Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology

Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 748–770

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology John Zammito Department of History, MS42, PO Box 1892, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA

Abstract ‘Naturalism’ is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology, and Kant simply cannot be refashioned into a naturalist. Instead, epistemological ‘deflation’ was the decisive feature of Kant’s treatment of the ‘biomedical’ science in his day, so it is not surprising that this might attract some philosophers of science to him today. A certain sense of impasse in the contemporary ‘function talk’ seems to motivate renewed interest in Kant. Kant—drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors—provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that it was impossible to explain it. Its ‘inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity, to have its ‘Newton of the blade of grass’. By contrast, for Locke, and a fortiori for Buffon and his followers, ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. If biology must conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant’s regulative/ constitutive distinction is pointless in practice and the (naturalist) philosophy of biology has urgent work to undertake for which Kant turns out not to be very helpful. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Function; Immanuel Kant; Naturalism; Intrinsic purposiveness; Biology as a ‘special science’; Systematicity

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The self-understanding of an empirical science, biology : : : is for biologists to decide. 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 the philosophical discussion of function, especially in biology, to the question of whether Kant might 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 teleology is of rich relevance to the current debate on biological function. This presentist consideration will lead then to a historicist consideration of what Kant actually argued. My claim is that ‘naturalism’ is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology (Bedau, 1991, 1993, Depew & Weber, 1985), and Kant simply cannot be refashioned into a naturalist (see Zammito, 2003). I will argue, instead, that Kant is most accommodating to present thinkers who wish to set in epistemological suspension the question of the actuality of function in biology (e.g. Lewens, 2004, p. x). Thus, the recourse to Kant is not merely a historical retreat. Indeed, epistemological ‘deflation’ (from ‘constitutive’ to ‘regulative’, that is, from explanatory to heuristic) was the decisive feature of Kant’s treatment of the life sciences of his day. In that light it is not surprising that 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 was hardly central to the philosophical assault on ‘design’ that characterized the epoch of positivism in the philosophy of science—an epoch that, if at all, only recently expired (Zammito, 2004a). In the first part of that positivist era, the nineteenth century, the ambition was 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 effort was to purge philosophy of all ‘metaphysics’ and to refine scientific explanation into one 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 biology (and the social sciences). Because he held mechanistic methodology to be indispensable 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 twentiethcentury incarnation—though, like all venerated ancestors, best left at rest in his urn. One form of post-positivism, naturalism, has gradually captivated philosophers of science—and especially of biology. Of course, naturalism is not just one form: it betokens a congeries 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 continuation (by other means) of the positivist program of unity of science via physical reductionism. The father of ‘naturalized epistemology’, Willard van Orman Quine, cherished just this ambition for naturalism (Quine, 1969). The Churchlands and their train in philosophy of mind and ‘cognitive science’ cherish a similar ambition (see, for example, Churchland, 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 but methodological in order to be taken as authentic scientists. This suggests that the argument for the disunity of science and the discrediting of the positivist myth of physical reductionism 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 hardly make that case here (see Zammito, 2004a). In any event, I propose to assess Kant’s potential assistance in terms of the pervasive commitment to naturalism in contemporary philosophy of biology. 1. Conundrums of ‘function talk’ in biology today A certain sense of impasse in the contemporary discourse seems to be the common motivation behind renewed interest in Kant (Rescher, 1986; Ruse, 2000; Walsh, 1996). Deadened by the ‘dull thud of conflicting intuitions’ (Bigelow & Pargetter, 1998, p. 257), many find 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 forty years’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 63). There is, in the paradoxical formulation of GodfreySmith (1993), a ‘consensus without unity’. This ‘pluralism’ appears to be a truce of exhaustion, not a truth of conviction. But, as Lewens argues, important issues are hardly resolved: ‘how teleological approaches in biology work, what risks they carry, what forms of teleological content can be grounded by biological processes, and why teleological approaches are found only in biological contexts’ (Lewens, 2004, p. 7). He draws the gist of conventional wisdom, that is, that ‘natural selection : : : plays a role analogous to intentional 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 that case. Similarly, McLaughlin notes that ‘a great deal of the interest in functional explanation 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 naturalistic 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’s work of the eighteenth century should be of relevance in coming to terms with them? Obviously, one can only undertake a partial consideration of this vast literature. I wish to tease out indicative, not exhaustive traits. At the most immediate level, the question of the analogy of human artifacts with natural organisms presents itself, with a lineage that goes all the way back to at least Aristotle. The phenomenal encounter with natural organisms elicits the sense of parallel with objects of human design, and what so strongly impinges as a descriptive analogy invites translation into a causal explanation. Yet analogy implies not only similarity but difference. The imputation of design is metaphorical, and metaphor cannot be literal: ‘organisms are not artifacts’ (Lewens, 2004, p. ix). Via disanalogy Aristotle discerned a fundamental, ontological difference between external and internal teleology. Kant, too, recognized both the analogy and the disanalogy, but for him the implication was a retreat from explanatory perplexity to epistemological discretion, as we will discuss below. For more recent commentators, the propensity to find the analogy heuristically compelling and yet unfitting methodologically made an escape into efficient

