SCEPTICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS[1541]
Applying the “sceptical method,”[1542] Kant argues that even supposing
one or other party could conclusively establish itself through final
refutation of the other, no advantage of any kind would accrue. The
victory would be a fruitless one, and the outcome “mere nonsense.”[1543]
The sole validity of the Ideas lies in their empirical reference; and
yet that reference is one which proves them to be, when objectively
interpreted, entirely meaningless. The cosmological Idea is always
either too large or too small for any concept of the understanding. No
matter what view is taken, the only possible object (viz. that yielded
by experience) will not fit into it. If the world has no beginning, or
is infinitely divisible, or has no first cause, the regress transcends
all empirical concepts; while if the world has a beginning, is composed
of simple parts, and has a first cause, it is too small for the
concepts through which alone it can be experienced. In other words, the
cosmological Ideas are always either too large or too small for the
empirical regress, and therefore stand condemned by sense-experience,
which can alone impart relation to an object, _i.e._ truth and meaning
to any concept. For, as Kant explicitly states, _we must not reverse
this relation and condemn empirical concepts, as being in the one case
too small, and in the other case too large for the Idea. Experience, not
Ideas, is the criterion alike of reality and of truth_.
“The possible empirical concept is, therefore, the standard by
which we must judge whether the Idea is mere Idea and
thought-entity (_Gedankending_), or whether it finds its object in
the world.”[1544]
When two things are compared, that for the sake of which the other
exists is the sole proper standard. We do not say “that a man is too
long for his coat, but that the coat is too short for the man.”[1545] We
are thus confirmed in the view that the antinomies rest upon a false
view of the manner in which the object of the cosmological Ideas can be
given; and are set upon the track, followed out in the next section, of
the illusion to which they are due.
This reduction of the Ideas to mere thought-entities is one of the two
alternative views which, as we have already stated,[1546] compete with
one another throughout the entire _Dialectic_. We may, for instance,
compare the above explanation of the conflict between the Ideas and
experience with that given in A 422 = B 450. In the latter passage the
antinomies are traced to a conflict between Reason and understanding. If
the unity is adequate to the demands of Reason, it is too great for the
understanding; if it is adequate to the understanding, it is too small
for Reason. Kant does not here allow that the claims of Reason are _ipso
facto_ condemned through the incapacity of experience to fulfil them. On
the contrary, he implies that it is through the Ideas that we come to
realise the merely phenomenal character of everything experienced.
Our task, in this Commentary, is only to distinguish the passages in
which those two conflicting tendencies appear, and to trace the
consequences which follow from Kant’s alternation between them.
Discussion of their significance had best be deferred to the close of
the _Dialectic_, where Kant dwells upon the regulative function of
Reason. At present we need merely note that the main content of the
above sections, in which the sceptical view is expounded, is of early
date, prior to the working out of the _Paralogisms_ and of the _Ideal_.