KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

138 Interpretations of the Antinomy
judgment. A passage from Ernst Cassirer may serve to illustrate
this view: 5
The antinomy between the concept of purpose and the concept of cause thus
disappears as soon as we think of both as two different modes of ordering,
by which we attempt to bring unity into the manifold of phenomena. Then,
the harmony of two mutually supplementing 'maxims' and orders of reason
takes the place of the conflict between two metaphysical basic factors of
events.
There are a number objections to this kind of interpretation.
In the first place, this characterization of the opposition and its
resolution does not at all match up with Kant's announcement of
the antinomy discussed in detail in the last section. It was supposed
to consist in a conflict between maxims, which belonged to reflective
judgment, and which in some sense could be said to be necessary.
But Kant neither calls the constitutive principles (C1 and C2)
"maxims" nor does he treat them as such. He says explicitly that
they belong not to reflective judgment but rather to determinate
judgment. And he nowhere even hints that the constitutive principles
might in any sense be necessary; they are even introduced in
the subjunctive mood, and Kant afterwards maintains that they
cannot be proved. We would thus have to assume that Kant presents
in §70 an antinomy completely different from the one he announced
in the last sentence of §69.
Secondly, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had already
envisioned the possibility of a confusion between regulative and
constitutive principles without trying to pass off such a confusion as
an antinomy. There he wrote:
When merely regulative principles are treated as constitutive, they can be in
conflict as objective principles. But when they are treated merely as maxims,
there is no real conflict, but merely those differing interests of reason that
give rise to the separation of modes of thought. In actual fact, reason has
only one single interest, and the conflict of its maxims is only a difference
in, and a mutual limitation of, the methods of satisfying this interest.
(B*694)
The possibility that the confusion of regulative and constitutive principles
can lead to a seeming conflict and the fact that differing max-
5 E. Cassirer, p. 369. Cf. also Adickes, Naturforscher, vol. 2, 473-4; Adickes,
Systematik, p. 171; Baumanns, p. 109; H.W. Cassirer, p. 344; Eisler, p. 634;
Eisler, p. 634; E.-M. Engels, p. 93; J.E. Erdmann, p. 213; Ewing, Causality,
p. 228; Karja, p. 87; Körner, p. 208; Löw, p. 212; O'Farrell, p. 659; Schrader,
p. 225; Stadler, p. 128.