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cause seem essential: metaphor needed to be flattened out into the literal lines of standard causation. And yet, ‘unreduced teleology : : : surfaces time and again even in the most austerely naturalistic analyses’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 157). The two approaches between which the debate has been ongoing for the last forty years are known as the ‘etiological’ and the ‘causal-role’ conceptions of function. The etiological approach, as its name betokens, looks backward for an account of the origin or cause of the item to which function is ascribed, while the causal-role approach looks forward to the effect the item will have in serving a given systemic capacity. The two views can be traced back 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 to appraise their respective conceptions of function in terms of the general theory of explanation expressed by the D-N model. Hempel denied that function could satisfy the logical requirements for valid explanation, and Nagel rescued its validity by robbing it of its specificity (Nagel, 1977). The core of their endeavor was rendering teleological discourse without remainder into efficient cause explanation. That is, teleology was taken as a fac¸on de parler, a metaphor or analogy, which could and should be cashed out by translation into a suitably logical–scientific explanation in terms of efficient cause: linear succession in time from cause to effect. This was assimilated entirely into the second round of interpretation centered specifically within the philosophy of biology, which entailed ‘reduction of teleological locutions to a naturalistically safe concept that : : : depends only on efficient causation’ (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’ theorists and their ‘modern history’ amenders (Millikan, 1989; Neander, 1991; Godfrey-Smith, 1994)—were inspired by the prospect that natural selection could provide the decisive efficient-causal force to ‘naturalize’ teleology. Function could be translated as the causal result 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 contribution of earlier tokens of the same type to the reproductive success of the organism. Because earlier tokens of the type establish its causal efficacy, the presence of the latest token is the outcome of an efficient causal sequence, escaping the ‘backward causality’ that made teleology 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 order discerned in organic processes. The etiological view has seemed to loosen its grip in the last few years. Both Lewens and Quarfood indicate that revisionists have been gaining ground in casting suspicion on the model. What seems to have come most under suspicion is the adaptationist interpretation of natural selection, especially its optimization model, and this primarily because of scruples about historical reconstruction. The start of the unraveling appears to have come with the intervention of Gould and Lewontin (1979) against the ‘Panglossian paradigm’. It carried forward to a general recognition that it is very difficult on the basis of present ‘adaptiveness’ to infer both the environmental pressures and the adaptational sequences out of which present organisms arose. As Lewens puts it, ‘development plays as much of a role in the explanation of adaptation as selection’ (Lewens, 2004, p. 16). If one cannot establish the developmental constraints in the structure of the organism, one can never establish what selection pressures had to work with. As Lewens puts it, there is a ‘question of

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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 they did not vary across an entire population, and traits could become adaptive or cease to be adaptive as environments changed (Gould & Vrba, 1982). Indeed, it was clear that organisms 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 nature of the adaptive problems solved’ (ibid., p. 50; Griffiths, 1996). Thus, ‘our hypotheses about [an item’s] design history will often be underdetermined by those data’, so that ‘it is clearly a mistake to assume that we can always make a reliable inference to the best explanation when we attempt to infer past selection from the observations of organismic form alone’ (Lewens, 2004, pp. 51–52). ‘There may be many combinations of phenotype sets, heritability assumptions, fitness measures and state equations compatible with the claim that a phenotype is the fittest of available variants’ (ibid., p. 57). That is, ‘not one but several 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 will be more to say in my conclusion. At the same time the consideration began to arise—fueled by a far wider dispute between developmental and evolutionary biologists—that the origin-orientation of the selectionists could not adequately account for the ongoing (physiological) self-regulation of systems in individual organisms (Griffiths and Gray, 1994). That is, evolution and physiology 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 notion that the whole can be temporally prior to the parts and thus have a causal impact on them brings up the problem of holistic causality’ (McLaughlin, 2001, pp. 24–25). And ‘juggling types and tokens won’t solve this problem’, because we are caught up with the specific token (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 feedback mechanism that applies even to the first generation of a new trait or organism : : : It may 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 survival and/or propagation of that system’ (ibid., p. 69). ‘The basic assertion is that whatever has an ergon can be the subject of benefit. Anything that supports the characteristic activity of an entity is good for that entity as an entity of that kind’ (ibid., p. 199). But it is not clear how to make a compelling account of this. What seems required is ‘a kind of historically stretched quasiholistic causal relation : : : within one generation : : : [A] token of a type of trait can be viewed as contributing to its own re-production as the same token : : : At each particular moment, the whole is determined by the properties of its parts : : : [W]e consider the system to be the same : : : over time even if it consists of different parts at different times, 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 efficient 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 to provide for its own welfare’ (ibid., p. 76). That entails commitment to a complex-systems model of teleology (Christensen, 1996; Schlosser, 1998).

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Thus, immanent normativity—what a system (and hence its functions) should or can be supposed to be—is essential to the conceptualization (Bedau, 1992; Schurz, 2001; Wachbroit, 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 restricted to living organisms or might well need extension downward into physico-chemical processes of emergence, on the one hand, and upward into social systems, on the other. That the actual order that self-regulation entails seems to require a notion of immanent normativity seems starkly disconcerting for the positivist tradition of natural-scientific explanation, which enshrined the ‘fact-value dichotomy’ as dogma (Putnam, 2002). It is awkward even for some versions of naturalism, which aim precisely to reduce the seemingly evaluative–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: : : talking about 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 question of naturalizing such notions is central to the current conundrums. All this brings back with a vengeance the original tension between artifacts and organisms, between external and intrinsic purposiveness, extending the question decisively to the actual nature of human—not simply organismic—spontaneity and systematicity. ‘For naturalism’, McLaughlin puts it precisely, ‘the explanatory relation between natural and artifactual functions must be one of the generation of the latter from the former not of mutual subsumption under a generic term’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 15). That is, naturalism is an ontological historicism, that is, its project is to ‘reconstruct the generation of artifactual functions from natural ones’ (ibid.). Humans are organisms first, and designers only derivatively. Design is ontologically parasitical upon a designer: there can be no relative purposiveness without an intrinsic purpose to be served. The analogy of design presumes the transparency—both epistemological and ontological—of human agency. Aristotelian internal teleology intrudes as an ontological matter. Lewens lays out the argument. ‘It is the internal constitution of biological items, not the fact that selection acts only 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 some specific process, which only organisms undergo, that bestows normative, purposive states on them’ (ibid., p. 120). I take this to mean there are non-organismic systems that qualify as well. ‘The basic point to be made is that only certain kinds of systems (systems whose exact characterization I leave to others) are able to evolve by natural selection to yield complex adaptations’, Lewens writes (ibid., p. 125). Yet just this unwillingness to go further betokens his ultimately ‘deflationary’ project, aimed to expose the epistemological aporias of function talk: ‘The problem in making a decisive choice between the theories is that there is really no single ‘killer intuition’ that will tell us which of the accounts is right’ (ibid., p. 108). Lewens contents himself with demonstrating how ‘a number of crucial disanalogies between selection and intention : : : can lead us to : : : underestimate the functional 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 notes that 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 most tempting 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

