KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

152 Heuristic but Necessary Principles
Mechanism
Let us return to Ewing's insight into the necessity of distinguishing
between mechanism and causality. If we want to retain
causal determinism as a category, then we shall have to find a relevant
difference between mechanism and causality. There must be a
specific difference that makes it possible for mechanism to be regulative
for reflective judgment while causality remains constitutive of
experience as such. It must be shown that mechanism is only a particular
species of the genus of natural causality. In his presentation
of the antinomy Kant does not specify any difference; in fact he does
not speak of causality as such at all. He simply uses the terms
"mechanism" or "mechanical laws" instead of "causality" or
"causal laws"; but he uses them in a way that would be inconsistent
with the Critique of Pure Reason, if his intention was to equate the
two concepts.
Only in §77 in which the actual antinomy is resolved, does
Kant explain the differentia specifica of mechanism. There he characterizes
the mechanistic manner of explanation as follows:
When we consider a material whole as being, in terms of its form, a
product of its parts and of their forces and powers for combining on their
own (to which we must add other matter that the parts supply to one
another), then our presentation is of a whole produced mechanically (§77,
B351; CJ, 293)
When we explain something, we explain a "whole" "as the joint
effect of the motive forces of the parts" (§77, B349; CJ, 292). Mechanism
has a determination that natural causality as such does not
have. This differentia specifica is to be found in the special relation
of part to whole: in mechanism the parts determine the whole; the
whole cannot determine the parts. 21 The concept of causality as
developed in the Critique of Pure Reason involves a sequence in time
but not an inclusion in space. Causality gives time a direction, a
21 In Kant's draft to the introduction of the CJ (the "First Introduction") he writes:
"But it is quite contrary to the nature of physical-mechanical causes that the whole
should be the cause that makes possible the causality of the parts; rather, here the
parts must be given first in order for us to grasp from them the possibility of the
whole." (Ak, 20,236; W 5,214; CJ, 425)