ABSTRACT
Language is spatial whether it is ideographic, pictographic, alphabetical or the language of binary numbers. The problem of the beginning of time constitutes a most startling paradox. It seems to be a case in which language and concepts overrun reality. Immanuel Kant was right to criticize the powers of pure reason to know reality, but he was right for the wrong reason. In order to do metaphysics, one must begin with phenomenological data. These data are pure objects of consciousness. For Kant, one could not aspire to metaphysics because one was always limited to appearances - to the way the world appeared to human beings. When one takes into account the phenomenological nature of space-time and the difference between phenomenological space-time and physical space-time, one is in a better position to approach a solution to the problems Kant couches in his First Antinomy.