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to ‘seeking facts about the internal organization or development of organisms’, to physiology 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 not sure whether ‘goal-directedness’ can be ‘justified as anything more than anthropomorphic projection’ (ibid., p. 19). He doubts whether the goal can be specified in a manner that allows falsification, or even ‘goal-failure’. Thus Lewens turns to Kant, who recognizes with him all the appeals of both the artifact and the agent models, but recognizes their weaknesses as well, and insists that teleology can only be heuristic. Yet finding the inadequacies of the artifact model for organisms is not enough, as Lewens himself recognizes: the actuality of systems with intrinsic purposiveness has to be conceptualized. This internal purposiveness, as Peter McLaughlin put it, ‘is where the analogy between artifacts and organism breaks down’ (McLaughlin, 2001, p. 145). The artifact model and the analogy of design simply stop short of the mark. McLaughlin goes on, decisively: ‘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 existence of entities that can stop a functional regress’ (ibid., p. 211). That is, ‘the real problem has always been holism’ (ibid., p. 27). To deal with this ontological challenge, McLaughlin insists we need to reconsider a deep ambiguity in the reception of teleology from the Aristotelian tradition, the blur of final cause with formal cause. While teleology and function have always, especially on the basis of the artifact model or analogy to design, seemed a matter of final cause, McLaughlin argues this is in fact inaccurate: ‘most genuinely functional explanations involve not so much an illicit appeal to final causes as an implicit appeal to holistic causality’ (ibid., p. 9). What, then, are the issues current ‘function talk’ would carry back to a consideration of Kant? First, the question of the phenomenal encounter with organisms: how are they recognized, and as what? Second, the question of the analogy of artifact and organism: how satisfactory is this analogy for biology? Third, the question of the exhaustiveness of efficient 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 it adequately? Fifth, how can normativity be understood within a (naturalist) scientific research 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 have always 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 substantive consideration, and that the seemingly discrete considerations of aesthetics and biology were in fact part of a still larger construction entailing the problem of a unified ‘order of nature’ as empirical law, on the one hand, and the problem of human moral teleology, on the other, made the third Critique only more of a morass for critics. Nonetheless, Kant’s overarching concern was not merely ‘architectonic’. Reconciliation of the first and second Critiques—of theoretical with practical reason—entailed the ‘critical’ reconciliation of human obligation, and its implicated freedom, with the lawfulness of phenomenal nature, the unity of its ‘order’, as the locus in which man was to act out this obligation. Everything in the third

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Critique was a means to that end (Genova, 1975; Zammito, 1992). Paul Guyer is surely correct to maintain that ‘the basic reason for discussing organisms at all was precisely that these are 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 difficulties in 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 to the further thought that purposiveness entails immateriality, thus that organisms and ultimately all of nature must have an immaterial ground’ (ibid., p. 280). That is, Kant’s treatment of biology was always subsidiary to larger systematic concerns of the ‘critical philosophy’ as a whole. That was a sword with two edges, however. It was meant to enable the coherence of his system, but it could also turn out to pose it grave problems. I have suggested that biology created acute difficulties for the unity of science in a coherent ‘order of nature’ along the lines Kant preferred (Zammito, 2003). He had two recourses: 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 he set in his philosophy of (biological) science. Second, as Guyer suggested, he could propose the possibility of ‘thinking’—though, of course, not knowing—a ‘supersensible ground’ that might rescue the coherence of that order (at a metaphysical cost, even as ‘thought’, beyond the philosophical bankroll of any current naturalist). We have good historical reason to believe that Kant made a decided shift over time from participation in actual theorizing in life science (to be sure, from his armchair) to a much more skeptical critique of its method. Phillip Sloan characterizes Kant’s trajectory as a shift from the new ‘history of nature’ [Naturgeschichte] associated with Buffon and Bonnet back to a transcendental– philosophical version of ‘description of nature’ [Naturbeschreibung] (Sloan, 2006, this issue; Lagier, 2004 and Adickes, 1924). The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of life science to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic 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 Quarfood sets the discussion of Kant in the proper frame by asserting: ‘The distinctive feature of Kant’s view is : : : an epistemic presupposition constitutive for the study of life, rather than a definite ontological commitment’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 145). Joan Steigerwald agrees Kant was concerned with the conditions of the possibility of our cognition of organisms, not with their fundamental nature. She stresses that Kant claimed we could only grasp organisms through analogy with our own purposive activity, that is, he maintained only the analogy 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 conceived intrinsic purposiveness—the capacity to self-organize and to maintain organization as naturally occurring processes in organic bodies. Kant opened his ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ with a consideration of ‘the structure of birds regarding how their bones are hollow, how their wings are positioned to produce motion and their tails to permit steering : : :’ (Kant, 1987, p. 236 [5:360]).2 The

