Immanuel Kant: Mechanism, Teleology, Organism, and the Powers of Our Mind

Abstract

The chapter investigates ideas about mechanisms and teleology in nature, especially in relation to the origin and life of organisms, as Immanuel Kant formulated them in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Then it focuses on one specific direction in later reception of Kant’s ideas. Kant, like many other authors at the end of the eighteenth century, was attracted to the idea of a purely mechanistic interpretation of nature and tried to formulate an incontestable justification of the possibility of such an interpretation. At the same time, though, he believed it unthinkable that organisms could have come to be solely through the action of blind forces: he was convinced that one must assume a purposeful activity behind their origin and existence. His transcendental philosophy makes it possible – among other things – to reconcile these two conceptual tendencies. Kant gave up on searching for the truth of things as they are in themselves; he examined only what appears to us and the powers of our mind which form these appearances. He analysed the composition of the complex system of powers and principles inherent to our mind and searched among conceptions of the world that can be produced by this system for those ultimately based only on principles which are common to all human beings, and can therefore be universally shared. Kant believed that within such theoretical framework, he managed to prove that we can, all of us and always, successfully apply a mechanistic view of nature, whereby phenomena will even confirm its correctness. At the same time, we necessarily all apply a view of organisms as created by a (presumably divine) intention, although no such thing can be empirically confirmed. In the final section, I outline the reception of Kant’s ideas by some of his contemporaries, as well as by some twentieth-century thinkers. They stressed the importance of aesthetic judgment, which according to Kant seeks the appropriate degree of emphasis on the particular aspects of things without being guided by rules that can be grasped conceptually. The thinkers in question then not only gave up on a search for the truth of things in themselves but also on search for universal perspectives valid for everyone, always, and everywhere. At that point, all one can do is to reinvent reasonable combinations of possible perspectives, always again and anew, depending on the situation. I consider this to be a relevant challenge also for contemporary thinking about the mechanistic and teleological character of organisms.

Introduction

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) holds a key position among thinkers who – after the emergence of modern natural science associated with scholars such as Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and especially Newton – tried to come to terms with a new conception of nature. Mechanistic natural science at least seemed to head towards the discovery of universal deterministic laws. On the other hand, it seemed hardly compatible with our experience of our own freedom – as well as with most theological and ethical conceptions of human life – that everything should be subjected to such laws. Moreover, it was unclear how one could reconcile determinism with a meaningful order of nature, especially living nature, or what role in such an order should be left to God.

We will, of course, be primarily interested in Kant’s ideas regarding organisms¹ and limit ourselves to his by far most influential contribution to the topic of their relation to mechanisms, which appeared in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790[2000]). Here, Kant in a sense articulates what is specific to organisms and why they require an explanation other than a mechanistic one. But more original and more inspiring to this day is the status which Kant attributes to this subordination to a mechanism and to the ‘apparent’ purposefulness. This, however, is something Kant can carry out only in his system of philosophy as a whole, within philosophy that has in a unique way conceived of and related to each other reality, phenomena, and the faculties of our mind.

The gist of his original juxtaposition of the mechanistic and (specific) non-mechanistic view of the organism and nature in general is expressed in the so-called antinomy of teleological judgment, that is, in the statement of a contradiction between the principles inherent to teleological judgment and a solution thereof. They both form the content of the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment, which occupies about twenty-five pages in the second half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant, 2000: 257–284; AA 5 385–415). I will try to summarise Kant’s ideas and then, with the help of some later writers, suggest how Kant’s initiative can perhaps be further developed in one specific direction.

The Antinomy

Let us start with the antinomy of teleological judgment. Kant formulates it in §70 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where he states that neither of the following can be asserted:

Thesis: All generation of material things is possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws.

Antithesis: Some generation of such things is not possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws. (Kant, 2000: 259; AA 5 387).

And yet both of the following must be asserted:

[T]hesis: All generation of material things and their forms must be judged as possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws.

[A]ntithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (judging them requires an entirely different law of causality, namely that of final causes). (Kant, 2000: 258–259; AA 5 387).

I believe that a degree of ‘uncommonness’ of Kant’s position can at least be suspected prior to any comment. It ought to be noted, though, that to this day there are many disputes about the details of the antinomy. There is not even a full consensus about what exactly the antinomy lies in, let alone what Kant believed its solution to be: the way the Dialectic proceeds is very convoluted.

First, I want to recount all that must be borne in mind if we want to understand what the abovementioned distinctions and statements mean and how Kant arrived at them. Naturally, it will be necessary to explain, at least to some extent, not only the concepts and principles directly present in the antinomy, but also those which are implicitly present in Kant’s system as such or at least in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. We shall have to keep track of what exactly (all of it) is meant by ‘mechanical laws’ and what is meant by the other, teleological, causality. We must also keep track of what, when, how, and why we must explain according to the mechanical and teleological principles and how these explanations do or do not relate to how things ‘really are’. Then we will clarify where the contradiction seems to lie and why and how, according to Kant, one can remove the appearance of incompatibility of the sentences of the antinomy.

