KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

142 Interpretations of the Antinomy
nism with phenomenal causality." 9 In any case, if mechanism is
the same as causality, then its validity must already have been
proven by the Critique of Pure Reason.
There seem thus to be two important reasons to distinguish
the two concepts, mechanism and causality. Finally, if one equates
them, then the entire construction of the antinomy is simply deceptive
packaging. Kant simply calls constitutive principles regulative
and regulative principle constitutive; he contradicts himself. Furthermore,
we would also have to assume that he immediately contradicts
himself again, since he asserts that the supposedly constitutive
principle of mechanism is unprovable (in which case it would
not be constitutive). Both contradictions follow from the equation of
mechanism with causality which is interpreted into the text, thus
refuting the equation.
(3) This conclusion must be relativized in light of a third variety
of interpretation: Either "mechanism" means something different
from "causality" or else "causality" has changed its meaning
since the Critique of Pure Reason. Some commentators have
attempted a solution by demoting the category of causality to a
merely regulative principle. They see in this the beginning, or even
the completion of a transition in Kant's thought to a kind of vitalism
or openly advocated teleology. This approach to an interpretation
was relatively popular in German neovitalism early in this century
9 Ewing, Causality, p. 228. Although a number of commentators have noted that
Kant must have seen a difference between mechanism and causality, only Ewing
seems to have fathomed Kant's reasons. Macmillan (pp. 271-2), for example,
considers causality to be constitutive for all real experience and mechanism to be
regulative for all possible experience. Often, the mechanistic interpretation of
causality is conflated with the use of causality in the branch of physics known as
mechanics: Kant's "analysis of experience was by no means restricted to the
domain of theoretical physics" (Schrader, p. 223); Kant "realizes that all
thinking is not the thinking of the physicist and that to make sense of some aspects
of our experience we must use concepts different from the mechanical, even if
these cannot be objectively justified" (McFarland, p. 135). Ewing on the other
hand sees that mechanism is supposed to consist in the reduction of a whole to its
parts; but he does not distinguish between the alternatives, namely between the
possibility that the representation of the whole has a causal influence on the parts
(intentional purposiveness) and the possibility that the whole itself has such an
influence (natural purpose). This problem will be dealt with at length in the next
section.