1 2

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

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features he highlighted are anatomical–physiological, befitting ‘adaptiveness’ or causalrole thinking today. The question he immediately raised is how nature could have brought these 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 purpose, in order to organize our reception of this phenomenon. But we do this ‘only : : : so as to bring nature under principles of observation and investigation by analogy : : : without presuming to explain it : : :’ (ibid.). To take teleology as explanatory would ‘introduce a new causality into natural science, even though in fact we only borrow this causality from ourselves : : :’ (ibid., p. 237 [5:361]). This would be a quite ‘special kind of causality, or at least a quite distinct lawfulness [Gesetzma¨ßigkeit] of nature’ and ‘even experience cannot prove 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 Gesetzma¨ßigkeit and Wirklichkeit meant for Kant, here. Should Gesetzma¨ßigkeit be translated as lawfulness or lawlikeness? Are these different for Kant, as similar compounds with Zweck have suggested to interpreters, that is, can there be lawlikeness in the absence of law? (See Ginsborg, 1997; Rang, 1998; Fricke, 1990; Warnke, 1992). And Wirklichkeit: what is Kant after in questioning whether we can ‘prove’ such an ‘actuality’? The notion of ‘proving [beweisen]’ from experience is a very touchy question in transcendental philosophy, but is Kant going even further, suggesting that we can never really be sure that we have experienced a ‘natural purpose’, that is, that it is ‘actual’? Kant triggers a minefield of problems from the very moment of phenomenal encounter with organisms. As Marcel Quarfood explains, ‘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 explanations in terms of causal laws appropriate for ordinary physical objects’ and thus ‘there is no explanation (or ‘‘law’’) for how matter comes together in the ways characteristic for organisms’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 146). Kant characterizes what presents itself as an organism ‘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 [begreifen] it’ (ibid., [5:371]). That is, we cannot bring it under concepts of the understanding. The distinction between erkla¨rbar and erkennbar is of crucial significance for the loosening of the theoretical structure of Kant’s philosophy by virtue of the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’. That one can ‘recognize’ what one cannot ‘explain’ puts an enormous strain on the coherence of ‘experience’ in Kant’s system. That teleology can be an explanation of phenomenal elements of nature is equally straining. ‘Teleology in its identificatory role singles out the biological object as a functional unit, an organism : : : The quasi-explanatory use of teleology serves to provide a ‘‘law’’, or at least some order, unifying the vast number of causal chains that interact in the organism in ways otherwise wholly contingent’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 157). Technically, Kant must deny that teleology can explain anything in phenomenal nature (compare Simon, 1976; Flasch, 1997; Fricke, 1990; Ginsborg, 1987). That is what it means to privilege the mechanistic maxim. What teleology is alone permitted to do is offer an analogy with heuristic utility. It is even less than an empirical conjecture. Many historians and philosophers of biology credit Kant with an elucidation of ‘organized being’ [organisiertes Wesen] that was enabling for the crystallization of biology as a special science (Lieber, 1950; Baumanns, 1965; Lo¨w, 1980; Huneman, 2002; Lorenz, 1975;

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Reill, 2004). But Peter McLaughlin has given a very useful account of the development of eighteenth-century thought about organism which would give credit for the decisive insight rather to John Locke (McLaughlin, 2001, pp. 173–178). As McLaughlin construes Locke, he attempted to determine the difference between the identity over time of an aggregate or ‘‘mass’’ and that of an organism. The identity of a material substance or a physical body consists in the identity of its parts and thus ultimately in the identity of its component atoms: : : The identity of an organism, on the other hand, consists not in substantial identity but rather in vital (modal) identity, in the identity of the process of 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 particles : : : 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, the replacement of one carbon atom by another—at the particle level—affects nothing regarding the identity of the part or the organism.) This was the decisive eighteenth-century retrieval and reformulation of Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, of intrinsic purposiveness. Buffon took it up into eighteenth-century empirical life science, especially in terms of his notion of the moule inte´rieure (Sloan, 1979). Kant inherited it from the ensuing discussions among life scientists of the day. In the third Critique, Kant, on the example of a tree, highlighted three such features that 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 cause and 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 tokens in asserting the reciprocity of cause and effect. For our part, what is important is that in propagation 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 assimilates is first processed by it until the matter has the quality peculiar to the species, a quality that the natural mechanism outside the plant cannot supply’ (ibid.). That is, the tree transforms inorganic materials into organic forms (something he believed inorganic matter could 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 nature outside it we have to consider it to be only an educt’ (ibid.). An ‘educt’ merely redeploys what is already given. By contrast, a ‘product’ makes something new. In terms of Locke’s distinction, all organic parts are compounded of particles that are drawn from the general physical–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 of the organism. When the tree assimilates inorganic into organic matter: it transforms it into a part of itself, and hence the tree becomes a product, not merely an educt. Kant recognized that metabolism is a matter of systemic (re)integration. He distinguished emphatically between growth by internal integration and mere aggregation. Mechanism can get no 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-

