Kant's First Antinomy: The Beginning of the Universe

The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that reason is not capable of answering the question of whether the universe began to exist. Kant sought to show this by demonstrating that both the proposition that the universe began to exist and its negation (i.e., the universe did not begin to exist) admit of incontrovertible arguments in their favor, thus implying that reason leads to the conclusion that a proposition (what Kant calls the “thesis”) and its negation (what Kant calls the “antithesis”) are both true. But by the principle of non-contradiction, a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. Kant refers to such paradoxes as antinomies of pure reason. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant identifies four such antinomies, the first of which is the one presently under discussion. In trying to answer such cosmological questions by way of pure reason, reason itself, as Kant puts it, “soon falls into such contradictions that it is constrained, in this cosmological field, to desist from any such pretensions” (Critique of Pure Reason, Bk. II, Ch. II, pg. 385). Given the present antinomy, we must conclude that reason itself is bankrupt with respect to answering the question of whether the universe began to exist, even though the question must of logical necessity have an objective answer. As Kant writes,