Teleology Then and Now the Question of Kant

The self-understanding of an empirical science, biology : : : is for biologists to decide.

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A philosopher can only analyze the metaphysical costs of the various options.(McLaughlin, 2001, p. 190)

If a teleological point of view is a condition for biology, teleology should rather be
seen as a constitutive principle for this science. (Quarfood, 2004, p. 119)
This paper is an exercise simultaneously in presentism and historicism (see Zammito,2004b). It will begin with a consideration of present issues in the philosophy of biology,and with recent conjecture that it might be ‘illuminating to go back to Kant’s discussion’(Quarfood, 2004, p. 118). Three recent writings move from current conundrums in thephilosophical discussion of function, especially in biology, to the question of whether Kantmight be of renewed relevance. Most important for my purposes will be McLaughlin(2001). A close second is Lewens (2004 and Forthcoming). Third is Quarfood (2004).All three pieces express the view—which inspires this entire special issue—that Kant’s tel-eology is of rich relevance to the current debate on biological function.

This presentist consideration will lead then to a historicist consideration of what Kantactually argued. My claim is that ‘naturalism’ is the aspiration of contemporary philoso-phy of biology (Bedau, 1991, 1993, Depew & Weber, 1985), and Kant simply cannot berefashioned into a naturalist (see Zammito, 2003). I will argue, instead, that Kant is mostaccommodating to present thinkers who wish to set in epistemological suspension thequestion of the actuality of function in biology (e.g. Lewens, 2004, p. x). Thus, therecourse to Kant is not merely a historical retreat. Indeed, epistemological ‘deflation’(from ‘constitutive’ to ‘regulative’, that is, from explanatory to heuristic) was the decisivefeature of Kant’s treatment of the life sciences of his day. In that light it is not surprisingthat this might attract some philosophers of science to him today.

Of course, no one has ever really forgotten Kant’s discourse on teleology, but it washardly central to the philosophical assault on ‘design’ that characterized the epoch of pos-itivism in the philosophy of science—an epoch that, if at all, only recently expired (Zam-mito, 2004a). In the first part of that positivist era, the nineteenth century, the ambitionwas to purge biology of natural theology, or what today calls itself ‘intelligent design’.Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ was the purgative. Later, in the twentieth century, the effortwas to purge philosophy of all ‘metaphysics’ and to refine scientific explanation intoone definitive algorithm—ultimately, the so-called ‘D-N model’ of logical empiricism.The upshot made teleology ‘taboo’ in the physical sciences and an embarrassment in biol-ogy (and the social sciences). Because he held mechanistic methodology to be indispens-able for science, Kant could be comfortably assimilated to logical empiricism. In fact,Kant was held to be an esteemed progenitor of positivism in its sophisticated twentieth-century incarnation—though, like all venerated ancestors, best left at rest in his urn.

One form of post-positivism, naturalism, has gradually captivated philosophers of sci-ence—and especially of biology. Of course, naturalism is not just one form: it betokens acongeries of views that have starkly disparate premises and programs (Depew & Weber,1985; Wagner & Warner, 1993). A notable variant, indeed, could be taken to be the con-tinuation (by other means) of the positivist program of unity of science via physical reduc-tionism. The father of ‘naturalized epistemology’, Willard van Orman Quine, cherishedjust this ambition for naturalism (Quine, 1969). The Churchlands and their train in philos-ophy of mind and ‘cognitive science’ cherish a similar ambition (see, for example, Church-land, 1995). It should be acknowledged, as well, that some—perhaps many—practicing

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biologists believe they must still conform to a reductionism that is not only ontological butmethodological in order to be taken as authentic scientists. This suggests that the argu-ment for the disunity of science and the discrediting of the positivist myth of physicalreductionism need to be more effectively advocated in and for that community of scholars.For my part, I take this to be the appropriate naturalistic program, though I can hardlymake that case here (see Zammito, 2004a). In any event, I propose to assess Kant’s poten-tial assistance in terms of the pervasive commitment to naturalism in contemporary phi-losophy of biology.

1. Conundrums of ‘function talk’ in biology today

A certain sense of impasse in the contemporary discourse seems to be the common moti-vation behind renewed interest in Kant (Rescher, 1986; Ruse, 2000; Walsh, 1996). Dead-ened by the ‘dull thud of conflicting intuitions’ (Bigelow & Pargetter, 1998, p. 257), manyfind themselves asking whether there is ‘no end to function talk in biology’ (Lewens, 2001).‘The same two basic alternatives have been debated back and forth over the past fortyyears’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 63). There is, in the paradoxical formulation of Godfrey-Smith (1993), a ‘consensus without unity’. This ‘pluralism’ appears to be a truce of exhaus-tion, not a truth of conviction. But, as Lewens argues, important issues are hardlyresolved: ‘how teleological approaches in biology work, what risks they carry, what formsof teleological content can be grounded by biological processes, and why teleologicalapproaches are found only in biological contexts’ (Lewens, 2004, p. 7). He draws the gistof conventional wisdom, that is, that ‘natural selection : : : plays a role analogous to inten-tional choice’ and thus ‘grounds various claims about function : : : in the natural world’;moreover, selection can give ‘[functional] traits norms that can be met’, hence it can‘ground projects to naturalize content in the philosophy of mind’. But then he asserts:‘such a picture is almost completely mistaken’ (ibid, p. 3). His book goes on to make thatcase. Similarly, McLaughlin notes that ‘a great deal of the interest in functional explana-tion is due to naturalistic projects’, especially in the philosophy of mind (McLaughlin,2001, p. 10). ‘Does natural selection as such get you all the teleology you need for a nat-uralistic interpretation of functional explanation? The answer will turn out to be no’ (ibid.,p. 14). And his book goes on to make that case.

What are the conundrums—the impasses—of contemporary ‘function talk’, that Kant’swork of the eighteenth century should be of relevance in coming to terms with them? Obvi-ously, one can only undertake a partial consideration of this vast literature. I wish to teaseout indicative, not exhaustive traits. At the most immediate level, the question of the anal-

ogy of human artifacts with natural organisms presents itself, with a lineage that goes allthe way back to at least Aristotle. The phenomenal encounter with natural organisms elic-its the sense of parallel with objects of human design, and what so strongly impinges as adescriptive analogy invites translation into a causal explanation. Yet analogy implies notonly similarity but difference. The imputation of design is metaphorical, and metaphorcannot be literal: ‘organisms are not artifacts’ (Lewens, 2004, p. ix). Via disanalogy Aris-totle discerned a fundamental, ontological difference between external and internal teleol-ogy. Kant, too, recognized both the analogy and the disanalogy, but for him theimplication was a retreat from explanatory perplexity to epistemological discretion, aswe will discuss below. For more recent commentators, the propensity to find the analogyheuristically compelling and yet unfitting methodologically made an escape into efficient


cause seem essential: metaphor needed to be flattened out into the literal lines of standardcausation. And yet, ‘unreduced teleology : : : surfaces time and again even in the most aus-terely naturalistic analyses’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 157).