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tionem), but not by external additions (per appositionem)’ (Kant, 1923, p. 653 [3:539]). For this reason, Kant rejected the notion that crystal growth was proto-organic; it was in his view strictly mechanical. The contrast of educt and product is crucial, as Kant elaborated later in the third Critique and as I have explored in my discussion of his view of epigenesis, which turns on this distinction (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 have a separating and forming ability [Scheidungs- und Bildungsvermo¨gens] of very great originality; all our art finds itself infinitely outdistanced : : :’ (Kant, 1987, p. 250 [5:371]). This emphasis on the creative spontaneity of nature as incomparably superior to human artifice is repeated in a decisive passage later in the third Critique, which substantially disqualifies the ‘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 the tree was the power of regeneration, that is, healing and even organ restoration—a matter of the most exciting experimental discoveries of mid-eighteenth-century empirical life science: the experiments of Trembley, Bonnet, and ultimately Blumenbach (Vartanian, 1950; Roger, 1963 and Roe, 1981). What the regenerative powers of the polyp confirmed were the arguments that Caspar Friedrich Wolff had advanced based on his embryological observations, namely that organic forms had the power of developmental self-organization, a capacity for internal regulation and modulation which involved a continuous and mutually responsive relation between parts and whole for the sustenance of the organism. 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 highlights in organic systems is persistence and plasticity in securing system-maintenance. As Steigerwald construes Kant, he highlights their ‘flexibility in the realization of [their] forms and functions’, the ‘degree of freedom or at least spontaneity’ in their operations, which nevertheless demonstrate regularities in formation, structure and functioning (Steigerwald, 2006, this issue). These ‘marvelous properties of organized creatures’ are part of the empirical–experiential data available to human investigators trying to comprehend the ‘order of nature’. That is, Kant appears to consider their phenomenal description unproblematic. But how these ‘marvelous properties’ can be explained—and how they can be integrated into a system of 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 rationality. Yet that is what is required to conceive a natural purpose. Steigerwald writes: ‘In order for us to judge a body as a natural purpose, not only is it necessary that we conceive the possibility of the parts as dependent for their existence and their form on their relation to the whole, but also that all the parts through their own causality reciprocally produce one another as regards their form and combination and in this way produce a whole’ (Steigerwald, 2006, this issue). To be sure, Kant articulated this point, but he did so in order to set it 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 this nexus effectivus? If we wish to understand what Kant could possibly have meant in claiming that we can at one and the same time experience organisms and yet not be able to explain

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them within the order of natural law, we must drive a wedge between experience and explanation, 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 general to 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 drawn to think that Kant drastically compromised the force of his ‘Second analogy’ account of causality (as determinant or constitutive) by his representation of mechanical causality in the third Critique as merely ‘reflective’ or regulative. We were misguided to think that Kant always 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 to a new realization that mechanical causality as practiced by natural science introduced a supplementary restriction whereby the causal relation between parts and wholes could only work aggregatively from parts to whole, and not mutually, or inversely (McLaughin, 1990). Quarfood summarizes McLaughlin’s claim elegantly: ‘whereas constitutive causality involves a determination of time-order, the maxim of mechanism is a further, regulative assumption about the relation of part to whole, according to which a whole is always causally 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 specific account (the part–whole argument). Hannah Ginsborg has argued that this is insufficient to distinguish organisms from machines, or crystals from organisms. She resorts to notions of normativity to complicate the causal theory (Ginsborg, 2001, 2004). But even Ginsborg, and with her others like Quarfood (2004), Steigerwald (this volume), and Breitenbach (this volume), 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 was possible to ‘experience’ this bizarre phenomenon of something as ‘cause and effect of itself’—though only by immediately translating it into an analogy that was prima facie inadequate. But scientific ‘explanation’ could not accommodate it, insofar as it restricted itself to the mechanistic maxim. Now, clearly Kant committed himself without reservation to the appropriateness of following this maxim of mechanical explanation. He only introduced the epistemological proviso that, as finite—indeed, ‘discursive’—intelligences, we might never be able to bring it to closure. The unity of science as an order of nature in its empirical laws constituted a regulative ideal we needed to believe in to pursue science, but all the same it might never be fulfilled. 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 the basis of organisms, Kant felt so confident that he claimed (what Quine was forced to repudiate) that it was already inescapable that the project must fail. Quarfood formulates the paradox (or could it be a contradiction?): ‘how Kant can claim both that organisms are mechanically unexplainable and that it nonetheless is possible that they are mechanically produced’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 196). If there is an ‘antinomy of judgment’ it is about this mechanist perplexity far more than about teleology per se (McLaughlin, 1990; Allison, 1991; Philonenko, 1977; Zanetti, 1993). Can there be an acceptable ‘order of nature’ if we have to exclude something as pervasively present as life forms? What does this ‘experience’ incapable of ‘explanation’—or only of a knowingly fallacious explanation (‘analogy of design’)—actually refer to? What is it about? Is the organism

