Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Kant had come close to the truth, Hegel believed, in developing the antinomies of reason in the first Critique. Kant’s purpose there was to show that reason is out of its depth when it tries to figure out noumenal truths about reality. He did so by developing four pairs of parallel arguments on four metaphysical issues and by showing that in each case reason leads to contradictory conclusions. One can prove that the universe must have had a beginning in time, but one can equally soundly prove that the universe must be eternal. One can prove the world must be made up of simplest parts and also that it cannot be, that we have free will and that strict determinism is true, that God must exist and that He does not exist.[49] These contradictions of reason show, Kant concluded, that reason can never know reality, and that therefore our reason is limited to structuring and manipulating its subjective creations.