KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

132 Antinomy of Judgment
must have an antinomy; therefore Kant has for architectonic reasons
conjured up something that he can call an antinomy. The
Dialectic is supposed basically to have no philosophical content; the
so-called antinomy is supposed already to be resolved as soon as it is
clearly formulated. The question arises then, of course, why Kant
wrote so much about it. The alternative seems to be posed: either not
to take this particular text seriously or not to take Kant's system
seriously. For instance, some recent commentators have postulated
two different drafts which Kant simply collated and sent to press. 1
On the other hand, one can take the text seriously and change the
system; it has been suggested that the category of causality be
transformed into a merely regulative principle, or that a thirteenth
category be introduced for teleology, or even that a third form of
intuition for purposiveness be admitted. 2 My interpretation will
attempt to avoid such acts of desperation without however denying
the objective grounds that have led to them. The goal is to show that
Kant in the Dialectic of teleological judgment means something that
a) significantly resembles what he actually says, and b) is compatible
with the basic positions of the Critique of Pure Reason. From
the analysis of Kant's presentation of the antinomy (Section 3.2) and
of the interpretative difficulties of previous commentators (Section
3.3) some more specific considerations will be worked out and articulated.
The reason for the unsatisfactory character of the available
interpretations lies mainly with Kant himself. His presentation and
his elucidations of the antinomy create many problems and any
interpretation of the Dialectic can be confronted with particular passages
which it can scarcely explain. As a first step, an interpretation
of the text as a whole must be established in order to show what
Kant is actually getting at. Due to these particular circumstances
my procedure will on occasion seem rather philological. It will
sometimes be necessary to go through the text line by line in order to
show what Kant must have meant; on the other hand, it will occa-
1 Cf. Delekat, pp. 463f; Löw, pp. 206f. This kind of interpretation can take on a
life of its own: Delekat infers from the content of the text that it must consist of two
different draft versions. Löw, who cites Delekat, assumes as fact that two drafts
have been spliced together and bases his interpretation of the text's content on this
assumption. No external evidence whatever for the two draft thesis has been
offered.
2 Cf. Driesch, "Kant und das Ganze"; Ernst, Zweckbegriff, p. 64; Van de Pitte,
"The Role," pp. 114f.