The two approaches between which the debate has been ongoing for the last forty yearsare known as the ‘etiological’ and the ‘causal-role’ conceptions of function. The etiologicalapproach, as its name betokens, looks backward for an account of the origin or cause ofthe item to which function is ascribed, while the causal-role approach looks forward to theeffect the item will have in serving a given systemic capacity. The two views can be tracedback to Carl Hempel and to Ernest Nagel, respectively, in the 1960s (McLaughlin, 2001,Ch. 4–6). As two of the foremost logical–empiricists, Hempel and Nagel sought toappraise their respective conceptions of function in terms of the general theory of expla-nation expressed by the D-N model. Hempel denied that function could satisfy the logicalrequirements for valid explanation, and Nagel rescued its validity by robbing it of its spec-ificity (Nagel, 1977). The core of their endeavor was rendering teleological discourse with-out remainder into efficient cause explanation. That is, teleology was taken as a facon de

parler, a metaphor or analogy, which could and should be cashed out by translation into asuitably logical–scientific explanation in terms of efficient cause: linear succession in timefrom cause to effect. This was assimilated entirely into the second round of interpretationcentered specifically within the philosophy of biology, which entailed ‘reduction of teleo-logical locutions to a naturalistically safe concept that : : : depends only on efficient cau-sation’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 122). This more recent instauration was launched by Wright(1973), on the one side, and Cummins (1975), on the other.

More recent thinkers in the tradition of Wright—such as the ‘proper function’ theoristsand their ‘modern history’ amenders (Millikan, 1989; Neander, 1991; Godfrey-Smith,1994)—were inspired by the prospect that natural selection could provide the decisive effi-cient-causal force to ‘naturalize’ teleology. Function could be translated as the causalresult of a successful adaptation. Thus, for Sober (1993), function just is adaptation.The presence of function in a given item or trait token is the causal result of the contribu-tion of earlier tokens of the same type to the reproductive success of the organism. Becauseearlier tokens of the type establish its causal efficacy, the presence of the latest token is theoutcome of an efficient causal sequence, escaping the ‘backward causality’ that made tel-eology unacceptable. The anthology, Nature’s purposes (Allen, Bekoff, & Lauder, 1998),presented an authoritative collection of key essays establishing this seeming consensus.The ‘core consensus’ (Buller, 1999) was to explain in terms of efficient causes all the orderdiscerned in organic processes.

The etiological view has seemed to loosen its grip in the last few years. Both Lewens andQuarfood indicate that revisionists have been gaining ground in casting suspicion on themodel. What seems to have come most under suspicion is the adaptationist interpretationof natural selection, especially its optimization model, and this primarily because of scru-ples about historical reconstruction. The start of the unraveling appears to have come withthe intervention of Gould and Lewontin (1979) against the ‘Panglossian paradigm’. It car-ried forward to a general recognition that it is very difficult on the basis of present ‘adap-tiveness’ to infer both the environmental pressures and the adaptational sequences out ofwhich present organisms arose. As Lewens puts it, ‘development plays as much of a role inthe explanation of adaptation as selection’ (Lewens, 2004, p. 16). If one cannot establishthe developmental constraints in the structure of the organism, one can never establishwhat selection pressures had to work with. As Lewens puts it, there is a ‘question of


whether selection, or development, has the primary role in explaining form’ (ibid., p. 74).Moreover, there could be highly adaptive traits that were never adaptations, because theydid not vary across an entire population, and traits could become adaptive or cease to beadaptive as environments changed (Gould & Vrba, 1982). Indeed, it was clear that organ-isms could themselves alter their environments (Lewontin, 1985). All of this militated‘skepticism about our abilities to uncover the evolutionary past’ (Lewens, 2004, p. 42).Lewens invokes Paul Griffiths for the conclusion: ‘observed form underdetermines the nat-ure of the adaptive problems solved’ (ibid., p. 50; Griffiths, 1996). Thus, ‘our hypothesesabout [an item’s] design history will often be underdetermined by those data’, so that ‘it isclearly a mistake to assume that we can always make a reliable inference to the best expla-nation when we attempt to infer past selection from the observations of organismic formalone’ (Lewens, 2004, pp. 51–52). ‘There may be many combinations of phenotype sets,heritability assumptions, fitness measures and state equations compatible with the claimthat a phenotype is the fittest of available variants’ (ibid., p. 57). That is, ‘not one but sev-eral histories can be constructed for the same trait’ (ibid., p. 58). Accordingly, there is more

historicism to naturalism than the ‘historical’ adaptationists understood. Of this there willbe more to say in my conclusion.

At the same time the consideration began to arise—fueled by a far wider disputebetween developmental and evolutionary biologists—that the origin-orientation of theselectionists could not adequately account for the ongoing (physiological) self-regulationof systems in individual organisms (Griffiths and Gray, 1994). That is, evolution and phys-iology seem to entail quite different forms of function and require quite different accounts.The type/token distinction is of no use in the physiological context, and the question of‘backward causality’—or better, of holistic causality—becomes unavoidable. ‘The notionthat the whole can be temporally prior to the parts and thus have a causal impact on thembrings up the problem of holistic causality’ (McLaughlin, 2001, pp. 24–25). And ‘jugglingtypes and tokens won’t solve this problem’, because we are caught up with the specifictoken (ibid., p. 163).

We need to understand each token organism as implicitly a feedback system in itself,‘reassembling [itself] all the time’ (ibid., p. 167). ‘We have to find some kind of feedbackmechanism that applies even to the first generation of a new trait or organism : : : Itmay have to be explained by a number of detailed physiological processes’ (ibid., p.163). What characterizes these is a goal-directedness whose goal is ‘ultimately the survivaland/or propagation of that system’ (ibid., p. 69). ‘The basic assertion is that whatever hasan ergon can be the subject of benefit. Anything that supports the characteristic activity ofan entity is good for that entity as an entity of that kind’ (ibid., p. 199). But it is not clearhow to make a compelling account of this. What seems required is ‘a kind of historicallystretched quasiholistic causal relation : : : within one generation : : : [A] token of a type oftrait can be viewed as contributing to its own re-production as the same token : : : At eachparticular moment, the whole is determined by the properties of its parts : : : [W]e considerthe system to be the same : : : over time even if it consists of different parts at differenttimes, and thus can have existed prior to some of its component parts’ (ibid., p. 210).Function ‘interpreted in the sense of internal teleology : : : could not be (part of) the effi-cient cause of the origin of the system because it can only exist once the system itself exists’(ibid., p. 24). What is needed is ‘a kind of system whose characteristic activity or ergon is toprovide for its own welfare’ (ibid., p. 76). That entails commitment to a complex-systemsmodel of teleology (Christensen, 1996; Schlosser, 1998).


Thus, immanent normativity—what a system (and hence its functions) should or can besupposed to be—is essential to the conceptualization (Bedau, 1992; Schurz, 2001; Wach-broit, 1994). But systems that satisfy this condition need not be living. In this context,the question becomes pressing whether self-regulating systems should really be restrictedto living organisms or might well need extension downward into physico-chemical pro-cesses of emergence, on the one hand, and upward into social systems, on the other. Thatthe actual order that self-regulation entails seems to require a notion of immanent norm-

ativity seems starkly disconcerting for the positivist tradition of natural-scientific explana-tion, which enshrined the ‘fact-value dichotomy’ as dogma (Putnam, 2002). It is awkwardeven for some versions of naturalism, which aim precisely to reduce the seemingly evalu-ative–intentional aspect of humans to material–efficient causality, crudely: mind to brain(Wagner, 1996; Millikan, 1997). Within the ‘teleosemantic’ project in philosophy of mind,McLaughlin notes, ‘the concept of norm : : : is, of course, technical not moral: : : talkingabout norms of production, not of moral evaluation’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 104). But‘function talk’ cannot get away from the question of ‘welfare’ or ‘benefit’, and the questionof naturalizing such notions is central to the current conundrums.

