KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Intuitive vs. Discursive 173
Since Kant claims to have derived the Categories from the Table of
Judgments, that is, from the basic forms of logic that hold for all
reason, they must also be considered binding for every understanding.
And in fact when Kant introduces a contrast understanding in
the Critique of Pure Reason, it is always (implicitly) an understanding
with the same Categories but with a different connection to sensibility.
On the other hand, Kant often speaks of "our human understanding"
even in connection with the categories, and his language
often suggests not only a sort of species specific idiosyncracy but also
its psychological anchoring in the mind. However, except for such
subjectivistic figures of speech there is no reason to believe that Kant
took this (categorial, causal) peculiarity of our understanding to be a
kind of psychologically anchored idolon tribus. Just as the difference
between mechanism and causality only became relevant and recognizable
once it actually made a difference — as was the case in the
discussion of the organism but not in the discussion of freedom —
so, too, a distinction between our (specifically human) mechanistic
peculiarity and our (universal logical) causal peculiarity only
becomes recognizable on the example of the organism. The equation
of our mechanistic understanding with the understanding as such,
which occurs often in the Critique of Pure Reason, may be somewhat
untidy, but, so long as we have no real need or occasion to
make the distinction, it remains harmless, much like the conflation
of genus and species in genera with only one (known) species. Only
in the Critique of Judgment does an occasion arise that necessitates
the distinction.
The Categories (e.g. causality) are constitutive of all experience
and accordingly of all objects of experience. If I can trip over
something in the dark, that thing must be spatio-temporal and completely
determined causally — otherwise I could not even come into
contact with it. But perhaps there is a difference between experiencing
something and explaining it scientifically. If my understanding
should be subject to some constraints (e.g. reductionism) which
are not derived from the logical forms of judgment and thus need
not apply to every understanding, then there might be objects of
experience that remain in principle incomprehensible for me, and
thus I might not be able to understand and explain everything I
stumble upon. We need the concept of natural purpose as an
"Erkenntnisgrund" not in order to experience the organism but in
order to explain it according to our standards of scientific explana-