ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2018
Now, to bring Kant’ s teleology back to the analogy with art and human creation: in his system, teleological investigation of natural organisms is an aesthetic judgment governed by concepts of fitness and harmony between parts and a larger whole. It is a creative act of the imagination, not an application of formal reason, though it is shaped and bound by a priori concepts of reason, as discussed previously.
As argued above, Kant strongly criticized attempts to move beyond investigations of natural purposes to speculations about ultimate purposes – as Steigerwald puts it,“ teleology cannot produce a theology”( Id. p. 732). There is no scientific justification for such speculation: theological speculations are out of bounds within Kantian philosophy. On the flip side of this coin, secular teleology faces the danger of taking an anthropocentric view of nature – even Kant is not immune to this critique in his positioning of human beings as free moral agents as the final purpose of nature.
The main point I wish to make here is that these formal philosophical objections are to a large extent obliterated, at least in pragmatic terms, by human-directed genetic enhancement: we are in a very real sense becoming at once the cause and effect of our own efforts to change our genetic code, but as organisms within the system of nature. We are apprehensible and observable as agents in a way that is not possible with other living organisms.
However, the collapse of this central pillar of Kant’ s teleological system does not render it incapable of making useful contributions to present day debates over human directed evolution. On the contrary, the Kantian notion that we must infer the purposiveness of nature in order to make sense of it, while at the same time realizing that the limits of the human intellect places the discovery of the ultimate purposiveness of nature into, at best, a hypothetical distant future, as setting the stage for the Jamesian, pragmatic concept of teleology. That two such disparate thinkers would both rely on cautious, even humble conceptions of the goals of human investigations as asymptotic, likely never to reach perfect understanding, is less surprising if one is aware of the lines of connection between them( See, e. g., Murray Murphey’ s well known essay Kant’ s Children: the Cambridge Pragmatists, discussed further below).
As a parenthetical transition, it might seem that the sketch of natural teleology I have elaborated so far is directly at odds with Evelyn Fox Keller’ s well-known essay Ecosystems, Organisms and Machines, the thesis of which is to drop discussions of intentionality in favor of agency. However, her discussion of self-organizing systems, which she actually grounds in Kant’ s discussions of organisms, is a deliberate attempt to bypass cruder forms of teleology, namely, an external creator or causal principle, while still asserting purposiveness through the action of agency, whether human or animal, in the sense of extending their abilities through modification of their surrounding environment.
I’ m especially interested in her final paragraph, where she makes the claim“ that the most interesting kinds of self-organizing systems are those that require the participation and interaction of many different kinds of selves,” despite her well-founded fears that human agency has a potential for destabilization far beyond other organisms. My reasons for this interest will be made clear in my discussion of James.
34