All this brings back with a vengeance the original tension between artifacts and organ-isms, between external and intrinsic purposiveness, extending the question decisively to theactual nature of human—not simply organismic—spontaneity and systematicity. ‘For nat-uralism’, McLaughlin puts it precisely, ‘the explanatory relation between natural and arti-factual functions must be one of the generation of the latter from the former not of mutualsubsumption under a generic term’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 15). That is, naturalism is anontological historicism, that is, its project is to ‘reconstruct the generation of artifactualfunctions from natural ones’ (ibid.). Humans are organisms first, and designers only deriv-atively. Design is ontologically parasitical upon a designer: there can be no relative purpo-siveness without an intrinsic purpose to be served. The analogy of design presumes thetransparency—both epistemological and ontological—of human agency.

Aristotelian internal teleology intrudes as an ontological matter. Lewens lays out theargument. ‘It is the internal constitution of biological items, not the fact that selection actsonly on biological items, that best explains the appearance of artifact talk in biology alone’(Lewens, 2004, p. 3). Yet ‘one makes a mistake if : : : one assumes that there must be somespecific process, which only organisms undergo, that bestows normative, purposive stateson them’ (ibid., p. 120). I take this to mean there are non-organismic systems that qualifyas well. ‘The basic point to be made is that only certain kinds of systems (systems whoseexact characterization I leave to others) are able to evolve by natural selection to yieldcomplex adaptations’, Lewens writes (ibid., p. 125). Yet just this unwillingness to go fur-ther betokens his ultimately ‘deflationary’ project, aimed to expose the epistemologicalaporias of function talk: ‘The problem in making a decisive choice between the theoriesis that there is really no single ‘killer intuition’ that will tell us which of the accounts isright’ (ibid., p. 108). Lewens contents himself with demonstrating how ‘a number of cru-cial disanalogies between selection and intention : : : can lead us to : : : underestimate thefunctional interconnectedness of organic, as opposed to artificial, design’ (ibid., pp. 16–17). He is interested in diminishing what he calls ‘heavy function talk’, though he notesthat there are aspects of what he calls the ‘agent model’—that is, intrinsic purposiveness—which appear very pertinent. ‘The study of development makes goal-directedness the mosttempting form for an account of function’ (Lewens, Forthcoming, p. 5). He finds that‘today such goal-based theories are highly fashionable’ (ibid., p. 19). Thus, the new turn


to ‘seeking facts about the internal organization or development of organisms’, to physi-ology and morphology, rather than historical origin (ibid., p. 3). But Lewens wants to‘downplay the seriousness of heavy function talk within biology’ (ibid., p. 18). He is notsure whether ‘goal-directedness’ can be ‘justified as anything more than anthropomorphicprojection’ (ibid., p. 19). He doubts whether the goal can be specified in a manner thatallows falsification, or even ‘goal-failure’. Thus Lewens turns to Kant, who recognizeswith him all the appeals of both the artifact and the agent models, but recognizes theirweaknesses as well, and insists that teleology can only be heuristic.

Yet finding the inadequacies of the artifact model for organisms is not enough, as Lew-ens himself recognizes: the actuality of systems with intrinsic purposiveness has to be con-ceptualized. This internal purposiveness, as Peter McLaughlin put it, ‘is where the analogybetween artifacts and organism breaks down’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 145). The artifactmodel and the analogy of design simply stop short of the mark. McLaughlin goes on, deci-sively: ‘the reality of internal (nonintentional) teleology is what is really at issue’ (ibid., p.17). ‘The real metaphysical cost of functional explanation lies in a commitment to the exis-tence of entities that can stop a functional regress’ (ibid., p. 211). That is, ‘the real problemhas always been holism’ (ibid., p. 27). To deal with this ontological challenge, McLaughlininsists we need to reconsider a deep ambiguity in the reception of teleology from the Aris-totelian tradition, the blur of final cause with formal cause. While teleology and functionhave always, especially on the basis of the artifact model or analogy to design, seemed amatter of final cause, McLaughlin argues this is in fact inaccurate: ‘most genuinely func-tional explanations involve not so much an illicit appeal to final causes as an implicitappeal to holistic causality’ (ibid., p. 9).

What, then, are the issues current ‘function talk’ would carry back to a consideration ofKant? First, the question of the phenomenal encounter with organisms: how are they rec-

ognized, and as what? Second, the question of the analogy of artifact and organism: howsatisfactory is this analogy for biology? Third, the question of the exhaustiveness of effi-cient cause for scientific explanation: can a mechanical account of origin (natural selection)suffice as an account of development and physiology (self-regulative systematicity)? Fourth,what is ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ for biological science? Is it possible to conceptualize itadequately? Fifth, how can normativity be understood within a (naturalist) scientificresearch program?

2. Kant and teleology

The intentions informing Kant’s composition of the Critique of (the power of) judgment

are exceedingly complex and multifarious (Zammito, 1992). On the face of it, critics havealways found it arbitrary that Kant treated of aesthetics and of biology in the same work.That this was a critique of judgment throughout seemed an ‘architectonic’ ruse, not a sub-stantive consideration, and that the seemingly discrete considerations of aesthetics and biol-ogy were in fact part of a still larger construction entailing the problem of a unified ‘order ofnature’ as empirical law, on the one hand, and the problem of human moral teleology, on theother, made the third Critique only more of a morass for critics. Nonetheless, Kant’s over-arching concern was not merely ‘architectonic’. Reconciliation of the first and second Cri-

tiques—of theoretical with practical reason—entailed the ‘critical’ reconciliation of humanobligation, and its implicated freedom, with the lawfulness of phenomenal nature, the unityof its ‘order’, as the locus in which man was to act out this obligation. Everything in the third


Critique was a means to that end (Genova, 1975; Zammito, 1992). Paul Guyer is surely cor-rect to maintain that ‘the basic reason for discussing organisms at all was precisely that theseare objects within our experience that can prompt us to take this twofold view of nature’required to achieve the reconciliation (Guyer, 2001, p. 262). ‘It may be theoretical difficultiesin comprehending organisms that require us to conceive them as products of purpose, but: : : it is our morally grounded conception of our own purposiveness as free that leads us tothe further thought that purposiveness entails immateriality, thus that organisms and ulti-mately all of nature must have an immaterial ground’ (ibid., p. 280).

That is, Kant’s treatment of biology was always subsidiary to larger systematic concernsof the ‘critical philosophy’ as a whole. That was a sword with two edges, however. It wasmeant to enable the coherence of his system, but it could also turn out to pose it grave prob-lems. I have suggested that biology created acute difficulties for the unity of science in acoherent ‘order of nature’ along the lines Kant preferred (Zammito, 2003). He had tworecourses: first, to reformulate the issues of biology as ‘regulative’ rather than ‘constitutive’,that is, as descriptive (heuristic) rather than explanatory (scientific). That was the course heset in his philosophy of (biological) science. Second, as Guyer suggested, he could proposethe possibility of ‘thinking’—though, of course, not knowing—a ‘supersensible ground’ thatmight rescue the coherence of that order (at a metaphysical cost, even as ‘thought’, beyondthe philosophical bankroll of any current naturalist). We have good historical reason tobelieve that Kant made a decided shift over time from participation in actual theorizingin life science (to be sure, from his armchair) to a much more skeptical critique of itsmethod. Phillip Sloan characterizes Kant’s trajectory as a shift from the new ‘history ofnature’ [Naturgeschichte] associated with Buffon and Bonnet back to a transcendental–philosophical version of ‘description of nature’ [Naturbeschreibung] (Sloan, 2006, thisissue; Lagier, 2004 and Adickes, 1924). The third Critique essentially proposed thereduction of life science to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attainauthentic scientificity, never to have its ‘Newton of the blade of grass’ (Kant, 1910–,Vol. 5, p. 400).1

For his relevance to contemporary (naturalist) philosophy of biology, Marcel Quarfoodsets the discussion of Kant in the proper frame by asserting: ‘The distinctive feature ofKant’s view is : : : an epistemic presupposition constitutive for the study of life, rather thana definite ontological commitment’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 145). Joan Steigerwald agrees Kantwas concerned with the conditions of the possibility of our cognition of organisms, notwith their fundamental nature. She stresses that Kant claimed we could only grasp organ-isms through analogy with our own purposive activity, that is, he maintained only theanalogy to artifice gave us conceptual access to organic form (Steigerwald, 2006, this issue).The question that Steigerwald brings to the center of consideration is how Kant conceivedintrinsic purposiveness—the capacity to self-organize and to maintain organization as nat-urally occurring processes in organic bodies.