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a fact or a confusion of experience? The very discernment of an order, of holism, seems to demand 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 something both as a purpose and as natural’ (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 236). The ‘appeal to analogy does not overcome the difficulty’, she continues (ibid., p. 238). Kant himself admitted it: ‘Strictly speaking, : : : the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us’, that is, ‘intrinsic natural perfection, as possessed by those things that are possible only as natural purposes and that are hence called organized beings, is not conceivable or explicable on any analogy to any known physical ability, that is, ability of nature, not even—since we belong to nature in the broadest sense—on a precisely fitting analogy to human art’ (Kant, 1987, p. 254 [5:375]). ‘Perfection’ as a conceptualization of ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ opens up the dimension of normativity that has become so urgent in contemporary controversy. Ginsborg highlights Kant’s language in §68 of the third Critique: natural purposes are ‘singly and alone explicable according to natural laws which we can think to ourselves only under the idea of purpose as a principle, and indeed merely in this way are they so much as internally cognizable as regards their inner form’ (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 233; Kant, 1910–, Vol. 5, p. 383). Kant argues in 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 concerns are (1) what it means within the critical philosophy to conceive of ‘natural laws’ in this fashion; (2) what it means that something be ‘internally cognizable’ as regards ‘inner form.’ What does this double inwardness betoken? ‘Perfection’ in its eighteenth-century German scholastic–philosophical (and thus, Kant’s) sense holds the clue. Ginsborg redeems the idea of natural purpose by insisting that ‘to regard something as a purpose is to regard it as subject to normative rules or standards’. She characterizes this kind of ‘lawfulness’ (or ‘lawlikeness’) in natural purpose as ‘normative law’, as distinguished from the necessity either of constitutive cognitive principles or of moral obligation (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 232). Kant himself 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 appears to signify that purpose cannot be restricted simply to the concept as cause of the existence of some object, as Kant formulated it in §10 of the third Critique, but that it characterizes something intrinsic to the object itself. The force of Ginsborg’s argument suggests we must take the normativity to be immanent in the object, a product of nature, not simply a rule of design [Bauplan] ‘analogically’ referred to a nonexistent ‘designer’, as in Kant’s metaphor of a Technik der Natur. Like contemporary systems theory or theory of self-organization, Ginsborg seems to ascribe normativity to the actual and the empirical order, notwithstanding Kant’s notorious insistence that this can only be ‘as if’. Why is this normative–systemic immanence so intractably unknowable for Kant, and why does he believe that analogy to design is our only—albeit inadequate—alternative? (see Roque´, 1985; Gfeller, 1998; Krohn & Ku¨ppers, 1992). To what is the analogy really being 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 pointedly, 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 further understand such a possibility’ Kant wrote in his Opus postumum (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 21, p. 213). How did Kant understand it?

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Kant developed an elaborate concept of systemic integration, for which organism was but one instance (Zammito, 1992; Guyer, 1990, 2000, 2001, 2003). His primary instance was reason itself. But this allowed Kant to draw a fundamental analogy between organism and reason as systems (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 3, p. 538–539). Quarfood recognizes the importance to Kant of the ‘biological analogy : : : between the systematicity of reason and the functional integration of the parts in an organism’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 79). Kant’s essential transcendental claim is that reason’s principles are a priori, that they cannot be derived empirically. This was the thrust of his famous analogy between pure reason and epigenesis at 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 philosophy and biological epigenesis is [strictly] an analogy’, that it would be wrongheaded to think that one could make any determinate inference from biological science to transcendental philosophy, 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 least some common concept under which two quite different matters can be subsumed, some correspondence at least in terms of a relation. But are reason and organisms simply species of 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 called man? 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 (epistemic) power [Vermo¨gen or Kraft]? What makes it ‘real’? Has Quarfood achieved any ‘metaphysical cost’ saving (or Kant before him) in conceiving it as an ‘acquisitio originaria’? (Quarfood, 2004, pp. 77–117). What, and more pertinently, how is that? Here, Kant’s analogy of organism and reason requires further inquiry. Guyer writes: ‘it is only our awareness of the freedom of our own purposiveness that leads us to conceive of the purposiveness of organisms as necessitating a fundamental split between the teleological and mechanical views of nature’ (Guyer, 2001, p. 264). And he then asks the very pertinent question: ‘Is it just an empirical fact, a matter of empirical psychology rather than transcendental 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 in Kant’s writings (Yovel, 1989; Gilead, 1985; Do¨rflinger, 2000). Kleingeld (1998) has offered a very careful consideration of Kant’s strange usage of ‘needs’ or ‘interests’ of reason and further talk of the ‘right’ of such impulses. What is to be made of that? Kleingeld identifies three possible senses. First, might it be an anthropological recasting of Kant’s transcendentalism—that is, is reason merely human? Second, could all this be simply a matter of ‘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 resurfacing of metaphysical elements in Kant’s transcendentalism? Is Kant’s ‘supersensible ground’ here demonstrating ‘agential’ properties, though not necessarily human ones (in Hegelian terms, must we render ‘reason’ as Geist)? Kleingeld holds that none of these options 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 argues that he is clear that such subjective impositions are permissible only when there are no objective determinations governing a matter. Thus, they arise primarily with reference to the ‘supersensible’, and take on a practical-rational register: ‘orientation in thinking’ for

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the sake of practical obligations (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 8, pp. 131–148). Further, Kleingeld argues 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 reason cannot 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 cannot 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 ‘natural purposes’ as with reference to many other concepts; the question is whether his own system allowed that. I suggest there is a passage in the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ that brings all this to a decisive head: ‘In considering nature and the ability it displays in organized products, we say far too little if we call this an analogue of art, for in that case we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature. : : : We might be closer 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 organism is already about, so what analogy could there be? Kant continues: ‘But in that case we must either endow matter, as mere matter, with a [kind of] property (hylozoism) that conflicts 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. What is the proper scope of Leben and what is its philosophical meaning (that is, what is the extension and what is the intension of the idea)? Kant is adamant that brute matter cannot possess this character. The essence of matter is inertia: all change in motion must have an external cause. To ascribe to brute matter the ‘inner’ capacity to inaugurate motion would be ‘the death of natural philosophy’ (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 4, p. 544). Hylozoism was anathema to Kant. But what alternative did the ‘analogy of life’ offer him for explaining organism? For Kant, brute matter was soulless and dead; man was a living organism. What about the intermediate orders: what of animals, what of plants? The point is, if the concept of 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 or force (Steigerwald, 2006, this issue). In his metaphysics lectures, Kant was more explicit than he permitted himself to be in the third Critique: ‘all matter that is animate has an inner principle which is separated from the object of outer sense, and is an object of inner sense : : : Thus, all matter which lives is alive not as matter but rather has a principle of life and 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 ‘Paralogisms’ of the first Critique banned the notion of an immortal soul, but not that of an embodied one. If the human organism was endowed with life, this was because its matter was as ‘ensouled’ as its soul was ‘embodied’. What Aristotle identified with ‘soul’, Kant had 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 a substitute for the traditional concept of the soul. He welcomed this term-shift, for he held that while we can recognize an effect, we should be wary of hypostatizing a substance as its ground (Kant, 1910–, Vol. 8, p. 413). Ingensiep suggests that we array Kant’s many sayings about life in terms of the Aristotelian scale of being, from brute matter through plants and animals to man and to the world as a whole. Of the many statements Kant made about life, a good starting point is from his Critique of practical reason: ‘Life is the power of a being to act in accordance