Mechanical Laws

Let us begin with the mechanical laws. Kant does not directly define mechanism and mechanicity in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, but he repeatedly characterises mechanical laws and forces as blind laws, unguided by any purpose. In his work, he distinguishes several kinds of such blind laws, and these distinctions are relevant to our present endeavour. I (tend to) agree with Ina Goy (2017: 197–205) who claims that when, both in the antinomy and elsewhere in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant speaks about mechanical laws in general, he means all of the following types.

The first type of blind laws is necessarily introduced into all things as we know them by our ‘understanding’ (Verstand). This is certainly a strange proposition, which is why we ought to pause here and remind ourselves of the basic outline of Kant’s critical philosophy. In it, Kant gave up on knowledge of things in themselves. He states that we always deal only with the way things appear and these appearances are inevitably organised at least to some extent by the faculties of our mind. Kant wants to define these faculties, examine their roles and mutual relations, and outline the limits to their legitimate use. Understanding is one such faculty. It is our ‘faculty of concepts’, a faculty that provides the concepts which we can safely apply to particular perceptions and thus let appear the objects which fall under these concepts. Among such concepts, Kant distinguishes between ‘empirical’ concepts and ‘pure’ or a priori ones, i.e., categories. All objects of experience fall under the latter, emerging by their application to perceptions.

Kant believed he discovered all the fundamental concepts which understanding has at its disposal a priori, that is, irrespective of any previous experience, and that he discovered them by analysing understanding as such, regardless of the particular nature of objects to which these concepts are applied. All objects of experience, both internal and external, that is, experiences with our ideas, thoughts, etc., as well as with things in the space of the world, are somehow subordinated to these concepts (Kant, 1998: 698–699; A845–847/B873–875; Kant, 2002b: 185, 188; AA 4 469–470, 474).

Kant presented them in a clearly organised table, which appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, 1998: 212; A80/B106) and in the Prolegomena (Kant, 2002a: 96; AA 4 302–303). The category most important for our present endeavour is that of causality. How things are in the case of inner experience is complicated, and Kant unfortunately does not elucidate the matter.² He tends to focus on explaining the causal interdependence of phenomena in the outer experience, and so shall we. Here, the application of the category of causality to perceptions at least insures in advance that every phenomenon has a cause, something that caused it, whereby what we mean is efficient causality, not causality determined by purpose.³ It should be noted that Kant uses the term ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) in a somewhat unusual way. Far from meaning all perception or even sensation, he means only ‘experience-based cognition’, which is formed during an interaction between perception and concepts and applies to all people. Closely related to Kant’s ‘experience’ is his use of the expression ‘nature’. What he means by it are phenomena insofar as they are subject to universally valid laws as well as these laws themselves. Until we arrive at ‘experience’, we cannot thus relate to ‘nature’, and ‘nature’ is ‘by definition’ subject to efficient, blind causality.

Let us note that the question of how, when, and on what levels categories are used along the way towards cognition of nature, i.e., in our experience, is not an easy one. There are disputes as to whether and how, according to Kant, any intuition (eventually perception) is pre-formed by categories at least in a rudimentary way. In particular, the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience in §§18–21 of the Prolegomena seems to suggest that there are even judgments that do not depend on categories, which naturally implies that perception would not depend on them either. The abovementioned paragraphs are, however, rather puzzling and some scholars believe them to be a mistake on Kant’s part, that is, something that is not compatible with the rest of his critical philosophy.⁴ Regardless of whether, during philosophical reflection, we are driven, according to Kant, to the conclusion that categories somehow apply to perception and to all judgments (which I consider probable),⁵ it seems that we ‘fully’ apply categories only in judgments in which we seek universally valid cognition of objects. In such instances, our goal is to grasp the categorial features (and thus acquire ‘experience’) – but that is not always the case when we speak or think.

The Powers of Our Mind: A Detour

Naturally, understanding is not the only capacity of our mind. To proceed further, we must therefore outline Kant’s broader conception of our mental faculties, which is why I take the liberty of taking a little detour from the exposition of the types of mechanical laws.

First of all, Kant distinguishes three basic faculties or capacities of the soul (Seelenvermögen oder Fähigkeiten),⁶ namely the faculty of cognition, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and the faculty of desire (Kant, 2000: 64–65; AA 5 177–178).⁷ In the course of our mental life, all these faculties of the soul continuously cooperate, and they do so in specific ways depending on the mental life area. But Kant’s primary ambition is not to describe our mental life in its vast diversity: what he is interested in is whether and how any given faculty can be governed only by a priori principles adequate to it and thus be autonomous while relying on something that has universal validity. When a faculty is used in this way, it becomes a higher faculty.⁸

Second, Kant distinguishes three cognitive faculties, which are not, however, simply three branches or kinds of the cognitive faculty of our mind. What they are is a different trinity on a different level. Before listing the three cognitive faculties, let us recall that in addition to active cognitive faculties, our a priori cognitive apparatus includes two a priori forms of intuition, namely time and space. Time is a form of intuition through an inner sense, while space is a form of intuition through the five outer senses.