Kant opened his ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ with a consideration of ‘the struc-ture of birds regarding how their bones are hollow, how their wings are positioned to pro-duce motion and their tails to permit steering : : :’ (Kant, 1987, p. 236 [5:360]).2 The

1 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.2 References in square brackets are to the original German in Kant (1910–).


features he highlighted are anatomical–physiological, befitting ‘adaptiveness’ or causal-role thinking today. The question he immediately raised is how nature could have broughtthese about, that is, an etiological question. He asserted that there was no way that the‘mere nexus effectivus’ in nature could account for this production; it was irretrievably‘contingent’. Famously, he claimed we resort to nexus finalis, causality according to pur-pose, in order to organize our reception of this phenomenon. But we do this ‘only : : : so asto bring nature under principles of observation and investigation by analogy : : : withoutpresuming to explain it : : :’ (ibid.). To take teleology as explanatory would ‘introduce anew causality into natural science, even though in fact we only borrow this causality fromourselves : : :’ (ibid., p. 237 [5:361]). This would be a quite ‘special kind of causality, or atleast a quite distinct lawfulness [Gesetzmaßigkeit] of nature’ and ‘even experience cannotprove that there actually are such purposes [die Wirklichkeit derselben: : :beweisen]’ (ibid.,p. 236 [5:359]).

I think we must be quite cautious in presuming we understand what Gesetzmaßigkeit

and Wirklichkeit meant for Kant, here. Should Gesetzmaßigkeit be translated as lawfulnessor lawlikeness? Are these different for Kant, as similar compounds with Zweck have sug-gested to interpreters, that is, can there be lawlikeness in the absence of law? (See Gins-borg, 1997; Rang, 1998; Fricke, 1990; Warnke, 1992). And Wirklichkeit: what is Kantafter in questioning whether we can ‘prove’ such an ‘actuality’? The notion of ‘proving[beweisen]’ from experience is a very touchy question in transcendental philosophy, butis Kant going even further, suggesting that we can never really be sure that we have expe-rienced a ‘natural purpose’, that is, that it is ‘actual’? Kant triggers a minefield of problemsfrom the very moment of phenomenal encounter with organisms. As Marcel Quarfoodexplains, ‘organisms like all objects of experience are subject to the causal principle’,but ‘there are features of organisms that appear to be intractable for the kind of explana-tions in terms of causal laws appropriate for ordinary physical objects’ and thus ‘there isno explanation (or ‘‘law’’) for how matter comes together in the ways characteristic fororganisms’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 146). Kant characterizes what presents itself as an organ-ism ‘provisionally, [as] a thing [that] is both cause and effect of itself’ (Kant, 1987, p. 249[5:370]). While we can ‘think this causality without contradiction, we cannot grasp [begrei-

fen] it’ (ibid., [5:371]). That is, we cannot bring it under concepts of the understanding.The distinction between erklarbar and erkennbar is of crucial significance for the loos-

ening of the theoretical structure of Kant’s philosophy by virtue of the ‘Critique of teleo-logical judgment’. That one can ‘recognize’ what one cannot ‘explain’ puts an enormousstrain on the coherence of ‘experience’ in Kant’s system. That teleology can be an expla-

nation of phenomenal elements of nature is equally straining. ‘Teleology in its identifica-tory role singles out the biological object as a functional unit, an organism : : : Thequasi-explanatory use of teleology serves to provide a ‘‘law’’, or at least some order, uni-fying the vast number of causal chains that interact in the organism in ways otherwisewholly contingent’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 157). Technically, Kant must deny that teleologycan explain anything in phenomenal nature (compare Simon, 1976; Flasch, 1997; Fricke,1990; Ginsborg, 1987). That is what it means to privilege the mechanistic maxim. Whatteleology is alone permitted to do is offer an analogy with heuristic utility. It is even lessthan an empirical conjecture.

Many historians and philosophers of biology credit Kant with an elucidation of ‘orga-nized being’ [organisiertes Wesen] that was enabling for the crystallization of biology as aspecial science (Lieber, 1950; Baumanns, 1965; Low, 1980; Huneman, 2002; Lorenz, 1975;


Reill, 2004). But Peter McLaughlin has given a very useful account of the development ofeighteenth-century thought about organism which would give credit for the decisiveinsight rather to John Locke (McLaughlin, 2001, pp. 173–178). As McLaughlin construesLocke, he

attempted to determine the difference between the identity over time of an aggregateor ‘‘mass’’ and that of an organism. The identity of a material substance or a phys-ical body consists in the identity of its parts and thus ultimately in the identity of itscomponent atoms: : : The identity of an organism, on the other hand, consists not insubstantial identity but rather in vital (modal) identity, in the identity of the processof continued renewal and regeneration of the parts of the system by the system.(Ibid., pp. 175–176; Locke, 1998 [1689])

McLaughlin continues: ‘Locke here introduces two levels of organization: parts and par-ticles : : : Life consists in the ability of the system to renew (‘‘continue and frame’’) its parts: : : An organic body is now conceptualized as something that remains identical to itself : : :by continually reproducing itself and its parts : : :’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 176). (Thus, thereplacement of one carbon atom by another—at the particle level—affects nothing regard-ing the identity of the part or the organism.) This was the decisive eighteenth-century re-trieval and reformulation of Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, of intrinsic purposiveness.Buffon took it up into eighteenth-century empirical life science, especially in terms ofhis notion of the moule interieure (Sloan, 1979). Kant inherited it from the ensuing discus-sions among life scientists of the day.

In the third Critique, Kant, on the example of a tree, highlighted three such featuresthat eighteenth-century life science considered empirically established about organisms.First, ‘with regard to its species the tree produces itself: with its species, it is both causeand effect, both generating itself and being generated by itself ceaselessly’ (Kant, 1987,p. 249 [5:371]). Here, Kant slid between the type or species tree and its individual tokensin asserting the reciprocity of cause and effect. For our part, what is important is that inpropagation Kant saw a functional property that is intrinsic to organisms.

Next, he highlighted physiological functions of more properly individual organisms:nutrition and growth. Kant stressed the particular point that ‘the matter that the tree assim-ilates is first processed by it until the matter has the quality peculiar to the species, a qual-ity that the natural mechanism outside the plant cannot supply’ (ibid.). That is, the treetransforms inorganic materials into organic forms (something he believed inorganic mattercould never do of itself, for that would be generatio aequivoca—spontaneous generation—or ‘hylozoism’). He went on: ‘in terms of the ingredients that the tree receives from natureoutside it we have to consider it to be only an educt’ (ibid.). An ‘educt’ merely redeployswhat is already given. By contrast, a ‘product’ makes something new. In terms of Locke’sdistinction, all organic parts are compounded of particles that are drawn from the generalphysical–chemical order and these particles are as such indifferent to organic assimilation.The point is the converse: something really does become different, but it is at the level ofthe organism. When the tree assimilates inorganic into organic matter: it transforms it intoa part of itself, and hence the tree becomes a product, not merely an educt. Kant recog-nized that metabolism is a matter of systemic (re)integration. He distinguished emphati-cally between growth by internal integration and mere aggregation. Mechanism can getno further than aggregation; but systems do more: ‘The whole is thus an organized unity(articulatio), and not an aggregate (coacervatio). It may grow from within (per intussuscep-


tionem), but not by external additions (per appositionem)’ (Kant, 1923, p. 653 [3:539]). Forthis reason, Kant rejected the notion that crystal growth was proto-organic; it was in hisview strictly mechanical.

