Kant defines an “antinomy” quite straightforwardly in The Metaphysics of Morals as “an unavoidable dialectic in which both thesis and antithesis make equal claims to the validity of two conditions that are inconsistent with each other” (MM 44). In the Critique of Practical Reason’s discussion of the highest good he claims we encounter such a dialectic in practical reason.
However, what Kant means by the highest good must be clarified. In defining it, it is not meant in the supreme sense, that is to say, as the unconditional condition, or virtue. Rather, Kant takes it in the sense of a “whole which is no part of a yet larger whole of the same kind” (CPrR 110). He thus means a complete good. That, as it so happens, must be virtue (the supreme good) coupled with happiness in proportion to that virtue. Interestingly, this highest good must be a demand of reason, since it is the “entire object of pure practical reason, i.e., of a pure will” (CPrR 109), meaning it is “a priori (morally necessary)” (CPrR 113) to freely bring it forth.
For Kant, though, this idea of the highest good is problematic. For, since it is an admixture of two different concepts which together precede experience, then as a synthetic a priori concept, there must be some connection between its elements. The only way to connect virtue with happiness, Kant declares, is to make one the cause of the other. If neither works, then the moral law is simply a chimera, for its entire object would be untenable. Therefore, a thesis and an antithesis arise: the first is that “striving for happiness produces a ground for a virtuous disposition” and the latter that “a virtuous disposition necessarily produces happiness” (CPrR 115).
As Kant shows in the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason, the first thesis is impossible. There he distinguishes between the “empirical principles [that] constitute the entire foundation” (CPrR 92) of the doctrine of happiness and the non-empirical aspect that must make up the doctrine of morality. But neither is the antithesis possible, namely, that a virtuous disposition necessarily produces happiness. For happiness depends not on the will’s disposition as it does on “knowledge of natural laws and the physical capacity of using them to its purposes.” Therein lies the tension.
Kant then proceeds as he did earlier in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is to say, he resorts to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Recall that the world of things in themselves, the noumenal world, is one that we cannot access. The one we can access, the world of experience, sees things (appearances) as “determinable in time” (CPrR 94). Time, for Kant, is the “form of all inner sensible intuitions” (MV 975), which would clearly have no place in the noumenal world, thereby making “the concept of causality as natural necessity” (CPrR 94) impossible in it.
Taking these things into consideration, there is still hope for morality. Looking over the thesis and antithesis again, the first one will remains completely false, but the second is now redeemed. For, at first, it was simply implied that a “virtuous disposition is…the form of causality in the world of sense” (CPrR 115). But if we see our existence justifiably “as that of a noumenon” (CPrR 115) which is determined not by natural necessity, but by the moral law within as our causality instead, we can still consider a moral disposition a cause of happiness in the world of the senses as long as we assume this indirect relation as “mediated by an intelligible Author of nature.”
----
WORKS CITED*
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993.
Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Kant, Immanuel. “Metaphysik Vigilantius.” Lectures on Metaphysics. Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
*As should be noted, MM = Metaphysics of Morals, CPrR = Critique of Practical Reason, and MV = Metaphysik Vigilantius.
