KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Architectonic Psychopath 145
All of these interpretations have great difficulty in explaining
what, if anything, Kant is doing in the remaining paragraphs of the
Dialectic. If the antinomy has been resolved after three sections or
even after two, what is the purpose of the remaining seven rather
difficult sections? With the exception of Hegel, almost all commentators
seem to agree that the antinomy is resolved as soon it is enunciated
clearly. Either we have two non-binding suggestions, about
how we ought to judge, or we have two propositions on different
levels: one constitutive for the objects of experience and one regulative
for our dealings with these objects. The question of course
arises: What is the point of all this? Why does Kant write so much
about so little? The answer generally given to this question —
though rarely put quite this succinctly — is simply, that he is crazy.
Kant as an Architectonic Psychopath
I cited earlier some remarks of Schopenhauer's about Kant's
"strange talent" for repeating himself as well as about his peculiar
disposition to mount "false windows" onto his system for reasons of
symmetry. 14 While such expressions of exasperation in the work of
Schopenhauer were still the spontaneous or perhaps affectedly
conceited reactions of the long-suffering Kant scholar, the basic
thought underlying them became a hermeneutic principle in the
work of Erich Adickes. In the form of the thesis of "Kant's systematics
as a system-building factor," this idea is systematically applied
to the interpretation of Kant's works. On the antinomy of judgment
in particular Adickes writes: 15
For the antinomy consists in the contradiction that arises between those two
ways of considering as soon as one makes teleological explanation a constitutive
principle, and the solution consists thus in restricting this explanation
to a merely regulative principle. However, Kant has already warned
throughout the entire Analytic against making it a constitutive principle, and
the Dialectic was therefore in itself completely unnecessary; but symmetry
and systematics demanded it imperiously, and Kant was so permeated by
the impossibility of defying this demand that he goes so far as to call the
Dialectic an "unavoidable illusion that we must expose and resolve in the
critique so that it will not deceive us."
14 Cf. Schopenhauer, pp. 630, 509, 541.
15 Adickes, Systematik, p. 171.