Teleological Time: A Variation on a Kantian Theme

The form of the inner sense, time, to which the Critique of Pure Reason devotes the first chapter, is subject to hard determinism, owing to which each of our choices, decisions, and actions is causally determined. Time is irreversible and the past determines the present, and the present determines the future, not the other way round. Such an idea of time is obviously incompatible with the demand-postulate of the second Critique, the practical use of reason, that our will is free and thus it is not subject to any determinism, temporal or otherwise. To solve this major problem, I have suggested a reconstruction, which I have called “teleological time,” and which is constructed by the teleological-regulative employment of our power of judgment. Such a time, unlike time as a form of intuition, which is constructed by the transcendental use of the power of judgment (in Kantian schematism), is not subject to any determinism, because in it the past does not determine the present, nor the present the future. In it, instead, it is the future that determines the present and the past by means of our free choice, which freely endorses the moral end. This end freely, out of our free choice, determines the temporal order of the teleological time, in which there is no necessary connection between the moments, but each of them is discretely and freely chosen in the order of its approximation to the moral end (which is its last moment of the teleological time). Surprisingly enough, Yakir Aharonov’s novel ideas of quantum theory, concerning retrocausation, in which the future determines the present, free choice and free will, and the “final state of the universe,” are gaining metaphysical support and clarification by independent and antecedent ideas that I have suggested concerning teleological time.