The contrast of educt and product is crucial, as Kant elaborated later in the third Cri-

tique and as I have explored in my discussion of his view of epigenesis, which turns on thisdistinction (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 5, p. 423; Zammito, 2003; Zammito, 2006). Kant continued:‘the separation and recombination of this raw material show that these natural beings havea separating and forming ability [Scheidungs- und Bildungsvermogens] of very great origi-nality; all our art finds itself infinitely outdistanced : : :’ (Kant, 1987, p. 250 [5:371]). Thisemphasis on the creative spontaneity of nature as incomparably superior to human artificeis repeated in a decisive passage later in the third Critique, which substantially disqualifiesthe ‘analogy of design’ in our conceptualization of organisms (ibid., p. 254 [5:374–375]).

The last of the distinguishing traits of organisms Kant formulated on the model of thetree was the power of regeneration, that is, healing and even organ restoration—a matterof the most exciting experimental discoveries of mid-eighteenth-century empirical life sci-ence: the experiments of Trembley, Bonnet, and ultimately Blumenbach (Vartanian, 1950;Roger, 1963 and Roe, 1981). What the regenerative powers of the polyp confirmed werethe arguments that Caspar Friedrich Wolff had advanced based on his embryologicalobservations, namely that organic forms had the power of developmental self-organiza-tion, a capacity for internal regulation and modulation which involved a continuousand mutually responsive relation between parts and whole for the sustenance of the organ-ism. This was the essential argument of eighteenth-century epigenesis.

These features of intrinsic purposiveness Kant discerned in organisms seem distinctly‘physiological’, that is they have to do more with questions of development or maintenance

than of origination. To phrase it in the terms of ‘causal role’ theory, what Kant highlightsin organic systems is persistence and plasticity in securing system-maintenance. As Steiger-wald construes Kant, he highlights their ‘flexibility in the realization of [their] forms andfunctions’, the ‘degree of freedom or at least spontaneity’ in their operations, which nev-ertheless demonstrate regularities in formation, structure and functioning (Steigerwald,2006, this issue).

These ‘marvelous properties of organized creatures’ are part of the empirical–experien-tial data available to human investigators trying to comprehend the ‘order of nature’. Thatis, Kant appears to consider their phenomenal description unproblematic. But how these‘marvelous properties’ can be explained—and how they can be integrated into a systemof empirical laws as the ‘order of nature’—remains, for Kant, a philosophical conundrum.That an entity can be cause and effect of itself, Kant argued, is beyond discursive rational-ity. Yet that is what is required to conceive a natural purpose. Steigerwald writes: ‘In orderfor us to judge a body as a natural purpose, not only is it necessary that we conceive thepossibility of the parts as dependent for their existence and their form on their relation tothe whole, but also that all the parts through their own causality reciprocally produce oneanother as regards their form and combination and in this way produce a whole’ (Steiger-wald, 2006, this issue). To be sure, Kant articulated this point, but he did so in order to setit beyond human explanatory power.

Quite simply, for an entity to be ‘cause and effect of itself’ is for it to become inexplicable

by all the resources of science according to the nexus effectivus. But what, exactly, is thisnexus effectivus? If we wish to understand what Kant could possibly have meant in claimingthat we can at one and the same time experience organisms and yet not be able to explain


them within the order of natural law, we must drive a wedge between experience and expla-nation, that is, not simply between ‘description’ and ‘explanation’ as a posteriori judgments,but between the a priori binding character of ‘determinant judgment’ for an object in generalto be part of a ‘nature’ possible for us to experience, and the multiply contingent character of‘reflective judgment’, that is, a posteriori scientific explanation. Many of us have been drawnto think that Kant drastically compromised the force of his ‘Second analogy’ account ofcausality (as determinant or constitutive) by his representation of mechanical causality inthe third Critique as merely ‘reflective’ or regulative. We were misguided to think that Kantalways meant the same thing by mechanism, or indeed, by the causal nexus.

A persuasive account is now in place that Kant intended a more restricted sense of‘mechanical causality’ in the third Critique. McLaughlin has argued that Kant came toa new realization that mechanical causality as practiced by natural science introduced asupplementary restriction whereby the causal relation between parts and wholes couldonly work aggregatively from parts to whole, and not mutually, or inversely (McLaughin,1990). Quarfood summarizes McLaughlin’s claim elegantly: ‘whereas constitutive causal-ity involves a determination of time-order, the maxim of mechanism is a further, regulativeassumption about the relation of part to whole, according to which a whole is always caus-ally determined by its parts’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 161). In a very influential essay, Allison(1991) has seconded this interpretation. Not everyone agrees with McLaughlin’s specificaccount (the part–whole argument). Hannah Ginsborg has argued that this is insufficientto distinguish organisms from machines, or crystals from organisms. She resorts to notionsof normativity to complicate the causal theory (Ginsborg, 2001, 2004). But even Ginsborg,and with her others like Quarfood (2004), Steigerwald (this volume), and Breitenbach (thisvolume), construe Kant as employing a different sense of mechanism in the third Critique,so that now this is the reigning wisdom. Causality, at the determinant or constitutive level,remained fully general for Kant, just as he contended in the first Critique, and so it waspossible to ‘experience’ this bizarre phenomenon of something as ‘cause and effect ofitself’—though only by immediately translating it into an analogy that was prima facieinadequate. But scientific ‘explanation’ could not accommodate it, insofar as it restricteditself to the mechanistic maxim.

Now, clearly Kant committed himself without reservation to the appropriateness of fol-lowing this maxim of mechanical explanation. He only introduced the epistemologicalproviso that, as finite—indeed, ‘discursive’—intelligences, we might never be able to bringit to closure. The unity of science as an order of nature in its empirical laws constituted aregulative ideal we needed to believe in to pursue science, but all the same it might never befulfilled. One can take this as a pretty fair anticipation of the underdetermination thesis—especially in Quine’s strongest form (Quine, 1975). What is striking is that, precisely on thebasis of organisms, Kant felt so confident that he claimed (what Quine was forced to repu-diate) that it was already inescapable that the project must fail. Quarfood formulates theparadox (or could it be a contradiction?): ‘how Kant can claim both that organisms aremechanically unexplainable and that it nonetheless is possible that they are mechanicallyproduced’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 196). If there is an ‘antinomy of judgment’ it is about thismechanist perplexity far more than about teleology per se (McLaughlin, 1990; Allison,1991; Philonenko, 1977; Zanetti, 1993). Can there be an acceptable ‘order of nature’ ifwe have to exclude something as pervasively present as life forms?

