KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Mechanism 153
before and after; but it does not give space a direction, an inside and
an outside. In any case it does not follow analytically from the concept
of causality that the parts condition the whole; nor is a contradiction
involved in the assertion that a whole conditions its parts.
There is no reason a priori why the parts into which a system can be
divided must be conceived as temporally and thus causally prior to
the system. Both organic and social systems may be, and have been,
conceived to be older than at least some of their constituent
elements.
Thus for Kant, a mechanical explanation means the reduction
of a whole to the properties (faculties and forces) which the
parts have "on their own," that is, independently of the whole. I
want to emphasize here that the point is not whether a whole is
'more' than the 'sum' of its parts nor whether it displays properties
or laws not possessed by the parts. The point is rather whether the
parts can have properties in the whole and due to their presence in
the whole which they would not (did not) have independently of their
existence in the whole.
The category of causality does not demand that the parts of a
material system have all their relevant properties independent of
their organization into a whole, or that organization is a property of
the parts and not a property of the whole. Practical mechanics as
used in manufacturing, however, presupposes that the parts produced
will have precisely those properties in the machine that they
had before they were put together to make the machine and that the
parts of a machine, do not lose any properties when the machine is
taken apart. Rigid gears and levers do not become elastic in the
machine and springs and transmission belts do not become rigid.
Let it be remembered that Kant closed the Analytic of teleological
judgment with a commitment to the traditional mechanistic view
that we can only really understand what we can in principle
produce. Any kind of explanation other than that "according to
mechanical laws" is excluded:
This is done so that, when we study nature in terms of its mechanism, we
keep to what we can observe or experiment on in such a way that we could
produce it as nature does, at least in terms of similar laws; for we have
complete insight only into what we can ourselves make and accomplish
according to concepts. But organization, as an intrinsic purpose of nature,
infinitely surpasses all our ability to exhibit anything similar through art.
(§68, B309; CJ, 264)