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with the laws of the faculty of desire’ (Kant, 1956, p. 9 n. [5:9 n.]). The faculty of desire, in turn, is the power ‘to be through its representations the cause of the actuality of these representations’ (ibid.). No one can miss the parallel between this definition of the faculty of desire and Kant’s definition, in the third Critique, of the key term purpose. Thus the question of the actuality (or actualization) of the object through a purpose or the faculty of desire 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 [Willku¨r]’ (ibid, Vol. 2, p. 327). In his Reflections Kant observed: ‘life is nothing but faculty of desire in its minimal exertion [in der geringsten Ausu¨bung]’ (ibid. Vol. 15, p. 465). In his Opus postumum, Kant wrote: ‘life in the strictest meaning of the term is the capacity of sponaneity 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 of desire—action in accordance with representations—to animals, though it is desire entirely driven by pleasure/pain, and not by rational choice. Even were we to grant that, what of plants? As Ingensiep stresses, Kant never ascribed psychological desire, even analogically, to plants. Thus, plants epitomize Kant’s conceptual discrimination of life from organism. As we have seen, he illustrated the features of organism precisely by a plant—a tree. Consequently, Kant’s notion of organism is broader than that of life, and the failure of these two terms to have the same extension expresses the insufficiency Kant acknowledged in his ‘analogy of life’ for natural purpose. How do we construe the residual disanalogy for biology? Blumenbach’s notion of Bildungstrieb won Kant’s endorsement for all organic forms. Animals were clearly identified with Trieb, but even plants have a Bildungstrieb, not just 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 in Kant’s notion of organism denotes the element unaccounted for even by Kant’s analogy of life. But what was a Trieb for Kant, and how did he distinguish it from a Kraft? How could an ‘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 (Bildungskra¨fte) it set in motion. 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 Newtonian mysteriousness of gravity. With Robert Butts, I believe it is necessary to hearken to the anomalies that pile up in Kant’s philosophy, and especially his philosophy of science, all of which revolve, as Butts notes, around ‘design’ (Butts, 1990, p. 3). Kant suggested that we could find our way through the difficulties by relying on our awareness of our own agential performance. But there are grave questions about whether Kant could warrant this transparency of human agency (theoretical or practical) on his own terms (ibid., p. 15 n. 4). In naturalist terms, to claim we can grasp organism by analogy to our agency is to put the cart before the 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 without 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 discriminate a conceptual difference between ‘‘organism’’ and ‘‘life’’ leads ultimately back to the

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roots of entelechy in Aristotelian substance theory’ (Ingensiep, 2004, p. 136). Can McLaughlin’s discrimination of formal from final cause, and with it the recourse to Aristotle, provide assistance especially given that the question of the actuality of intrinsic purposes 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 advance over Aristotle or Locke? To discriminate between ‘form’ and ‘existence’ in Steigerwald’s terms, would it not be more fruitful to resort to the Aristotelian distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ cause, or to Locke’s distinction between ‘parts’ and ‘particles’? The form of the part is a property of a higher level than the material existence of particles that transiently compose it. The persistence in identity that life science should meaningful explicate has to do with parts and organisms, not atoms or elements. Thus one could distinguish between an organelle and an element, and the questions of identity (and causality) would be quite different. While this still leaves us with ‘circular’ or ‘holistic’ causality, 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 (Fo¨rster, 1987) that became Kant’s preoccupation for the bulk of the period after the publication of his first Critique and the warrant for all subsequent German Idealism? What of the Opus postumum, especially according to the aggressive line of interpretation advanced by Tuschling (1991) and Edwards (2000)? What of biological practice in Blumenbach’s ‘Go¨ttingen school’ and elsewhere in turn-of-the-century German comparative morphology, culminating in von Baer and Cuvier? (Richards, 2002; Reill, 2004) And, finally, of course, what of Naturphilosophie, that beˆte noire of positivism? (Cunningham & Jardine, 1990; Gloy, 1994; Gloy & Burger, 1993; Beiser, 2002 and Steigerwald, 2003) Is it plausible, as some Kantians desire, to privilege the coherence of a particular reading of the first Critique with a particular reading of the third if it puts all these other questions beyond the pale? It is all well and good to recognize that Kant is talking about the judgments biologists make, not the content of their judgments (Ginsborg, 2001, p. 235). But biologists cannot be indifferent to the content of their judgments. Quarfood recognizes this clearly. In his dissertation he insists upon a ‘distinction : : : between the point of view of the biologist and the meta level perspective of philosophy’ (Quarfood, 2004, p. 119). What is striking is not only that he believes that ‘if a teleological point of view is a condition for biology, teleology should rather be seen as a constitutive principle for this science’ (which makes Quarfood a good naturalist), but he thinks Kant held this view! (ibid.) Quarfood asserts that on his reading of Kant, ‘teleology, though regulative, can be said to be constitutive for biology, as a condition for the possibility of biological objects (organisms)’ (ibid., p. 153). He elaborates: ‘Aristotelian functions : : : are to be seen as valid at the object level of biological investigation. The denial of their objectivity only takes place at a further meta level reflection. For the biologist, organisms exhibit functions as a matter of course’ (ibid., p. 152). I can find no passage in Kant that warrants ascribing to him this concession to biological practitioners. 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-

