ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
lawfulness of phenomenal nature, the unity of its ‘order’, as the locus in
which man was to act out this obligation.” (Zamitto p. 754-55)
3. Therefore, teleological claims about both individual organisms and nature as a
whole are, for Kant, intimately connected to human morality (he famously
claims the human species as the sole final purpose of nature, but only as a
moral being exhibiting free will), but also to human creativity and the feelings
of beauty and the sublime.
It is definitely not a mere coincidence that Kant begins his critique of teleological
judgment with a discussion of the physiology of birds and how their wings, hollow
bones, and tails are adapted for flight. Here he already pushes the analogy between
artifact and organism to set up claims about functionality directed towards a certain
purpose. In this analogy, fitness of an organ or organism is recognized by means of a
form of aesthetic judgment: we recognize functionality in the same way we recognize
the beauty of a work of art: through the quality of harmony, the relation of parts to a
whole, composition as a vehicle that carries apprehensible meaning. However, he dis-
tinguishes living organisms from artifacts by pointing to their abilities for reproduc-
tion, growth, and self-regulation as a system of integrated parts (Quarfood p. 738).
We take note of these abilities through sensation, through observed experience. But
this gives us no ground for ascertaining purpose beyond functionality. Kant character-
izes a living organism as something that exhibits a unique kind of causality – “as a
thing that is both cause and effect of itself” (Kant, Critique of Judgment 5:370, quoted
in Zamitto, p. 756). He adds that, while we can think of this kind of causality without
contradiction, we cannot bring it under concepts of the understanding, that is, we can
recognize it, without being able to explain it (Id.). In Kant’s view, the vast contingen-
cies involved in the development of a complex organism defied any explanation based
on mechanical principles of causation – please note that his view was consonant with
then current theories of biology.
Because of this limitation, Kant focused on natural teleology as, first and foremost,
part of the reflective power of judgment: a “transcendental rule necessary for our cog-
nition of organisms as organisms, as organized and self-organizing” (Steigerwald, p.
716). This a priori rule is constitutive of biology as a science that examines living or-
ganisms as natural purposes, but it is a heuristic principle only – it guides our investi-
gations into natural organisms, it does not provide for a final cause or purpose of life
as a whole. “It is thus by moving between the observation of particular natural objects
and the concept of purpose as a concept of reason that the reflecting power of judg-
ment arrives at the concept of natural purpose and the notion of intrinsic purposive-
ness” (Id. p. 719). Accordingly, the concept of the purposiveness [Zweckmässigkeit]
of organisms, their ‘harmony with the character of things only possible through pur-
poses’ (Id. p. 720, quoting the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment), is a product
of the principle of purposiveness, the assumption that nature will be purposive for our
intellect. According to some modern commentators, Kant turned this apparent contra-
diction – that all material things must be understood as products of mechanical laws,
but that living organisms cannot be so understood as merely mechanical products –
into a critique of contemporary metaphysics, and also of the limits of human under-
standing (Id. p. 729-30).
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