KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

172 Resolution of the Antinomy
introducing a second peculiarity of our understanding that is not
constitutive for experience but is nonetheless supposed to be binding
for knowledge. This second peculiarity of our understanding compels
us to explain only mechanistically without being able to
guarantee that all objects of experience can be so explained. Such a
merely subjective necessity that is non-binding for nature raises a
number of difficulties. For instance, in the Transcendental
Deduction Kant objected to psychological or subjectivistic
interpretations of the Categories since this would lead to skepticism,
being "exactly what the skeptic most desires":
The concept of cause, for instance, which expresses the necessity of an
event under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested on an arbitrary
subjective necessity, implanted in us, of connecting certain empirical
representations according to the rule of causal relation. I would not then be
able to say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object, that is to
say, necessarily, but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think this
representation otherwise than as thus connected ... Certainly a man cannot
dispute with anyone regarding that which depends merely on the mode in
which he is himself organized. (B168)
The concept of mechanism seems to be just what the concept
of cause was not under any circumstances to be: a concept resting
merely on a "subjective necessity implanted in us." Even the fact,
that this peculiarity of our understanding is supposed to be one not
only of a particular individual but of the entire human race, does not
change the problem in any fundamental way; and Kant does not
explain further how or why the understanding is so constituted —
whether there are supposed to be psychological, sociological, or epistemological
grounds. We are said to be so constituted that we cannot
conceive a real causation other than in a mechanistic-reductionist
fashion. This retroactive introduction of a second peculiarity of our
understanding or of a second level of peculiarity must lead to some
changes in the treatment of the understanding.
Just as in the case of the concept of mechanism, where Kant
was forced to sharpen his conception of causality and to introduce
distinctions into the relatively undifferentiated concept of the
Critique of Pure Reason, so too, he must sharpen his conception of
the understanding here. Let us pose, for example, the question: For
what kind of understanding do the Categories hold? In the Critique
of Pure Reason it was left rather unclear whether the Categories
hold only for our human understanding or for every imaginable understanding.
Systematically speaking, the latter must be the case.