KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Mechanistic Explanation 165
gated is itself a part. For such a specifically different understanding,
the subsumption of a particular under a universal would be
equated with tracing back a part to its whole. The explanans would
be the whole the explanandum the part — just the reverse of our
way of thinking. Even though our understanding explains a system
by examining its parts and ideally rebuilding the whole in thought,
we can imagine a different understanding that explains a part of a
system by examining the whole and then ideally detaching and isolating
the part in thought. Kant does not maintain that we can
really imagine such a process (in fact he denies it), he merely
asserts that we can imagine an understanding that could envision
such a process and that such an understanding does not involve any
contradiction.
Kant calls our understanding "discursive," and its point of
departure (the explanans, namely the parts) for the causal explanation
of a phenomenon he calls the "analytical universal" since the
general grounds or causes of the phenomenon are found by dissection
(analysis). The general explanatory principle is the part. For
the other, imaginary kind of understanding, the point of departure
(explanans) for the explanation of a phenomenon is the whole,
which would be a "synthetic universal." Alluding to our intuition of
space, where a space as a whole is intuited and a subspace is conditioned
by the space surrounding it, Kant calls this contrast understanding
"intuitive." This other understanding would sense no
underdetermination (contingency) of the structure in relation to its
component parts, e.g. in the form of an organic body, as our understanding
does (cf. §61, B368ff; CJ, 236) It would not think that
"nature could have built differently in a thousand ways," but would
rather only ascertain that the various parts were the necessary consequences
of the only natural division of such a whole.
Kant begins his analysis of our mechanistic (analytical, discursive)
peculiarity as follows:
The point is this: Our understanding has the peculiarity that when it cognizes,
e.g., the cause of a product, it must proceed from the analytically
universal to the particular (i.e., from concepts to the empirical intuition that
is given); consequently, in this process our understanding determines
nothing regarding the diversity of the particular. Instead (under the sup
position that the object is a natural product) our understanding must wait
until the subsumption of the empirical intuition under the concept provides
this determination for the power of judgment. But we can also conceive of
an understanding that, unlike ours, is not discursive but intuitive, and
hence proceeds from the synthetically universal (the intuition of a whole as