From Mechanical Inexplicability to a System of Ends: Kant on Organisms as Natural Ends

ABSTRACT

In Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims organisms are to be judged as ‘natural ends’, which are products of nature but inexplicable by mechanical laws of nature. The conception of natural ends necessarily leads to the idea of nature in its whole as a system of ends. This paper proposes an interpretation of Kant’s biological teleology that can be compatible with modern science. Mechanical laws in the third Critique are understood as empirical causal laws that determine all phenomena. A living organism is mechanically inexplicable, not because it falls outside of mechanical laws, but because the reciprocal productions of its parts are unifiable under its whole, as if designed by an intelligent agency according to the concept of the whole. Once we judge teleologically the mechanical laws determining the organic productions, we must judge teleologically all productions determined by these laws and therefore conceive nature in its whole as a system of ends, to which natural mechanism is subordinated.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant
• organism
• natural end
• biology
• teleology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kant’s (1902), works are cited by abbreviation and volume and page number from Immanuel Kants gesammelten Schriften, Ausgabe der königlich preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–). Abbreviations: BDG = Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes; EEKU = Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft; KrV = Kritik der reinen Vernunft; KU = Kritik der Urteilskraft; MAN = Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften; Prol = Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions. Translations used are from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (1998, 2000, 2003, 2004) (Cambridge University Press, 1992–), sometimes modified. I replace bold in the translations with italics.

2. Final causation consists in an object being the effect of its concept. The concept of the rent (rather than the rent) is the cause of the house and thus of the rent itself. The concept of the regular hexagon is the cause of one’s finger movement and thus of the shape: the causation is both descending and ascending, for the movement is the cause of the hexagon while the hexagon’s concept is in turn the cause of this movement.

3. As commentators convincingly point out, the notion of ‘mechanical laws’ in the third Critique is more inclusive than that discussed in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Ginsborg 2015a, 263, 266–7; McLaughlin 2014, 151–3).

4. These events include psychological, temporal events. Even causalities among psychological states or between psychological states and psychological events are subject to physical-mechanical laws. After all, by ‘physical’ Kant means ‘natural’ (KU 5: 375). As I shall show shortly afterwards, Kant allows another type of causality that is not natural but intelligible and rational.

5. Cf., Reath: ‘As noumenon it [a human being] would have a capacity for activity that is “intelligible” – presumably a capacity to guide its actions by normative principles – while as phenomenon its actions would be causally determined events in the natural world.’ (Reath, 2006: 281).

6. For Kant, ‘what an object ought to be’ refers to an object’s perfection in accordance with its concept in a teleological judgment (KU 5: 229; cf., EEKU 20: 240, KU 5: 320). Objective purposiveness is cognized ‘only by means of the relation of the manifold to a determinate end, thus only through a concept’ (KU 5: 226). Therefore, to represent an object’s objective purposiveness, ‘the concept of what sort of thing it is supposed to be must come first’ (KU 5: 227).

7. Cf., Kant’s mentioning of the ‘internal form’ of a natural end (KU 5: 378).

8. With my modification of Guyer and Matthews’ translation (‘as far as both their form and their combination is concerned’). The original text: ‘ihrer Form sowohl als Verbindung nach’.

9. As we will see shortly afterwards, Kant uses the terms ‘the idea of the whole’ and ‘the concept of the whole’ interchangeably.

10. Guyer and Matthews’ translation replaces ‘natural end [Naturzweck]’ with ‘purposive’ for no obvious reason.

11. I wish to thank Yiwei Jin and the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. This research was funded by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China under Grant 20CZX066.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences [20CZX066].