KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

144 Interpretations of the Antinomy
utterances of Kant's in the Critique of Judgment can be interpreted
in such a way that Kant seems to be abandoning his critical reservations
about teleology. Löw explains the purported conversion by
appealing to arguments found satisfying by the proponents of
teleology in science but not accepted by mechanists – arguments
that were certainly already familiar to Kant long before he began the
Critique of Judgment. However, no argument is advanced that
might plausibly be conceived to have convinced the "mechanistic"
author of the Critique of Pure Reason to abandon his objections, and
Kant himself of course gives no such argument. The interpretation
of an "Aristotelian turn" in Kant is thus grounded on arguments
whose power to convince presupposes such a turn. We would have to
believe that Kant without much ado simply abandons one of the fundamental
pillars of his system (the category of causality); that, while
he was not willing to abandon causal determinism to save human
freedom — as the Third Antinomy shows —, he does just this without
any hesitation in order to explain organisms.
It seems to me to be methodologically much more sensible to
assume, with Ewing, that Kant distinguishes between mechanism
in particular and causality in general. Furthermore, this third variety
of interpretation has the same difficulties as the first. The
maxims are still just as contradictory as before — however one
interprets the phrase "according to mechanical laws," for it appears
in both maxims. Almost all proponents of the third variety follow
Ernst Cassirer in seeing the distinction between regulative and
constitutive principles as itself the solution to the antinomy. 13
13 A number of commentators have attempted to avoid the problems criticized
here. In particular Marc-Wogau (214-245) sees that the confusion of regulative
and constitutive principles cannot constitute the antinomy, but he clings to the
identification of mechanism and causality. McFarland, too, agrees that the
confusion-thesis is unsatisfactory, but he looks for a solution in the supersensible,
as if we were dealing with an antinomy of reason rather than of judgment, and he
seems to conflate mechanism with the science of mechanics. Finally,
Philonenko's interpretation has much in common with mine — especially in the
emphasis on the form of the antinomy. However, he fails to commit himself to a
particular interpretation of the antinomy, i.e., whether R1 and R2 are incompatible
or not. Furthermore, in spite of his emphasis on the formal aspects, he
translates the phrase "nach bloß mechanischen Gesetzen möglich," which is
repeated verbatim in all four propositions (R1, R2, C1, C2), differently each time so
that the linguistic form of the contradiction is not conveyed.