. Kants transcendental method is a clever
escape from this necessary circularity of reasoning. Instead of trying to identify the nature of the
pure subject, Kant looks for the necessary conditions that make empirical experience and reasoning
about the self possible. It is impossible to access the transcendental idea of simplicity through either
rationalist or empiricist approaches.
Kant argues that these rationalist and empiricist approaches fail because they try to derive
this simplicity out from concepts or intuitions of experience of the self. But in fact, this simplicity,
as a transcendental idea, precedes all experience. It makes possible and sets strict limits on our
reasoning capacities. We are condemned to know our selfhood as a unified, simple substance, and
to be deficient in the cognitive capacities to truly make sense of it. We can only experience thoughts

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and appearances as discrete substances and cannot use rationality or intuition to explain how they
are necessarily unified in a simple self. We can know this conclusion of a simple subject solely
because it is necessary to explain our subjectivity and formulate knowledge on psychology.
However, there is a paradox to this transcendental simplicity of the pure subject. In order to
represent the subject as simple, or absolutely unified and indivisible, we have to think of the subject
as a conglomeration of thoughts or objects of inner sense only. We can only understand the subject
as separate from the outer environment. Otherwise, if we imagined the subject would be dispersed
over various objects in the environment, which are obviously divisible and discrete, and in this case
we lose the necessary simplicity of the pure subject. However, with this distinction between self and
matter, there arises all the classic issues of the mind-body problem: how can external substances
interact with internal substance?
Kant dissolves the mind-body problem. He grants that objects in the external world have
physical properties (e.g. extension and impenetrability) that inner sensations could never have. But
it is this fundamental exclusivity between them that gives rise to the illusion that they are
ontologically distinct substances, which is the mistake of both rationalists and empiricists alike.
Kant reminds us that all external objects are in fact mere appearances, or inner representations
synthesized by our cognitive faculties. Likewise, all inner sensations are also synthesized by us. So,
objects of outer and inner sense share a deeper nature; both are grounded in the same ultimate unity
of subjectivity. It turns out, the intuition that we are subjects distinct from the objects in the
environment is illusionary, and in fact we are share the same nature as these outer objects, or these
outer objects depend on and share our nature. A transcendental examination of the idea of
simplicity collapses the traditional subject-object duality.

Antinomies
Next, in the antinomies of pure reason, Kant discusses the hypothetical category of
transcendental ideas, or the cosmological ideas that guide our explanation of the origination of the
universe and causal reasoning in natural science. The cosmological transcendental idea itself is the
unconditional unity of objective conditions in appearance of its content, or the ultimate
unconditional condition, from which all other conditions and appearances are derived. It is both the
very first causally, and also the ultimate unifying ground of all conditions. This transcendental idea
determines our reasoning capacities; when we try to naturalistically explain any phenomena, we
look for the conditions of it and are aware that these conditions rest on even more previous
conditions. All our explanations are incomplete, but they aim at this ideal of the unconditioned first
cause. There are four antinomies, which each focus on different paradoxical aspects of this notion of
an unconditional cause: (1) the absolute completeness of a whole that is composed of all
appearances, (2) the divisibility of this whole, (3) the arising or origination of an appearance, and (4)
the dependence or contingency of appearances. I will focus on the third antinomy.
The third antinomy states that causality is not the only principle at play in the natural world;
we must also assume a higher order of causality called freedom in order to makes sense of how we

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understand empirical laws of causality and explain the natural world. Empirical causality is simply
the law that there are preceding conditions that determine any given appearance. By contrast,
freedom is the functional nature, or power of causality, of any given cause; we can understand it as
the violation of the lawfulness of causality. Freedom is the power to create a new series of
conditions without having been determined by any previous condition. It is the unconditioned
cause. It refers more than our psychological experience of being free agents but concerns all actions
and events, whether cosmological or psychological.
However, this notion of freedom is a source of philosophical confusions and dogmatic
conflicts. The only way to avoid such dogma is to understand that freedom is just a transcendental
idea, which is a noumenon that can never be known. It has no empirical or logical reality for us
whatsoever. We can only know experiences and representations that have been synthesized
according to the pure concepts, including that of causality. However, the noumenon freedom would
be a violation of causality altogether, and so it must defy this pure concept; it cannot undergo the
synthesis according to this concept if it is to retain its true content. So, it is impossible for us to ever
fathom freedom itself, since we can only know representations of freedom that are synthesized
according to the pure concepts. At best, we can understand the concept, and not the content, of
freedom through a transcendental analysis. Nonetheless, many philosophers are deceived, bestow
their deficient experiences or conceptions of freedom with literal validity, and use this deficient
version of freedom to try to explain the origin of the universe naturalistically. But because
ultimately freedom is beyond the boundaries of reason, these philosophers can only make dogmatic,
and not reasonable, assertions, which results in irresolvable conflicts, which Kant aims at dissolving.
There are two primary, conflicting cosmological dogmas concerning freedom: (1) there is a
prime-mover or ultimate first cause, and freedom is real, or (2) there is an infinite universe of causal
connections spanning back in time without end, and there is no freedom. Kant points out the
immediate problems of assuming an infinite universe in (2). According to Kant, infinity is
incomprehensible, and the only way to argue for this claim is to simply dismiss the
incomprehensibility of its content and commit to it as brute fact. Alternatively on (1), philosophers
are committed to a prime mover, which is the absolute first cause for all the motions of the
universe. However, there are deep conceptual issues on this account as well; in what manner could a
first cause begin the universe? There must have been an absolute nothingness that somehow gives
rise to conditions and appearances, which is already incomprehensible; it is beyond our reasoning
and experiential capacities to know how an absolute absence of space and time could suddenly
become an absolute positivity of space and time. Furthermore, if the first cause were material, then
it would be conceptually impossible for it to be a first cause, because as belonging to the material
universe it would necessarily be conditioned by a preceding cause. However, if the first cause were
non-material, we end up with the conceptual problem of interaction, similar to that of the
mind-body problem as described in the paralogism of simplicity of the pure subject. Additionally, by
committing to the literal notion of freedom, it is impossible to explain why not many phenomena in

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this world have this power of freedom or defiance of lawfulness, which would end up with a world
of total chaos. Given the uniformity, causal necessity to nature, there could not be this freedom.
We are all necessarily constrained by inherent limitations of reason. Then, many
philosophers fall for the illusion that phenomena exist in themselves rather than recognizing that
they are merely appearances synthesized by a priori conditions. Philosophers end up basing their
theories on axioms that perpetuate irresolvable problems, such as the mind-body problem, the
problem of an infinite universe, and the problem of free will. But once we understand that freedom
and other features of transcendental ideas are a noumena that we, by necessity, can never
apprehend, we can be at peace with the irresolvability of the conceptual paradoxes it entails as a
conceptual or empirical notion. Kants antinomies and paralogisms aim to point out that some
undeniable, necessary features of experience and reasoning processes that are in fact illusory. These
necessary features are due to the limitations of our cognitive capacities, rather than due to
veridicality of some reality in itself. Given this unknowability of noumenal realities, we can see that
the most abstract truths such as a pure subject or unconditional cause that we take as irresolvable
paradoxes are in fact completely fine and natural in their noumenal nature, but it is simply that we
are condemned to misunderstand these noumena and construe them into forms that contain these
paradoxes.

Citations
Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood, and Immanuel Kant. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason.
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press.