Antinomies

According to Findlay, “antinomy...is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the experienced and interpreted world (2).” Findlay states that the fact that antinomies abound in human experience leads us to “find the world a queer place” and led Plato and others to describe it as a “cave” (21). He argues that “the pervasive antinomy of the world is far too serious and too deep to count as a mere formal contradiction” (21). He holds that while antinomies can be specified as formal contradictions, this provides us with no insight because such contradictions can be readily dissolved through a specification of the “senses” in which each pole of the contradiction is true and false.  For Findlay, the antinomies of human experience are more akin to “discrepancies in a person’s character,” and it does us no good to either define or argue them away as an merely “apparent” contradictions.  Rather than adjust our concepts to accommodate antinimous experience, Findlay calls upon us to extend our experience to accommodate our antinimous concepts.  Findlay seeks an accommodation that will “explain rather than explain away such antinomies.”