# Antinomies

All my life I've felt these arguments pulling me in opposite directions and I never had a word for it. Be yourself. Be selfless, be kind. Both feel obviously right and they point at completely different things. It wasn't until I took Kant that I had a name for the feeling. Antinomies. For him they're equally strong contradictory arguments reason keeps producing, and the reason it produces them is a false assumption sitting underneath, treating appearances like they're things in themselves. Mine aren't quite that. Mine are just two arguments that both feel true, sitting at opposite ends, so people grab whichever one fits the moment, whichever one benefits them right then.

The one I keep coming back to is "don't overthink" and "just go with the flow." Sounds simple. It's not. Whenever I hit something hard my friends, my family, they all say the same thing, don't think about it too much, just follow nature. Which is basically Marcus Aurelius.

But here's where it falls apart for me. What if by nature I just want to overthink? Then the contradiction isn't out there between two pieces of advice, it's inside me. I drift toward thinking, and every time I do I tell myself I shouldn't, I should go with the flow. But what is the flow? If my flow is that I want to think things through, then "don't overthink" and "go with the flow" just turn into the same contradiction.

And you get stuck in this loop. Something hard happens, you feel a lot, you gravitate toward thinking about it. Then you tell yourself stop overthinking. But telling yourself to stop overthinking is overthinking. So you go back to it. Round and round.

So how do you get out? What's the false assumption, to use Kant's move? For me the closest thing I have is, never fight yourself. I think a huge amount of anxiety is just reason fighting emotion. You feel something, and reason tells you you're wrong to feel it. That war is the anxiety.

And people do it constantly without noticing. You fail a test and go "I shouldn't be sad, this is nothing when you zoom out." Sure, that helps for a minute. But you've just started a little war in your head, your emotions don't agree with your reason, and they're not going to just because reason told them to.

But then there's the thing that actually bothers me. How am I getting to this judgment, that reason shouldn't fight emotion? That's also reason. I used reason to make it. So how is this not just the exact same thing happening again, reason generating a claim that overrides what I feel? If using reason at all means producing claims that conflict with nature, then my solution is doing the exact thing it's telling me to stop doing. I don't have a clean way out of that.

Well, maybe the only way through is to ask what reason is even for. Kant says morality. But I think the more general version is that reason is supposed to help us flourish, to be happy. So if it's generating conflict with our emotions, it's probably just doing its job badly. Which would split reason's judgments into two kinds, the ones that help you flourish and the ones that don't. And maybe you could run your judgments through some kind of test, figure out which kind each one is. Empirically even, through something like science.

But I don't know. Because to even run that test I'd be using reason again, to decide what counts as flourishing, what counts as a good result. So the regress doesn't really close. It just moves somewhere I can't see it as easily.

So where does that leave the overthinking. I'm not sure it leaves it anywhere yet.