KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

178 Resolution of the Antinomy
anything that presupposes a purpose, so that this law can be mechanical and
yet also a subordinate cause of intentional effects" (B361; CJ, 299).
If the maggot can be explained purely mechanistically without teleology,
then the assumption of a supersensible purposive agent is
superfluous, but even where superfluous there is no contradiction
in the assumption that the mechanism is subordinated to a supersensible
purpose. And wherever the assumption of a supersensible
purposive agent is not superfluous because mechanism is not sufficient
there is of course no contradiction either. The analogy to the
antinomy of freedom consists only in the fact that the supersensible
purposive agent like noumenal freedom can be conceived without
contradiction as the noumenal ground or cause of phenomena. But
the analogy goes only so far. In the antinomy of freedom it was
argued that we not only have direct access to our noumenal freedom
but also moral reasons for ascribing to it causal efficacy in the phenomenal
world. In the antinomy of judgment we have no such
access to any supersensible principle of teleology ("supreme architect")
and moral necessity plays no role at all.
According to Kant, mechanistic explanations are always correct
when they are possible. Teleological explanations are always
compatible with mechanistic ones and supplement the deficiencies
of such explanations as long as no objective reality is ascribed to the
understanding that entertains the purposes and carries them out.
The mechanistically not-yet-reduced is considered as if an understanding
had so arranged it as it is. Should it turn out that a phenomenon
judged teleologically can be explained mechanistically,
e.g. on the basis of newly discovered empirical laws, no contradiction
can arise between the new mechanistic explanation and the
superseded teleological explanation; what was teleological in the old
explanation becomes superfluous and what was mechanistic in the
old explanation remains valid. Since the teleological manner of
explanation is introduced only when the merely mechanistic seems
to be deficient, it can be dispensed with as soon as its presuppositions
are removed. It never impedes the possibility of a later mechanistic
explanation and at the same time points out where such an
explanation must fit in. Whether or not, in a thing that we have to
conceive as a natural purpose, an unimaginable, non-mechanical,
real causality is active, we can never know with certainty. However,
since we can judge the causes of such a phenomenon as mechanically
real and teleologically ideal, we can admit that a purely