KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

160 Heuristic but Necessary Principles
subsume things under a concept that is merely problematic, then we do not
know whether we are judging about something or nothing, and hence the
synthetic predicates of the concept (here, e.g., whether it is an intentional or
an unintentional purpose of nature that, in thought, we add to the production
of the things) can yield only problematic judgments, whether affirmative or
negative, about the object. (§74, B331-2; CJ, 279)
With the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles
in the Critique of Pure Reason such systems have already been
superseded. Their dogmatic assertions can be interpreted as heuristic
maxims: "On the latter alternative [as maxims] the principles,
though disparate, might well still be reconcilable; on the former, the
principles are opposed as contradictories, so that they are incompatible
and annul one another" (§72, B321-2; CJ, 272). As long as such
heuristic maxims are not necessary, they represent merely different
cognitive interests of reason.
It is interesting to note that Kant in his analysis of the theories
of his predecessors makes no distinction in principle between
the purposiveness expressed in the organism and that seen in
nature as a whole, that is, between natural purpose and the purposive
arrangement of nature as a whole. Both are dealt with at the
same time and on the same level, until Kant turns in §75 to an
analysis of the possible conflict between the regulative maxims of
reflective judgment. Here once again he takes care to distinguish
between the status of those regulative maxims that apply to the
judgment of organisms from a teleological perspective and those
that deal with nature as a whole from this perspective. The organism
is given empirically; nature as a whole is not given empirically.
"But while the maxim of judgment is useful when applied to
the whole of nature, it is not indispensible there"; on the other hand,
for the organism, insofar as it is taken as a natural purpose, "that
maxim of reflective judgment is essentially necessary" (§75, B334;
CJ, 280-1; emphasis PM). A genuine antinomy can only arise if the
maxims are necessary.
Even if we might like to admit that the regulative maxims
(R1, R2) of the antinomy could in some reasonable sense be "transformed"
into the constitutive principles (C1, C2) of pre-critical science,
the reverse is not the case: the regulative maxims which constitute
the antinomy are not just the regulative translations of these
constitutive principles. The relation of the maxims (R1, R2) to these
constitutive principles (C1, C2) is not the same as the relation in the
Critique of Pure Reason of the maxims of the logical use of the ideas