KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

170 Resolution of the Antinomy
ous kinds of understanding are essentially contrast understandings;
they are understandings that are in some particular respect
different from ours. If our understanding is finite, we can imagine
an infinite understanding as contrast. If our understanding is
bound to the sensible forms of intuition space and time, we can
imagine an understanding that itself intuits directly and thus does
not need sensibility. Or we can imagine an understanding that,
while bound to sensibility, possesses a different, non-spatio-temporal
sensibility. We can imagine "higher" kinds of understanding
that are nonetheless still finite and are still similar in "quality." We
can even imagine an understanding (as done in the Dialectic of
teleological judgment) that is qualitatively different, "higher," in
terms of it constitution. Such an imaginable understanding is however
only negatively determined, that is, it is characterized only by
the negation of the property that interests us at the moment. It
serves only as contrast. Whereas our understanding is discursive
(i.e. mechanistic), "we can conceive of an intuitive understanding
as well (negatively, merely as one that is not discursive)" (B347;
CJ, 290). Kant's contrast understandings — when they gets a name
at all — are always called "intuitive" (anschauend, intuitiv) understandings.
The common characteristic of all these various intuitive
kinds of understanding is not a particular property that they share
but rather their common function as contrasts. In the Dialectic of
teleological judgment the epithet "intuitive" for the understanding
receives a certain justification in terms of content through the comparison
with our spatial intuitions. The thoughts of such an understanding
have a certain similarity to our intuitions of space "inasmuch
as no part in space can be determined except in relation to the
whole (so that [in its case too] the possibility of the parts is based on
the presentation of the whole)" (B352; CJ, 293). Let us recall again
the discussion of the antinomy of division in the previous chapter
(2.4), which showed that the explanatory regress from the conditioned
to its condition in space takes the opposite direction as that in
matter.
Thus, when Kant introduces a so-called "intuitive" understanding
in his resolution of the antinomy of judgment, this con
trast understanding should differ from ours only with respect to its
handling of the relation of parts to wholes. If the contrast understanding
also differs from ours in other dimensions (e.g. if it is not
bound to the forms of intuition space and time, or if it is infinitely