Kant’s Third Antinomy: the empirical and the intelligible character
February 12, 2012
Musing on Kant’s Third Antinomy where we think in terms of the human as subject to the laws of nature and at the same time, but in a different reference, as subject only to the laws of freedom.
It seems to work like this. We examine a person’s life and his various experiences and, as we do in applying all objects to the appearances, we conceive of an object, the Transcendental Object = X, which is so constituted that the person would have to appear as he does in all these actions and experiences of his. Perhaps we conceive of him as a product of a certain environment and who looks for his advantage and finds it sometimes in compliance with a moral law and at other times at odds with that. And so this wise we come to identify his “empirical character”, the way he acts in the world given the opportunities and circumstances he perceives. So we conceive of him as concerned about others to a certain extent, but then also reacts selfishly and so we come to understand him and if all factors were known science is able to make predictions about him with certitude. That is his empirical character; that is what he is as an object of a nature of laws.
But then we can still make appeal to the most fundamental basis of all, the thing on its own. This thing that we have presupposed (and necessarily so) by science, identified now in his empirical character is actually a free being who makes choices independently of all conditions of time (via principles for all action, including the future), and what we are looking at, this empirical character, is merely an appearance of the intelligible character.
And so what was the “thing on its own” for science, namely the “object of experience” (supplied by our understanding), is, transcendentally speaking, always only an appearance, just like the tree we conceive of as before us even when we blink, is itself an appearance within a giant brainarium. And then what is really there, we are permitted to assert (as long as we are self consistent and do not contradict science and experience), is a free being who simply exercise his liberty in the way that the empirical character presents him to science.
Let’s see. In order to recognize a tree in the appearances of the tree (e.g., bare and then also fruitful) we must come up with a “real” object which these appearances then represent to us, and it is this that we conceive of as existing in time and space whether we are looking at it or not. This is the object of experience which is the Transcendental Object = X = nature, and mean that we are speaking of the transcendental object as an object in a giant brainarium, i.e., the object of experience. But when we speak of what something looks like when it is not being looked at, we are speaking of the inexpressible, except as negations of what we see to be real, not colored, not extended, etc.
So if we remove from our concept of the object of experience all that we think, then we are left with merely a something. That something, as an appearance in the brainarium, is subject to conditions of time and space and laws of experience. But the something, not considered as an appearance, but as something on its own, is not subject to the conditions of human understanding at all. And so it remains a mere something.
Now Kant is saying that we can assume this mere something and follow science as it adds its “object of experience”, i.e., here the “empirical characters”. And then we can just assert, even as a sheer fiction, that the something is actually a free being, and the empirical character that sciences recognizes is merely the appearance of this something (intelligible character) which is free.
At this stage we can even go to the extreme and simply say with Kant: if we choose to, we can easily imagine a truly free being acting on his own principles alone, and thus not subject to conditions of time, and who chooses a certain empirical character, e.g., to like most people and dislike those who are unfriendly. Such a being then is conceived of as freely choose to act as it does. This is the way the being is revealed to the world. It has freely chosen and its character can be represented by the empirical character. It has freely chosen its way in this world and this choice is exemplified in its actions, i.e., they are freely chosen.
So, as Kant put it, let a man be totally determined by the laws of nature, given his upbringing and desires and experiences, nevertheless we blame him for wrong doing and declare that he did not have to act as he did, and so freely chose to do so.
Thus Kant must end up (at this stage of his thinking) with the capacity (of no use or interest to science) of a being who has always only freely make his choices independently of the conditions of time and experience. He says to science, “but nay, what he did he wanted to do and chose to do, and it only looks like he had to do it (where we remember that all looking is conditioned by our own time and space). Actually the being freely chose what science knows he did as a product of his make up and experience. It just looks like he was necessitated (in time [and in scientific parlance he was in fact necessitated]), but he was always free and is free even now at this immediate moment.
In this way Kant unifies freedom and the necessity of nature, two entirely different ways of thinking about the individual, and where the empirical character is considered the real thing on its own by science and experience on the one hand, and then on the other hand where this empirical character is not a real thing on its own, but rather merely an appearance of an intelligible character, one which is not subject to a sensitive and empirical looking.
There are three objects of interest to us here: the appearance, the object of experience, and the thing on its own. We are confronted with the appearances, we conceive of the thing on its own, and we come up with the object of experience, but which itself is always an appearance within the giant brainarium which we imagine to contain all empirical reality.
We have the appearance of a tree. We conceive of a real thing (in order to be able to recognize that the appearance is not itself a real thing, as it may appear to the other animals). We recognize this real thing as an object where we speak of this real thing as though it were itself real within the giant brainarium (which we imagine in order then to be able to recognize our appearances as representatives of something). But strictly (transcendentally) speaking that real object of experience (the real tree of science and experience) is just an appearance and in that regard has no more transcendental reality than a rainbow.
Wondering and speculating now. Quantum science tells us that the particles making up matter appear to be going in and out of existence. Since time and space are merely the forms of looking in the brainarium it may be that there are different dimensions of space that we cannot visualize and can find no room for, and since these dimensions would be apart from the brainarium, we may be at the end of our understanding and recognition, for these particles themselves are nothing but appearances.
There may be another possible sense, call it X, to which all humans stand as does the deaf man to hearing and the blind man to seeing. And since all senses are our own anyway, it certainly seems presumptuous to even want to assert that the thing on its own were no more than these sensations. And so in the same way that there might be a sense X which would give us additional appearances of an object of experience, it would not exhaust the reality of the thing on its own any more than does color or sound or touch, etc.
We conceive of the thing on its own, and by virtue of the object of experience (designed to represent this thing) we are able to turn the appearances from things on their own into representation of realities which are independent of the brainarium.
And so finally we come to assert that the object of experience called the empirical character is itself a representation in the brainarium world of the intelligible character which is free, and which is a characteristic of the thing on its own (independently of all human looking or thinking). The empirical character is the “thing on its own” or the “real thing” from the standpoint of science (just like the real tree so conceived for the appearances to represent), and is just an appearance of the intelligible and free character the thing on its own in a transcendental sense, just as the “real tree” remains ultimately always only an appearance and is never given to us in any other way except via the brainarium and our senses.
Filed under: Kant