The three cognitive faculties are understanding, reason, and the power of judgment. The power of judgment is the ability to think of the particular as subordinate to the general, and we will return to it later. Reason is the capacity that seeks or ‘demands’ the unconditional. But nothing unconditional is given to us in any form: no intuition corresponds to the concepts of reason called ‘ideas’. Kant identifies three ideas of reason which apply to the exercise of the cognitive faculty, namely the idea of the soul, of the all-encompassing world, and of God. These are the three aspects of something one might call the totality of all possible experiences.⁹

The cognitive faculty of the soul is a higher faculty, insofar as understanding – as indicated above – merely prescribes to nature a priori (i.e., categorial) forms and relations. In this higher exercise of the cognitive mental faculty, judgment and reason are subordinated to understanding, which supplies the a priori principles, that is, which works ‘purely’.¹⁰ Reason, through the ideas of the soul, the world, and God, directs understanding in its construction of a systematic unity of knowledge. It guides understanding to combine knowledge as if all phenomena were affected by the fact that they are experienced by one entity, embedded in the totality of all phenomena, and created by an infinite reason, or God, although none of this can be experientially verified. The power of judgment here, of course, serves understanding by placing particular phenomena into categories.

The faculty of desire, that is, the ability to want something, can become a higher faculty if it does not ultimately desire anything specific because it is attracted to it. If it did so, it would be dependent on the ability to feel pleasure. It can be a higher faculty only if it pursues the ultimate, unconditional purpose. To put it differently: it is a higher faculty if it follows a universal and unconditionally valid imperative or law, but that can be provided only by reason as the requirement of the unconditional, that is, if the reason works ‘purely’. The basic form of the law is: ‘[A]ct only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (Kant, 1996: 73; AA 4 421). Understanding and the power of judgment are subject to reason when the faculty of desire operates at a higher level.

Later, we shall see that a specific contact with the universal can also take place in the sphere of feeling, under the guidance of the power of judgment when it operates ‘purely’. A different cognitive faculty thus takes the lead depending on which mental faculty is operating at a ‘higher’ level.

Returning to the Mechanical Laws

We can now return to the types of mechanical laws to which nature is subjected. So far, just before starting the short detour on the system of the powers of the mind, we have mentioned one type of these laws. In particular, we spoke about the mechanical laws to which reflection in the exercise of universally valid cognition by application of categories necessarily subjects all objects, not only objects of the outer senses but also those of the inner sense, through which we acquire the contents of our mind.

Aside from this, Kant developed a special metaphysics of material things in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, which was published in 1786 (Kant, 2002b). In this treatise, he claims that thanks to the empirically acquired bare concept of matter (characterised as ‘impenetrable lifeless extension’; Kant, 1998: 699; A848/B876), he succeeded in deducing, with the use of a priori principles, somewhat more specific laws which necessarily apply to all phenomena of material objects. This is probably the second type of mechanical laws mentioned in the antinomy. The most important for us is the Second Law of Mechanics, according to which ‘Every change in matter has an external cause. (Every body persists in its state of rest or motion, in the same direction, and with the same speed, if it is not compelled by an external cause to leave this state)’ (Kant, 2002b: 251; AA 4 543). These a priori laws, which govern especially the material nature, are such that wholes arise according to these laws only in the form of sums or aggregates of parts. The behaviour of the whole can be explained as the ‘sum’ of behaviours of the parts, but not the other way around, which is also an important feature of the ‘mechanic laws’ discussed in the antinomy.¹¹

Thanks to the empirical knowledge delivered by natural sciences, we also know a number of other laws which phenomena follow. Kant calls them ‘empirical’ or ‘particular’ laws. They are based in some way on the general or a priori laws but cannot be derived from these laws without further empirical investigation. And these empirical laws, like Newton’s Law of Gravitation, belong to the mechanical forces and laws which Kant apparently refers to in his formulation of antinomy as their third type.

The Beauty of Nature and the Unity of Its Particular Laws

When searching for these empirical laws, understanding is not entirely ‘lawgiving’, as it is when it prescribes general laws to nature. The powers of our mind cooperate here in a different way than when they subject the intuition to categories. For us, it is important to bear in mind that, according to Kant, if we are to find any laws or indeed search for them at all, we must assume a unity among the particular laws of nature. This unity then enables us to grasp the laws in a unified way by our cognitive faculties (Kant, 2000: 69–73; AA 5 182–186). This means that we must assume that to our cognitive faculties, nature is arranged as if ‘purposively’, although no such thing is provided by the a priori forms of intuition or understanding.