What does this ‘experience’ incapable of ‘explanation’—or only of a knowingly falla-

cious explanation (‘analogy of design’)—actually refer to? What is it about? Is the organism


a fact or a confusion of experience? The very discernment of an order, of holism, seems todemand something far more than an analogy to artifice, as Kant himself acknowledged.As Ginsborg puts it, ‘the question remains of how we can even coherently regard some-thing both as a purpose and as natural’ (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 236). The ‘appeal to analogydoes not overcome the difficulty’, she continues (ibid., p. 238). Kant himself admitted it:‘Strictly speaking, : : : the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causalityknown to us’, that is, ‘intrinsic natural perfection, as possessed by those things that are pos-sible only as natural purposes and that are hence called organized beings, is not conceivableor explicable on any analogy to any known physical ability, that is, ability of nature, noteven—since we belong to nature in the broadest sense—on a precisely fitting analogy tohuman art’ (Kant, 1987, p. 254 [5:375]).

‘Perfection’ as a conceptualization of ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ opens up the dimension ofnormativity that has become so urgent in contemporary controversy. Ginsborg highlightsKant’s language in §68 of the third Critique: natural purposes are ‘singly and alone explica-

ble according to natural laws which we can think to ourselves only under the idea of purposeas a principle, and indeed merely in this way are they so much as internally cognizable asregards their inner form’ (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 233; Kant, 1910–, Vol. 5, p. 383). Kant arguesin the sentence before that physics needs to avoid crossing the boundary into metaphysics.But does his sentence not cross that boundary, and perhaps more than once? My concernsare (1) what it means within the critical philosophy to conceive of ‘natural laws’ in this fash-ion; (2) what it means that something be ‘internally cognizable’ as regards ‘inner form.’What does this double inwardness betoken? ‘Perfection’ in its eighteenth-century Germanscholastic–philosophical (and thus, Kant’s) sense holds the clue. Ginsborg redeems the ideaof natural purpose by insisting that ‘to regard something as a purpose is to regard it as sub-ject to normative rules or standards’. She characterizes this kind of ‘lawfulness’ (or ‘lawlike-ness’) in natural purpose as ‘normative law’, as distinguished from the necessity either ofconstitutive cognitive principles or of moral obligation (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 232). Kant him-self introduced the notion of what something was ‘supposed to be’ in a key passage of his‘First Introduction to the Critique of judgment’ (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 20, p. 240). That appearsto signify that purpose cannot be restricted simply to the concept as cause of the existence ofsome object, as Kant formulated it in §10 of the third Critique, but that it characterizessomething intrinsic to the object itself. The force of Ginsborg’s argument suggests we musttake the normativity to be immanent in the object, a product of nature, not simply a rule ofdesign [Bauplan] ‘analogically’ referred to a nonexistent ‘designer’, as in Kant’s metaphor ofa Technik der Natur. Like contemporary systems theory or theory of self-organization,Ginsborg seems to ascribe normativity to the actual and the empirical order, notwithstand-ing Kant’s notorious insistence that this can only be ‘as if’.

Why is this normative–systemic immanence so intractably unknowable for Kant, andwhy does he believe that analogy to design is our only—albeit inadequate—alternative?(see Roque, 1985; Gfeller, 1998; Krohn & Kuppers, 1992). To what is the analogy reallybeing made? It is not the work of art, but the artist (human agency). Kant suggested for‘natural purpose’ a ‘remote analogy with our causality in accordance with ends’ (Kant,1987, p. 255 [5:375]). But is the analogy really ‘remote’ in Kant’s argument? More point-edly, is our causality transparent to our ‘awareness’? What do we really know about that?‘Man is conscious of himself as a self-moving machine, without being able to furtherunderstand such a possibility’ Kant wrote in his Opus postumum (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 21,p. 213). How did Kant understand it?


Kant developed an elaborate concept of systemic integration, for which organism wasbut one instance (Zammito, 1992; Guyer, 1990, 2000, 2001, 2003). His primary instancewas reason itself. But this allowed Kant to draw a fundamental analogy between organismand reason as systems (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 3, p. 538–539). Quarfood recognizes the impor-tance to Kant of the ‘biological analogy : : : between the systematicity of reason and thefunctional integration of the parts in an organism’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 79). Kant’s essen-tial transcendental claim is that reason’s principles are a priori, that they cannot be derivedempirically. This was the thrust of his famous analogy between pure reason and epigenesisat B 167 of the first Critique (Kant–, 1910, Vol. 3, p. 128; Haffner, 1997; Ingensiep, 1994;Duchesneau, 2000). Quarfood insists that ‘the comparison of transcendental philosophyand biological epigenesis is [strictly] an analogy’, that it would be wrongheaded to thinkthat one could make any determinate inference from biological science to transcendentalphilosophy, as he (mistakenly) accuses Phillip Sloan to have done (Quarfood, 2004, pp.79–112; Sloan, 2002). The question, from our vantage, Quarfood notwithstanding, is:can this matter be left at the level of mere analogy? Logically, analogy postulates at leastsome common concept under which two quite different matters can be subsumed, somecorrespondence at least in terms of a relation. But are reason and organisms simply speciesof some logically higher genus [Schulgattung] of system? Or are they species of a generative

order [Naturgattung], such that ‘reason’ is an expression of the particular organism calledman? That, of course, is the gist of the naturalist program in the philosophy of mind.

How should we understand reason in Kant? What is its nature? Whence comes this (epi-stemic) power [Vermogen or Kraft]? What makes it ‘real’? Has Quarfood achieved any‘metaphysical cost’ saving (or Kant before him) in conceiving it as an ‘acquisitio origina-

ria’? (Quarfood, 2004, pp. 77–117). What, and more pertinently, how is that? Here, Kant’sanalogy of organism and reason requires further inquiry. Guyer writes: ‘it is only ourawareness of the freedom of our own purposiveness that leads us to conceive of the pur-posiveness of organisms as necessitating a fundamental split between the teleological andmechanical views of nature’ (Guyer, 2001, p. 264). And he then asks the very pertinentquestion: ‘Is it just an empirical fact, a matter of empirical psychology rather than tran-scendental psychology, that organisms suggest the idea of purposiveness to us?’ (ibid.,p. 276).

Consider the ‘conative’ conception of reason which scholars have begun to discern inKant’s writings (Yovel, 1989; Gilead, 1985; Dorflinger, 2000). Kleingeld (1998) has offereda very careful consideration of Kant’s strange usage of ‘needs’ or ‘interests’ of reason andfurther talk of the ‘right’ of such impulses. What is to be made of that? Kleingeld identifiesthree possible senses. First, might it be an anthropological recasting of Kant’s transcen-dentalism—that is, is reason merely human? Second, could all this be simply a matterof ‘metaphorical language’, warranting no further philosophical concern? (See Nuyen,1989). Finally, might this be more of a ‘root metaphor’, that is, might it betoken the resur-facing of metaphysical elements in Kant’s transcendentalism? Is Kant’s ‘supersensibleground’ here demonstrating ‘agential’ properties, though not necessarily human ones (inHegelian terms, must we render ‘reason’ as Geist)? Kleingeld holds that none of theseoptions is satisfactory. To account for Kant’s language she resorts to two moves. First,in assessing Kant’s talk of the right to recognize needs or interests of reason, she arguesthat he is clear that such subjective impositions are permissible only when there are noobjective determinations governing a matter. Thus, they arise primarily with reference tothe ‘supersensible’, and take on a practical-rational register: ‘orientation in thinking’ for


the sake of practical obligations (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 8, pp. 131–148). Further, Kleingeldargues that Kant offers us a philosophical basis for interpreting his usage of ‘need’ and‘interest’—namely his theory of symbolic hypotyposis (ibid. Vol. 5, p. 374). Ideas of reasoncannot be fully instantiated in intuition, but they can be evoked analogically in a symbol.Kleingeld argues that ‘reason’ is itself an ‘idea of reason’ in Kant’s technical sense: we can-not formulate a determinant judgment about it because it is not present to intuition.

