KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Part and Whole 103
Some or all parts of an organized system can themselves be
mere aggregates. Some or all parts of an aggregate can themselves
be organized systems. Leibniz's most common example of an organized
system is a watch or an automaton; and of an aggregate it is a
basket of fish or a pond full of fish. However, if the parts of an organized
system are organized and their parts in turn are also organized,
then the system is an organism. 58
So each organic body belonging to a living being is a kind of divine
machine or natural automaton infinitely surpassing all artificial automata.
For a machine made by human art is not a machine in each of its parts; for
example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which are not
artificial so far as we are concerned, and which no longer bear any traces of
the machine, for the use of which the wheel was intended. But the
machines of nature, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts,
into infinity. It is this that makes the difference between nature and art, that
is, between the divine art and ours.
Kant criticizes this theory of the organism in the resolution of the
Second Antinomy.
Part and Whole
In the first section of the antinomies chapter Kant introduced
the cosmological idea of the completeness of division and designated
the pursuit of the series of conditions as a regressive synthesis:
reality in space, i.e. matter, is a conditioned. Its internal conditions are its
parts, and the parts of these parts its remote conditions. There thus occurs a
regressive synthesis, the absolute totality of which is demanded by reason ...
(B440)
Although Kant holds that an empirical space is conditioned by the
space surrounding it, i.e. that the parts of space are conditioned by
the whole (the surrounding subspace), he nowhere adduces an
argument as to why just the opposite should be the case with respect
to matter. Kant apparently thinks it self-evident that a material
whole is conditioned by its parts and not by the larger whole of
which it is a part. In his metaphysics lecture of 1763 Kant had said
that "all composition is a contingent nexus, a mere accidens," 59 but
58 "Monadology," §64; GP VI,618; PPL, 649.
59 Ak 28,1,29 (Herder's notes).