This assumption must be made by the power of judgment, that is, by the ability to relate the general to the particular. To be precise, we are dealing here with so-called ‘reflective’ judgments, which are the focus of the entire Critique of the Power of Judgment. Kant distinguishes them from ‘determinative’ judgments (Kant, 2000: 66–68; AA 5 179–181), which subordinate the particular or special to the general, if the general is given to us. Reflective judgment searches for a more general concept or rule, one that is not given, for a given individual or particular. Either the rule cannot be given or at least the reflective judgment relies on a rule that is not based on an intuition in its search for a partial higher rule that perhaps can be given. The ultimate governing rule is the abovementioned necessary assumption that there is a unity among the partial empirical rules, a unity such that we can understand it. This concept of the purposiveness of nature is an a priori principle of the power of judgment. The particular laws of nature are therefore mechanical, but to us they are linked to purposiveness in the sense that finding them is necessarily connected with the abovementioned assumption.

Certain purposiveness of nature is also reflected in aesthetic judgments, where, however, the judgment does not start from a particular rule or concept, nor does it seek a concept. It starts with a pleasurable feeling, which it nevertheless recognises as arising from certain suitability, an as it were purposive arrangement, of the form of the object for the basic (and thus universally shared) arrangement of one’s cognitive capacities. Specifically, a form leads to a harmonious interaction between our understanding and our imagination. Guided by a reflective judgment, the ability to feel pleasure and displeasure is elevated to its higher form. This is done primarily when judging the beauty of nature (as opposed to art), where we do not, however, judge the forms as having been created deliberately based on their concept. Still, even works of art are ultimately created through the creator by a ‘genius’, that is, an ‘inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art’ (Kant, 2000: 186; AA 5 307). We feel that what is truly beautiful in a work of art is not based on a (human) concept.

It is the judgment of purposiveness in nature, its various forms, and their status, that are the main theme of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. And, as we shall soon see, organisms have a key place in the classification of the types of purposiveness and in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Before looking in more detail at Kant’s thoughts on purposiveness in nature, especially in relation to organisms, let us clarify the difference between the so-called constitutive and regulative principles. Constitutive principles are those a priori principles which, through determinative judgment, constitute or determine the very objects of experience. In contrast, the regulative principles and concepts (including the abovementioned ideas of reason) do not and cannot determine the objects of experience themselves. They can merely guide the way we think about them or the way we use our mental powers in general. Their validity cannot be directly verified by experience.

Another regulative principle is the systematic unity of all the special laws of nature that is comprehensible to us and whose existence we must assume. Such ‘purposiveness’ of nature is not an idea of reason. Rather, it is an a priori principle of reflective judgment, a principle which the reflective judgment, in seeking a more general law under which to subsume a special law, imposes upon itself ‘and cannot derive it from anywhere else (for then it would be the determining power of judgment)’ (Kant, 2000: 67; cf. a full explanation on p. 66–73; AA 5 180 and in more context at 179–186).

Purposive Causality

We have touched upon a sort of mysterious purposiveness in nature. We know that the antinomy of teleological judgment is about something like it. In contrast to the concept of mechanism, Kant explains the meaning of the notion of purposiveness in some detail. Let us first look at the various meanings of ‘purposiveness’, which he gradually comes to distinguish. It ought to be noted that Kant himself uses the word ‘purposiveness’ (Zweckmäßigkeit) in several senses, which are connected only by, shall we say, ‘some relation to some intentions’.

Subjective purposiveness of an object means that the object is somehow arranged purposively for the faculties of our mind. We have already seen that nature is purposively arranged for our cognition, because it largely permits the subsumption of particular laws under more general ones. More generally, one can say that nature is purposively arranged for the faculties of our mind when we say that nature is beautiful. Importantly, though, we do not perceive this purposiveness as something that had to be applied in the creation of the things in question. It is inherent only in their relation to our mental faculties: we do not find it difficult to conceive of the origin and existence of things which we happen to find beautiful as based purely on blind mechanical causality. Kant distinguishes a subjective purposiveness from an objective one. In the latter, he distinguishes between objective formal and objective material (or real) purposiveness.

Objective formal purposiveness is exhibited for instance by geometric figures, which are for instance useful for solving various mathematical problems. This is due to the nature of space, which is a form of our perception. The usefulness of geometric figures for pursuing our intention to construct some other form implies no other intention (Kant, 2000: 235–239; AA 5 362–366). In this respect, this situation is akin to grass being useful to a cow, which is, according to Kant, already an objective and material (real) purposiveness but nevertheless still external or ‘relative’. In other words, the fact that a thing is purposive for another thing is not an essential part of its concept. Here, too, we can well conceive of or think of that thing’s existence and formation without this kind of purposiveness. This ‘objective real external’ purposiveness differs from objective formal purposiveness of geometrical figures for us in that it is not the form that is purposive but the real existence of such purposive things.

Nevertheless, objective real purposiveness can also be internal. This is the case when the concept of the thing itself includes the fact that it came to be intentionally, with the aim of bringing into being a thing whose concept existed beforehand (Kant, 2000: 239; AA 5 366–367). A common and uncomplicated example is all human artefacts. An equally common but highly mysterious variant is all organisms. Kant believes that we cannot think of them otherwise than as having come to be based on a prior idea of their totality: the complex ordering which they exhibit, and which is necessary for their perpetuation simply cannot have arisen by chance. And this is a mystery, because we do not see any conscious creator behind them, and nature, which seems to have created them, according to Kant ‘by definition’ cannot have intentions and act according to them.