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ogists misunderstood his admonitions in a way that enabled them to get on with their work. Kant—drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors—provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that it was impossible to explain it. All one could do was draw poor analogies to it. Its ‘inscrutability’ was intrinsic. That is the implication of Clark Zumbach’s provocative title: The transcendent science (Zumbach, 1984). We need to take Kant’s assertion of ‘inscrutability’ seriously. Kant set a hard and fast boundary marker between attainable science and speculative metaphysics. But did he mark the boundary properly? Need we halt there? Have we halted there? Kant found this boundary very useful in pursuing his larger philosophical project. I submit that for biologists it was hardly so propitious, even if they really tried to work with it (Zammito, 1998). Only by misunderstanding Kant did biology as a special science emerge at the close of the eighteenth century. Robert Richards put it succinctly: ‘The impact of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft on the disciplines of biology has, I believe, been radically misunderstood by many contemporary historians. : : : Those biologists who found something congenial in Kant’s third Critique either misunderstood his project (Blumenbach and Goethe) or reconstructed certain ideas to have very different consequences from those Kant originally intended (Kielmeyer and Schelling)’ (Richards, 2002, p. 229). And my judgment is that for philosophers of biology today, especially naturalists, Kant has little to offer. Locke and the other eighteenthcentury theorists of organisms well may, but not Kant. For Locke and a fortiori for Buffon and his followers ‘intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. There is, to be sure, a blurred boundary between where ‘hypothesis’ ends and where ‘speculation’ begins—and anxieties about 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 of the twentieth century leery of ‘metaphysical costs’. But science—as Buffon already insisted—is probabilistic, not apodictic (Sloan, 1985, 1995). It is about inference to the best explanation, always as contingent as it is fallible, but not for all that either arbitrary or hopeless. 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 a historical and cultural fiction. It is the ‘disunity’ of science we find whenever we take up serious investigation of the practices of science (Galison & Stump, 1996). And that suggests that ‘special’ sciences need feel no longer the positivist shudder of submission to hegemonic physical reduction. Naturalism is obliged to find a way to conceptualize a special science whose terms exceed physical–mechanical reductionism and yet achieve a determinacy of empirical ‘lawfulness’ that deserves accreditation (a notion of ‘special science’ in which biology might be simply one of a number of cases). I suggest that we take seriously enough the type/token distinction to consider a new conceptualization of the organization of 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 (including history) which take as their object of inquiry tokens, not just types, and therefore find themselves inevitably caught up in questions of ‘historicism’. In the epigraph above, McLaughlin makes the claim that sciences ought to define their own appropriate projects and practices, and that it is the role of philosophy simply to

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assess the ‘metaphysical cost’. I think that comes close to the core principle of naturalism in 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 in the modern world. It is not surprising that Kant’s epistemological discretion should appeal to philosophers of science today, especially as the conventional wisdoms of positivism perish in the deep, dogma by dogma. However, that it should ultimately satisfy current practitioners 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 biology must conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction is pointless in practice and the (naturalist) philosophy of biology has urgent work 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 problems of ‘function talk’. Once we slip Kant’s safe epistemological moorings, we enter into troubled waters, but they are our waters: these are the questions of our naturalism. Where theory stands between epistemology and metaphysics is a very difficult post-positivist question: both ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ and ‘underdetermination of theory relative to available or possible evidence’ bear directly upon it. Naturalist philosophers of biology today need not succumb to the scruples (whether ‘absolute’ or ‘transcendental’) that haunted eighteenth-century philosophers. We are both more scrupulous in having surrendered foundationalism—even Kant’s—and more emancipated, for our collective enterprise is from the outset only provisional, but it should provision us as boldly as our resources permit. I submit a philosopher of science who pronounces from the epistemological high ground has no place with us in Neurath’s boat on the naturalist sea. References Adickes, E. (1924). Kant als Naturforscher. Berlin: de Gruyter. Allen, C., Bekoff, M., & Lauder, G. (Eds.). (1998). Nature’s purposes: Analyses of function and design in biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Allison, H. (1991). Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgment. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 30 (Suppl.), 25–42. Allison, H. (2000). Is the Critique of judgment ‘post-critical’? In S. Sedgwick (Ed.), The reception of Kant’s critical philosophy (pp. 78–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumanns, P. (1965). Das Problem der organischen Zweckma¨ßigkeit. Bonn: Bouvier. Bedau, M. (1991). Can biological teleology be naturalized? Journal of Philosophy, 88, 647–655. Bedau, M. (1992). Goal-directed systems and the good. The Monist, 75, 34–51. Bedau, M. (1993). Naturalism and teleology. In S. Wagner, & R. Warner (Eds.), Naturalism: A critical appraisal (pp. 23–51). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Beiser, F. (2002). German idealism: The struggle against subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Bigelow, J., & Pargetter, R. (1998). Functions. In C. Allen, M. Bekoff, & G. Lauder (Eds.), Nature’s purposes: Analyses of function and design in biology (pp. 241–260). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buller, D. J. (Ed.). (1999). Function, selection and design. Albany: SUNY Press. Butts, R. (1990). Teleology and scientific method in Kant’s Critique of judgment. Nous, 24, 1–16. Christensen, W. (1996). A complex systems theory of teleology. Biology and Philosophy, 11, 301–320. Churchland, P. (1995). The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: A philosophical journey into the brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cummins, R. (1975). Functional analysis. Journal of Philosophy, 72, 741–764. Cunningham, A., & Jardine, N. (Eds.). (1990). Romanticism and the sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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