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

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