In a famous passage, Kant states that it is absolutely certain that there will never be a ‘Newton of the blade of grass’ capable of explaining the origin of an organism, even a blade of grass, according to some blind mechanical laws.¹² He does not, however, justify this opinion.

Kant calls the things of nature which seem to have come to be by intention¹³ ‘natural purposes’. Like artefacts, they cannot be explained without purposive causality, that is, without an activity that pursues a goal (for comparison, see Chap. 2). But since an organism in nature has no external creators, as a thing of nature in relation to itself it must be both the cause and the effect. In short, as Kant was perhaps the first to say (Keller, 2008: 46), it must be a ‘self-organising being’ (sich selbst organisirendes Wesen; Kant, 2000: 245; AA 5 374). Kant further elaborates on this notion by saying that in a natural purpose, the individual parts of the whole not only exist for each other’s sake (that is the case also, for example, in a clock), but on top of that they also create each other. Kant lists three phenomenal features in which this nature of the organism (he gives a tree as an example) is manifested. A tree, like essentially any organism, can (1) produce offspring of the same kind, and shape itself as an individual in both (2) growth and (3) regeneration. (Again, cf. Chap. 2; alongside procreation and growth, Aristotle does not explicitly mention regeneration).

Hannah Ginsborg (2004) speaks of the ‘two kinds of mechanical inexplicability’ of organisms in Kant. First, like some artefacts, organisms cannot be thought of as having come to be without reference to causality pursuing goals, and, unlike artefacts, their individual parts have created and maintain each other. Ginsborg (2004: 54–62) points out that two similar lines of reasoning about organisms can also be found in Aristotle. To wit, also according to Aristotle, organisms, like artefacts, would not have come into being solely based on the natural behaviour of the substance from which they are composed. Their existence must be therefore due to some purposive causality. At the same time, they differ from artefacts in that they have their own nature. In other words, the principle of their change and permanence – as well as of their formation – is inherent in themselves (cf. Chap. 2).¹⁴

The concept of natural purpose is an idea of reason,¹⁵ because no operation of purposive causality in nature is given to us in an intuition.¹⁶ But its result, or rather something that we cannot but view as its result, is given. The idea of a natural purpose is therefore different from all other ideas. Yes, we can only judge that a given object falls under the concept–idea, but this is a different situation from when the ideas of soul, world, and God regulate our efforts to determine by understanding more and more objects of experience. The difference between the idea of a natural purpose and ideas of the soul, the world, and God is that it is not an idea of reason for reasoning, but an idea of reason for (reflective) judgment (Kant, 2000: 274–275; AA 5 405).

As soon as reflecting upon organisms forces us to judge at least something in nature as having come to be based on purposive causality, we can view as its products (i.e., as a case of objective real internal purposiveness) those natural phenomena that cannot force us to do so on their own, such as the external purposiveness of natural beings for each other, the beauty of nature, or the unity of the particular laws of nature. Reflection upon organisms thus transforms the view of the whole of nature.¹⁷

One can now see that we cannot understand the presence of purposeful causality in nature (i.e., the antithesis of antinomy), as a constitutive principle, neither in connection with the unity of laws, nor beauty, nor organisms. But why cannot we consider the thesis of the antinomy, that is, the mechanical intelligibility of everything in nature, to be a constitutive principle? I believe the reason is simple: Kant realises that if we know that every single thing has a mechanical cause (which in turn has another cause, etc.), it does not yet imply knowing whether, if we knew all such causes, we would see that all states and events in nature are explained by them.

Solving the Antinomy

The line of explanation in §§71–78, which should contain the solution of antinomy, is convoluted. What is according to Kant the solution to antinomy is still a matter of controversy. For a long time, it has been generally assumed that the antinomy arises only between the two theses about constitutive principles, that is, between the theses which Kant says we cannot posit, and that it dissolves once we realise that the two principles are not constitutive but merely regulative (for an overview of such interpretations, see McLaughlin, 1990: 137–145). Such interpretation is supported by the end of §71.¹⁸ But the name of the paragraph is ‘Preparation for the resolution of the above antinomy’, which itself suggests that the solution will be somewhat more complicated. The recently prevailing view – to which I also subscribe – states that the antinomy lies between the two regulatory principles, and the subsequent considerations in §§72–78 are integral to its resolution. (See for example McLaughlin, 1990: 161–180; Ginsborg, 2006: 459–466; Guyer, 2006: 346–349; Goy, 2015; Goy, 2017, summary at 90–91).

Kant also sees an antinomy, that is, an at least apparent internal contradiction, between the two regulative principles of reflective judgment. It seems that we cannot even judge something to be possible and impossible at the same time. The resolution of the antinomy therefore rests in reconciling the two principles at the level of human thinking about things, not at the level of grasping the features directly given in phenomena, let alone the level of grasping the nature of things as they are in themselves. In other words, the solution is based on understanding that the two principles guiding our thinking about things do not exclude or do not necessarily exclude each other.

