Argument Outline: Hegel §46 – 48

Conclusion:

Kant’s metaphysics, insofar as it asserts that Reason must transcend sensory experience into the noumenal realm (e.g. freedom and necessity) and is concerned only with the appearances of reality, is correct.  Antinomies are found, not to the fault of reason alone, but in the subjects themselves.

“Antinomies are not confined to the four special objects taken from Cosmology: they appear in all objects of every kind, in all conceptions, notions, and Ideas” (Hegel 158 §48).

Premises:

1.      Knowledge is an acquaintance with the object as perceived by its distinct and special subject matter.

a.       The subject-matter has a connection within the object itself and with other objects.

b.      To employ the features of the Thing-in-itself, Reason would have to become transcendent because it’s only means of understanding is through the categories.

c.       Since knowledge is gained through the means of the categories found in the unity of self-consciousness, it is purely subjective (Hegel 154-155§46).

2.      Kant asserts the following:

a.       The soul is a substance.

b.      The soul is a simple substance.

c.       The soul is numerically identical at the various periods of existence.

d.      It stands in relation to space (Hegel 155 §47).

3.      Universality and necessity are absent from sensation and they are empirically different from their intellectual formulation.

a.       The attributes of the soul, which are felt through experience, are not the same attributes that result from thought.

b.      All knowledge, including experience, arises from the transformation of empirical, sensory categories into intellectual categories (Hegel 156 §47).

4.      The application of the categories is necessary and it is these categories that make up reason’s capability of cognition.

a.       If reason is only indeterminate thinking, then it thinks nothing.

b.      “That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements” (Hegel 159 §48 Zusatz).

5.      Kant’s argument is a “sham of demonstration” because what he seeks to prove is implied in the assumption.