ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
conscious organisms? What is the ultimate goal of our taking control of our own evo-
lution?
The notion that human directed evolution is already supplanting natural evolution is
not new (see Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto of 1984 and its provocative, presci-
ent slogan: “We Are all Cyborgs Now”). But there is an increasing, and increasingly
dangerous, gap between the ethical and teleological language employed by those indi-
viduals and institutions who are driving technological change, and those who articu-
late the social and cultural consequences of that change.
I choose to focus on the teleological writings of Immanuel Kant and William James
for typical scholarly reasons – partly out of fitness for the subject at hand, and partly
out of familiarity with the texts – but also because the 100 years between them neatly
brackets the time of Darwin and the first, greatest impact of On the Origin of Species.
Most particularly, the philosophical movement from Kantian idealism to Jamesian
pragmatism exhibits interesting parallels with my eventual arguments about human
directed evolution. This movement is, to quote Richard Rorty, a “passing from a defi-
nition of knowledge as a better fit between mind and world to one that sees knowledge
as a better set of tools with which to modify our environment and shape our own defi-
nition of ourselves” (Rorty, quoted in Boffetti p. 617).
I.
Kant
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, long considered a lesser, even tangential work compared
to his other Critiques, is, in fact, being drawn upon in current debates on the teleology
of biological function within the philosophy of science. It is also raised in discussions
of how much, if any, space is left for teleology within natural selection and evolution-
ary theory, and lastly it plays a role in an ongoing tussle within post-positivism and
naturalism. I will bypass much of this discourse, but I will make a brief overview
sketch before diving into particulars.
The Critique of Judgment is an explication of what Kant terms reflective judgment:
the discovery of the “universal” for the given particular. Reflective judgment comes in
two types: aesthetic judgments (about the beautiful and the sublime) and teleological
judgments (about purposes in natural things), and the work is comprised of two sec-
tions dealing with each separately. Philosophers have long debated why Kant put
these seemingly disparate categories together, and some have argued that there is, in
fact, no real, substantive philosophical connection between the two: it is a mere mar-
riage of convenience. More recent scholarship views them as more unified, and I note
a few key points of connection made by these authors:
1. It can be argued that Kant treated aesthetics first because it sets forth his
views on human artifacts, which he later draws heavily upon by analogizing
and contrasting between human artifacts and natural organisms in setting up
his teleological system. That analogy appears to exert a strong influence still
on contemporary attempts to explain function and self-regulation in living or-
ganisms.
2. The overarching reason for the structure of the Critique of Judgment, accord-
ing to Zammito and others, is not arbitrary, but an attempt at a “‘critical’ rec-
onciliation of human [moral] obligation, and its implicated freedom, with the
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