On Antinomies

“We here, however, come up against a central feature of life and experience: that the various directive ideas in terms of which the phenomena are ordered and articulated do not always square. That the patterns of order in which one of them sets before us as a guiding framework run athwart the patterns another sets before us, and that even in the pattern dictated by what may be called a single idea there are possibilities of alternative development, confusions of direction, that make orderly extensions difficult. Antimony, in other words, is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the experienced and interpreted world, and becomes more and more acute the more we attempt to focus phenomena clearly, to see them in their unshifting, fully revealing light. It is this all-pervasive presence of antinomy in the work of experience that makes us find the world a queer place and that led Plato and ourselves to describe it as a cave.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 20.