The key step, according to Kant, is to understand that if we are to see a purpose in the products of nature and conceive of nature itself as essentially incapable of purpose, we must think of nature as having a non-natural, supernatural basis or source, specifically a source that can pursue purposes. We must think of a being with infinite understanding as the author of the universe and think of nature as dependent on such a suprasensible foundation (Kant, 2000: 269; AA 5 398–399).¹⁹

But we cannot positively confirm the existence of an intelligent cause of the blind nature. We cannot prove it. This, too, is a regulative idea and, as such, it can only be demonstrated that we, humans, cannot think of nature except as having been made by an intelligent creator. For us, not only natural purposes but the entire world originate in it – and so do its mechanical laws. How the two principles emanating from the same source combine in one natural purpose is something we do not and cannot know. But there is a way of making the ‘cooperation’ between these two principles conceivable to our understanding: if we see organisms, and ultimately all of nature, as products of a divine purpose, we can view the mechanical laws as the means by which God accomplishes His purposes. In what way, we cannot understand. But we can judge the mechanical laws as mysteriously subjected to God’s purposes. This does not relieve us of the obligation to use our understanding and thus to seek mechanistic explanations of natural processes ‘as far as it is in our capacity’ (Kant, 2000: 284; AA 5 415), but we must bear in mind that we, humans, cannot explain all forms and processes in nature by these (mechanic laws) alone. And, as noted above, even a search for those mechanistic explanations which we are able to find cannot succeed without the adoption of a teleological perspective (Kant, 2000: 280; AA 5 411).

Perhaps most remarkable is Kant’s reflection on the specific features of our understanding, which enable the notion of a natural purpose and constitute the particular character of our apparatus in general from which he derives our need to distinguish between two causalities and relate them to each other, as well as the subsequent need to distinguish between nature and its intelligent cause. Kant presents it in §§76–77, where he points out that our understanding is discursive, i.e., that it works with particular, more or less general concepts; but when it comes to a further specification and existence of what falls under these concepts, it is dependent on the (sensory) intuition because the above cannot be deduced from its concepts. And if our understanding finds some sense, or unity, in what does not follow from conceptual knowledge and is therefore accidental to it, it must ultimately view it as resulting from an intention.

To appreciate that this is a specific feature of our understanding, we must contrast it with another possible understanding that would not depend on sensory judgment, that is, on ‘intuitive’ reasoning (implicit here is that God has such understanding; cf. Goy, 2015: 78–81). First of all, this understanding would not distinguish between the possible and the real – everything it ‘sees’ would be real, the notion of ‘merely possible’ would be out of question for it. Second, it would look at the whole and proceed from it to the parts, whereas we proceed from conceptually apprehended parts to the whole. Our understanding knows the parts but cannot compose them into a whole that would be superordinated to them. In this, the perspective taken by our understanding is in a sense inherently mechanistic.

An understanding that would see the whole would not necessarily perceive the distinction or opposition between mechanism and teleology. Such understanding would simply see that the whole happens as is appropriate to it. We, humans, can only understand the subordination of parts to the whole by imagining the whole and treating this notion as something that predetermines the parts (Kant, 2000: 277; AA 5 407–408). In other words, by our understanding we introduce into our comprehension of nature partial laws that govern partial processes and we define nature as subjected to these laws. Then we conclude that some phenomena cannot be explained by these laws and therefore add another, quite different type of causality to our reflections of nature. Subsequently, we try to figure out what the character of this causality is and how it relates to mechanical causality. The character of this other causality must be understood, in analogy to our own making of things, as the action of the intelligent author of nature, and we must conceive of its relation to mechanical causality as that of intentional creation to the means it uses.

Kant’s Contribution and Possibilities of Its Further Development

Let us now try and see what aspects of Kant’s thoughts might be inspiring for current discussions about organisms as well as mechanistic versus non-mechanistic views of the living. As suggested in the introduction, I believe that especially thoughts on the status of the mechanistic and teleological (or more generally, non-mechanistic) views of organisms retain their relevance. Here, in the purely philosophical sphere, lies the core of Kant’s contribution.

I believe that John Zammito (2006) is right when he states that for those who simply seek a naturalistic interpretation of the generation and persistence of organisms, Kant’s reflections are essentially worthless. This is because Kant, offering hardly anything in the way of an argument to support this claim, simply declared a mechanistic interpretation of organisms to be impossible and another interpretation to be valid only in a ‘regulative’ function. Zammito identifies other authors, both Kant’s contemporaries or even earlier thinkers, such as John Locke and Georges Buffon, as precursors of current efforts to formulate a naturalistic philosophy of organisms.

