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 .
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