KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

168 Resolution of the Antinomy
able to guarantee that they must be such and such, is obviously not
very satisfying:
This clarifies at the same time why we are far from satisfied in natural
science if we can explain the products of nature through a causality in terms
of purposes: the reason for this is that all we demand in such an explanation
is that natural production be judged in a way commensurate with our ability
for judging such production, i.e., in a way commensurate with reflective
judgment, rather than with the things themselves and for the sake of determinative
judgement. And [to make these points] we do not have to prove
that such an intellectus archetypus is possible .... (B350; CJ, 292)
The resolution of the conflict between the general necessity
and the occasional impossibility of mechanical explanation is thus
the following: We must judge all natural things mechanistically
because for us only mechanical objects can be explained. If we are
unable to conceive of a particular object of experience as naturally
mechanical, we must judge it as an artificial mechanism that was
intended by some understanding. This is not because such an
understanding exists, nor because the thing is not really mechanical
(if we knew all empirical laws we might be able to conceive it as
mechanical), but because we cannot otherwise conceive the apparent
causal dependency of the parts on the whole. Our mechanistic
understanding is unable to explain the organism (insofar as it is a
natural purpose) by pure "real" causes, by the "natural laws of matter"
— and the same would apply to any finite mechanistic (non-intuitive)
understanding:
Indeed, absolutely no human reason (nor any finite reason similar to ours in
quality, no matter how much it may surpass ours in degree) can hope to
understand, in terms of nothing but mechanical causes, how so much as a
mere blade of grass is produced. (B353; CJ, 294; emphasis, PM)
Both the necessity and the impossibility of mechanistic judgement
can be traced back to the peculiar constitution of our understanding.
Both the necessity and the impossibility are subjective in
nature; they apply to us — or to any qualitatively equivalent finite
understanding — but not to every imaginable understanding. The
two original maxims can thus be reformulated in the following
manner: For our finite, "discursive" or mechanistic understanding
only those natural things that can be conceived as merely mechanical
can also be explained. Some such natural things cannot be
explained, because they cannot be conceived as merely mechanical.
There is no contradiction between these two propositions, for it need
not necessarily be the case that all natural things can be explained