The one aspect of Kant’s conceptual system I want to highlight here is not far from the ideas of many twentieth-century philosophers classified as belonging to phenomenology, pragmatism, or poststructuralism. Many of these thinkers had analysed and drawn on Kant’s thoughts (cf. Marino & Terzi, 2021). I want to emphasise, first, that it would be simplistic to say that Kant thought nature to be ‘in fact’ subjected to mechanical laws while we can, or must, view it ‘as if’ it were also somehow teleological. Kant also does not attribute mechanicity to things as they ‘really’ are in themselves. It is only guaranteed, he claims, that to all people things appear, or can appear, to be so. It is a perspective all people can apply. The ‘perspective’ by which we ‘see’ nature as realising some goals (due to being created by an infinite intellect) is simply another perspective we are also capable of, a perspective which we, as humans, according to Kant must also all apply.

Kant’s topic is not the ‘real substance’ of the processes of nature. Rather, he analyses certain particularly important human perspectives of them and relationships between these perspectives. Kant notes that we can never know whether we know the ‘real’ reality and shows that, in principle, our thinking does not require its concept for anything. After showing that we, humans, must think of organisms – and ultimately the world as a whole – as if they were ‘the product of a rational cause (God),’ he asks:

Now if this proposition,²⁰ grounded on an indispensably necessary maxim of our power of judgment, is completely sufficient for every speculative as well as practical use of our reason in every human respect, I would like to know what we lose by being unable to prove it valid for higher beings, on purely objective grounds (which unfortunately exceed our capacity)? (Kant, 2000: 270; AA 5 400)

Of Kant’s writings, it is the Critique of the Power of Judgment that is of key importance for the subject of the relationship between our various faculties and the corresponding facets of the world. In fact, already some of Kant’s contemporaries perceived it as such, and it is perhaps not too surprising that the most famous of them had a close relationship to art. But they did not appreciate it only for the reflection on art which it contains. For instance, Friedrich Schiller – and soon after him Friedrich Hölderlin – saw in the aesthetic judgment, or the sense of beauty, as Kant understood it, the fundamental principle for the conduct of one’s entire life, the ultimate principle to which all other partial human faculties must be subordinated if one is not to be one-sided, that is, if one is to fulfil one’s innermost potential. Both understanding and reason, and both cognition and moral action, must ultimately submit to the principle of beauty. One can and ought to relinquish efforts to base one’s life firmly on principles that can be grasped conceptually (or purely by senses). Instead, one should be open to the interplay of all partial rules and forces, not only one’s own but also those of the environment. Such interplay is not grounded in anything definite. Instead, it is anchored in a sense for the whole as it variably presents itself to us, that is, in taste. Schiller and Hölderlin argue that it is only in this way that one’s life and the world as one experiences it acquire their appropriate unity: indeed, that a human being only becomes human in the true sense of the word (Schiller, 2004: 75–81; Hölderlin, 2021: 67–71).

Many twentieth-century writers praised the Critique of the Power of Judgment for similar reasons. Let us recall Deleuze’s claim that the theory of aesthetic judgment is in a sense the basis for the whole of critical philosophy, not just a supplementary bridge between its theoretical and practical parts (as Kant claims in the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment). In all other higher forms of mental faculties, Deleuze (2004) notes, cognitive forces are in concert under the rule of one among them, but in order for one of the cognitive forces to take charge, cooperation must already be established. This ungoverned interplay is then revealed in the perception of beauty (and, in a negative way, in the perception of the sublime; as when we experience a kind of ‘hidden harmony’ of reason and imagination, which surfaces in the feeling of their mutual inadequacy, in the impossibility of depicting the ideas of reason).²¹

If we were to try to follow up on Kant’s ideas regarding the correspondence between our abilities and the facets of the world, which of the theses and assumptions would nowadays have to be rejected? Let us assume, as I have just indicated, that in the spirit of some of Kant’s ideas, especially those from the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we take as the core or even as the whole of what is ultimately to be considered our actual experience, that is, the actually experienced world. This is always characterised by a conflict or interplay of several possible perspectives (ways of unifying what is experienced). In this case, it would be probably appropriate to relinquish the goal of isolating from this interplay certain partial ‘pure’ principles and perspectives which would then be maintained as ‘higher’ in the hope that they would be valid for all and always. Our thoughts arise from encounter and conflict, and the pursuit of pure autonomy and thoughts based on a priori universal principles is dubious and futile. We share some of our attempts at combining relevant perspectives with many people, others with just a few, and reflection is ultimately conducted by each person from their own perspective. One must then simply wait to see who may find the proposed way of discerning and matching the principles valid and who does not.

We will have to accept that there are many ways of seeing, many genres of speech, and new ones are being invented all the time; there are gradual transitions between relatively distinct types, and it is usually impossible to draw clear and sharp boundaries, certainly not once and for all. A mechanistic view of the material world, although it will certainly remain one of the important ones, will lose the status of a sort of default theoretical view of nature, which it in many ways seems to occupy in Kant’s thoughts. One need not start from a universal conception of the whole of nature as being governed by mechanical laws. In fact, we can accept that our world is untidy and partly chaotic, and although we have learned in history lessons to present always a certain fragment of what happens in the world also mechanistically, in the world of our experience, what is seen and managed mechanically will always form just a tiny fragment. We are always exposed to different demands, we are constantly trying to decide how, when, and to what extent we can satisfy them, and we invent ways of combining the fulfilment of different imperatives in different situations.