There is no question that Kant wanted to eschew metaphysics, with reference to ‘nat-ural purposes’ as with reference to many other concepts; the question is whether hisown system allowed that. I suggest there is a passage in the ‘Critique of teleological judg-ment’ that brings all this to a decisive head: ‘In considering nature and the ability it dis-plays in organized products, we say far too little if we call this an analogue of art, forin that case we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature. : : : We might becloser if we call this inscrutable property of nature an analogue of life’, Kant wrote(1987, p. 254 [5:374]). This seems to a modern reader bizarre: life is what we think organ-

ism is already about, so what analogy could there be? Kant continues: ‘But in that case wemust either endow matter, as mere matter, with a [kind of] property (hylozoism) that con-flicts with its nature. Or else we must supplement matter with an alien principle (a soul)conjoined to it’ (ibid.). Life, it appears, comes with heavy metaphysical baggage. Whatis the proper scope of Leben and what is its philosophical meaning (that is, what is theextension and what is the intension of the idea)? Kant is adamant that brute matter cannotpossess this character. The essence of matter is inertia: all change in motion must have anexternal cause. To ascribe to brute matter the ‘inner’ capacity to inaugurate motion wouldbe ‘the death of natural philosophy’ (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 4, p. 544). Hylozoism was anath-ema to Kant. But what alternative did the ‘analogy of life’ offer him for explaining organ-ism? For Kant, brute matter was soulless and dead; man was a living organism. Whatabout the intermediate orders: what of animals, what of plants? The point is, if the conceptof life is restricted to intelligent will, ‘is man the only living thing?’ (Ingensiep, 2004, p.121).

One must be cautious in affirming that Kant was not introducing a special matter orforce (Steigerwald, 2006, this issue). In his metaphysics lectures, Kant was more explicitthan he permitted himself to be in the third Critique: ‘all matter that is animate has aninner principle which is separated from the object of outer sense, and is an object of innersense : : : Thus, all matter which lives is alive not as matter but rather has a principle of lifeand is animated. But to the extent matter is animated, to that extent it is ensouled’ (Kant,1910–, Vol. 28, p. 275). Ingensiep (2004) argues that Kant’s careful arguments in the ‘Para-logisms’ of the first Critique banned the notion of an immortal soul, but not that of anembodied one. If the human organism was endowed with life, this was because its matterwas as ‘ensouled’ as its soul was ‘embodied’. What Aristotle identified with ‘soul’, Kanthad to reformulate to befit a modern science context. Late in his life, in Perpetual peace,Kant acknowledged the popularity of the new term Lebenskraft, which he recognized as asubstitute for the traditional concept of the soul. He welcomed this term-shift, for he heldthat while we can recognize an effect, we should be wary of hypostatizing a substance as itsground (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 8, p. 413).

Ingensiep suggests that we array Kant’s many sayings about life in terms of the Aristo-telian scale of being, from brute matter through plants and animals to man and to theworld as a whole. Of the many statements Kant made about life, a good starting pointis from his Critique of practical reason: ‘Life is the power of a being to act in accordance


with the laws of the faculty of desire’ (Kant, 1956, p. 9 n. [5:9 n.]). The faculty of desire, inturn, is the power ‘to be through its representations the cause of the actuality of these rep-resentations’ (ibid.). No one can miss the parallel between this definition of the faculty ofdesire and Kant’s definition, in the third Critique, of the key term purpose. Thus the ques-tion of the actuality (or actualization) of the object through a purpose or the faculty ofdesire entails a theoretical component. In his early Dreams of a spirit-seer, Kant wrote:‘all life consists in the inner capacity of self-determination according to free choice [Will-

kur]’ (ibid, Vol. 2, p. 327). In his Reflections Kant observed: ‘life is nothing but faculty ofdesire in its minimal exertion [in der geringsten Ausubung]’ (ibid. Vol. 15, p. 465). In hisOpus postumum, Kant wrote: ‘life in the strictest meaning of the term is the capacity ofsponaneity of a physical entity to act in accordance with certain of its own representations’(ibid. Vol. 20, p. 566). Kant seemed to be willing to extend at least some measure ofdesire—action in accordance with representations—to animals, though it is desire entirelydriven by pleasure/pain, and not by rational choice. Even were we to grant that, what ofplants? As Ingensiep stresses, Kant never ascribed psychological desire, even analogically,to plants.

Thus, plants epitomize Kant’s conceptual discrimination of life from organism. As wehave seen, he illustrated the features of organism precisely by a plant—a tree. Conse-quently, Kant’s notion of organism is broader than that of life, and the failure of thesetwo terms to have the same extension expresses the insufficiency Kant acknowledged inhis ‘analogy of life’ for natural purpose. How do we construe the residual disanalogyfor biology? Blumenbach’s notion of Bildungstrieb won Kant’s endorsement for all organicforms. Animals were clearly identified with Trieb, but even plants have a Bildungstrieb, notjust Bildungskraft, in the discrimination Kant adopted from Blumenbach (Kant, 1910–,Vol. 5, p. 424; McLaughlin, 1982 and Richards, 2000). That is, they have some ‘internal,quasi-spontaneous principle of motion’ (Ingensiep, 2004, p. 128). The question of Trieb inKant’s notion of organism denotes the element unaccounted for even by Kant’s analogy oflife. But what was a Trieb for Kant, and how did he distinguish it from a Kraft? How couldan ‘inner’ force be actual for scientific inquiry? Kant insisted it could only be ‘heuristic’, or‘regulative’. Blumenbach and his school took the Bildungstrieb for actual, not speculative.Their project was to specify its effects through the mechanisms (Bildungskrafte) it set inmotion. Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction proved useless for them in that pursuit,though it gave them some metaphysical comfort, especially in the analogy to the Newto-nian mysteriousness of gravity.

With Robert Butts, I believe it is necessary to hearken to the anomalies that pile up inKant’s philosophy, and especially his philosophy of science, all of which revolve, as Buttsnotes, around ‘design’ (Butts, 1990, p. 3). Kant suggested that we could find our waythrough the difficulties by relying on our awareness of our own agential performance.But there are grave questions about whether Kant could warrant this transparency ofhuman agency (theoretical or practical) on his own terms (ibid., p. 15 n. 4). In naturalistterms, to claim we can grasp organism by analogy to our agency is to put the cart beforethe horse, for that agency is contingent upon the features of organism for its own cogency(McLaughlin, 2001, p. 15).

Organism is a capital anomaly. It will not fit in Kant’s system of science, and yet with-out a good account of it, the system itself must in the end appear inadequate (Zammito,2003). Ingensiep observes: ‘Not only the Kantian but also the modern struggle to discrim-inate a conceptual difference between ‘‘organism’’ and ‘‘life’’ leads ultimately back to the


roots of entelechy in Aristotelian substance theory’ (Ingensiep, 2004, p. 136). CanMcLaughlin’s discrimination of formal from final cause, and with it the recourse to Aris-totle, provide assistance especially given that the question of the actuality of intrinsic pur-poses in nature (or for science) bears on humans—not merely as knowers but as agents?How did Kant construe ‘intrinsic purposiveness’? Did he offer us any conceptual advanceover Aristotle or Locke? To discriminate between ‘form’ and ‘existence’ in Steigerwald’sterms, would it not be more fruitful to resort to the Aristotelian distinction between ‘for-mal’ and ‘material’ cause, or to Locke’s distinction between ‘parts’ and ‘particles’? Theform of the part is a property of a higher level than the material existence of particles thattransiently compose it. The persistence in identity that life science should meaningful expli-cate has to do with parts and organisms, not atoms or elements. Thus one could distin-guish between an organelle and an element, and the questions of identity (andcausality) would be quite different. While this still leaves us with ‘circular’ or ‘holistic’ cau-sality, it does so at the level of parts, not particles.

3. Conclusion: philosophy and science: who is the ‘Underlaborer’ in naturalism?

Paul Guyer has written that the argument in the third Critique is ‘unstable’ (Guyer,2001, p. 275). How do we understand that instability? If it was not already ‘post-critical’,to use a phrase from Allison (2000), did the third Critique instantiate that notorious ‘gap’in the critical system (Forster, 1987) that became Kant’s preoccupation for the bulk of theperiod after the publication of his first Critique and the warrant for all subsequent GermanIdealism? What of the Opus postumum, especially according to the aggressive line of inter-pretation advanced by Tuschling (1991) and Edwards (2000)? What of biological practicein Blumenbach’s ‘Gottingen school’ and elsewhere in turn-of-the-century German com-parative morphology, culminating in von Baer and Cuvier? (Richards, 2002; Reill,2004) And, finally, of course, what of Naturphilosophie, that bete noire of positivism?(Cunningham & Jardine, 1990; Gloy, 1994; Gloy & Burger, 1993; Beiser, 2002 and Steiger-wald, 2003) Is it plausible, as some Kantians desire, to privilege the coherence of a partic-ular reading of the first Critique with a particular reading of the third if it puts all theseother questions beyond the pale?

It is all well and good to recognize that Kant is talking about the judgments biologistsmake, not the content of their judgments (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 235). But biologists cannot beindifferent to the content of their judgments. Quarfood recognizes this clearly. In his dis-sertation he insists upon a ‘distinction : : : between the point of view of the biologist andthe meta level perspective of philosophy’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 119). What is striking is notonly that he believes that ‘if a teleological point of view is a condition for biology, teleol-ogy should rather be seen as a constitutive principle for this science’ (which makes Quar-food a good naturalist), but he thinks Kant held this view! (ibid.) Quarfood asserts that onhis reading of Kant, ‘teleology, though regulative, can be said to be constitutive for biol-ogy, as a condition for the possibility of biological objects (organisms)’ (ibid., p. 153). Heelaborates: ‘Aristotelian functions : : : are to be seen as valid at the object level of biologicalinvestigation. The denial of their objectivity only takes place at a further meta level reflec-tion. For the biologist, organisms exhibit functions as a matter of course’ (ibid., p. 152). Ican find no passage in Kant that warrants ascribing to him this concession to biologicalpractitioners. On the contrary: Kant saw himself called to caution them about their‘daring adventure of reason’ (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 5, p. 419 n.). The charm is that the biol-


ogists misunderstood his admonitions in a way that enabled them to get on with theirwork.

Kant—drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors—provided a discerning andpowerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His differencefrom the rest is that he opined that it was impossible to explain it. All one could do wasdraw poor analogies to it. Its ‘inscrutability’ was intrinsic. That is the implication of ClarkZumbach’s provocative title: The transcendent science (Zumbach, 1984). We need to takeKant’s assertion of ‘inscrutability’ seriously. Kant set a hard and fast boundary markerbetween attainable science and speculative metaphysics. But did he mark the boundaryproperly? Need we halt there? Have we halted there? Kant found this boundary very usefulin pursuing his larger philosophical project. I submit that for biologists it was hardly sopropitious, even if they really tried to work with it (Zammito, 1998). Only by misunder-standing Kant did biology as a special science emerge at the close of the eighteenth cen-tury. Robert Richards put it succinctly: ‘The impact of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft onthe disciplines of biology has, I believe, been radically misunderstood by many contempo-rary historians. : : : Those biologists who found something congenial in Kant’s third Cri-

tique either misunderstood his project (Blumenbach and Goethe) or reconstructed certainideas to have very different consequences from those Kant originally intended (Kielmeyerand Schelling)’ (Richards, 2002, p. 229). And my judgment is that for philosophers of biol-ogy today, especially naturalists, Kant has little to offer. Locke and the other eighteenth-century theorists of organisms well may, but not Kant.

For Locke and a fortiori for Buffon and his followers ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ was a factof the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulationwere hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. There is, to be sure, a blurredboundary between where ‘hypothesis’ ends and where ‘speculation’ begins—and anxietiesabout that boundary were as acute in an eighteenth-century Newtonian context where‘feigning no hypotheses’ was sacrosanct, as in a (post-)positivist context at the close ofthe twentieth century leery of ‘metaphysical costs’. But science—as Buffon alreadyinsisted—is probabilistic, not apodictic (Sloan, 1985, 1995). It is about inference to the bestexplanation, always as contingent as it is fallible, but not for all that either arbitrary orhopeless.

But there is another feature that needs to be stressed, namely the relation of so-called‘special’ sciences to physics. The ‘unity of science’ has now been vigorously challenged as ahistorical and cultural fiction. It is the ‘disunity’ of science we find whenever we take upserious investigation of the practices of science (Galison & Stump, 1996). And that sug-gests that ‘special’ sciences need feel no longer the positivist shudder of submission tohegemonic physical reduction. Naturalism is obliged to find a way to conceptualize a spe-cial science whose terms exceed physical–mechanical reductionism and yet achieve a deter-minacy of empirical ‘lawfulness’ that deserves accreditation (a notion of ‘special science’ inwhich biology might be simply one of a number of cases). I suggest that we take seriouslyenough the type/token distinction to consider a new conceptualization of the organizationof the various sciences. Here I follow some very promising proposals from Tucker (2004,p. 260), who aligns the new evolutionary biology with a larger group of sciences (includinghistory) which take as their object of inquiry tokens, not just types, and therefore findthemselves inevitably caught up in questions of ‘historicism’.

In the epigraph above, McLaughlin makes the claim that sciences ought to define theirown appropriate projects and practices, and that it is the role of philosophy simply to


assess the ‘metaphysical cost’. I think that comes close to the core principle of naturalismin philosophy of science. It bespeaks more authentically than logical positivism ever did—or, I am suggesting, Kant either—the proper relation between philosophy and science inthe modern world. It is not surprising that Kant’s epistemological discretion should appealto philosophers of science today, especially as the conventional wisdoms of positivism per-ish in the deep, dogma by dogma. However, that it should ultimately satisfy current prac-

titioners of biological science is, I suspect, just as problematic now as it proved then.Perhaps the same ‘misunderstanding’ of what Kant restricted to the merely ‘reflective’might profit biology—epistemological skeptics notwithstanding—even today. If biologymust conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant’s regulative/constitutivedistinction is pointless in practice and the (naturalist) philosophy of biology has urgentwork to undertake for which Kant turns out not to be very helpful.

Kant is harbor only for those who seek epistemological shelter from the hard problemsof ‘function talk’. Once we slip Kant’s safe epistemological moorings, we enter into trou-bled waters, but they are our waters: these are the questions of our naturalism. Where the-

ory stands between epistemology and metaphysics is a very difficult post-positivistquestion: both ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ and ‘underdetermination of theory rela-tive to available or possible evidence’ bear directly upon it. Naturalist philosophers of biol-ogy today need not succumb to the scruples (whether ‘absolute’ or ‘transcendental’) thathaunted eighteenth-century philosophers. We are both more scrupulous in having surren-dered foundationalism—even Kant’s—and more emancipated, for our collective enter-prise is from the outset only provisional, but it should provision us as boldly as ourresources permit. I submit a philosopher of science who pronounces from the epistemolog-ical high ground has no place with us in Neurath’s boat on the naturalist sea.

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