With emphasis on the need to seek moderation when it comes to the realisation of various incompatible but interdependent possibilities and demands, Pavel Kouba (2005b)²² tried to distinguish in Kant’s thoughts the parts which are still relevant and those which failed the test of time. I consider Kouba’s brief commentary to be one of the most insightful in this respect (and the perspective suggested in the previous two paragraphs is inspired by his writings as well). Kouba points out that despite the desire to escape from the actually experienced world to pure principles (i.e., to build a ‘metaphysics’), Kant displays on many points an excellent awareness of the constant presence of numerous competing modes of possible unification, that is, various forms of meaning in the lifeworld. Kant often stresses the necessary and unresolvable tension between thinking and seeing, knowing and acting, the a priori and the a posteriori, the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. Kouba suggests that one ought to try to liberate this tendency within Kant’s thought from the metaphysical burden, that is, from the attempts to resolve these tensions and contradictions by escaping to the pure, a priori principles and their hierarchy. Like Deleuze, he states that in this way²³ an analysis of the power of judgment, and especially aesthetic judgment, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment would turn out to be not merely an additional bridge between the theoretical and practical parts of philosophy but ‘the supporting foundation of the whole edifice’ (Kouba, 2005b: 151). Kant’s philosophy could then help us in our attempts to reflect upon our situation where, after abandoning metaphysics, we must again and again and without a priori rules try to see ‘how to arrange a certain unification and how far one can go with it without losing the possibility of the other unifications’ (Kouba, 2005b: 151). One might say that we must seek the limits of the legitimate use of our various abilities depending on the situation. According to Kouba, in order to respect the nature of meaning in general, we must not lose sight of other, often directly opposite, possible unifications when deciding on adopting a particular one, and we should be aware that in certain situations, it may well be advisable to resort to one of these other perspectives.

In other articles, Kouba (2005a, 2011) also addressed specifically science and its place in our (experienced) world. In his reflections on Anton Markoš’s Readers of the Book of Life (2002), written at the same time as the Kantian study just cited, Kouba writes:

When trying to find one’s way and decide in the tangled plots and events of our lives, no normal person looks to science for solutions. Therefore, at the most general level, our aim cannot be a discovery of the true science of life but rather an insight into what place science has in our lives. (Kouba, 2005a: 84)

The question of how to apply or not apply the (mechanistic or other) view of natural science reasonably, sensibly, and innovatively in different spheres of our life and how to combine it with other views will obviously be with us for a long time still. What I believe to be a reasonable and promising approach is to view the process of this search not as a conflict between understanding reality as it is on the one hand and the subjective distortions imposed by our limitations and needs on the other. Instead, we ought to treat it simply as a clash of the different powers of our mind and correlative faces or layers of the world. Immanuel Kant had significantly contributed to a formulation of this approach, and those who follow this course will surely be able to learn from him for a long time to come. In this context, Pavel Kouba writes:

Kant’s philosophy [...] can nowadays tell us many and unexpected things about what it means to understand meaning. Although his ultimate goal was to establish metaphysics, Kant has more to tell us in this regard than those who are still engaged in refuting metaphysics. (Kouba, 2005b: 152)

Conclusions

Kant, like many thinkers, especially modern ones, tried to come to terms with the fact that while the material world seems to be governed by blind mechanic laws, it is hard to believe that some phenomena, above all organisms, could have come to be by such forces alone. We feel compelled to assume some intention behind their creation and existence. Kant’s transcendental philosophy as a whole allows him to resolve the contradiction in a highly original way. He proposes we ought to give up trying to find out how things really are and content ourselves with an analysis of the different ways of looking at things which all people must necessarily adopt given the composition of their mental powers. He states that both of these views of nature, a mechanistic and a teleological one, are indispensable for all humans. One essential difference between these views is that subordination to mechanic laws can indeed be claimed with respect to phenomena, while teleology is a way of thinking about phenomena which the phenomena themselves cannot directly empirically confirm.

According to Kant, given the structure of our cognitive apparatus, we necessarily link this teleology in nature and its relation to the mechanical laws we observe in it with the notion that the world is created by an infinitely intelligent and good God, who, in ways utterly incomprehensible to us, uses mechanical laws as the means of pursuing his purposes. Kant thus wants to preserve the traditionally metaphysical conception of the world as God’s Creation for humanity while relegating its key theses to the realm of regulative principles and ideas, that is, principles and ideas which not only do not apply to things in themselves but, on top of that, cannot be verified by any intuition.

Kant’s followers, however, also saw in his philosophy the possibility of focusing on the real multifaceted interplay and contention of forces and perspectives in our experience, a possibility of abandoning the metaphysical assumption of full and complete universality of certain perspectives and their hierarchy, and of focusing on inventing ways in which we could combine and balance different perspectives in order to seek the right measure of application of one or another in a particular situation. I consider this part of Kantian legacy to be most relevant for the philosophy of organisms.²⁴