KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Summary 179
mechanistic explanation of the organism may perhaps never be
successful without abandoning mechanism as the ideal of explanation.
3.6 Summary
The point of departure of the Dialectic of teleological judgement
was an apparent contradiction in the central concept of Kant's
analysis of biological explanation, the natural purpose. This concept
had been introduced to deal with the peculiar causal relations in an
organism. But, as has been stressed, the actual problem for Kant,
and for philosophy, is not the organism or life as such, but rather
the discrepancy between the mechanistic ideal of explanation and
the actual explanations given in biology. The organism is not a problem
for philosophy but for biology. The way that biologists explain
the organism to their own satisfaction may however pose a problem
for philosophy if it does not conform to the ideal which philosophers
consider universally valid. The first problem that Kant saw in the
explanation of the organism was the underdetermination of the
structure of the organism by the properties of its parts: The necessity
of precisely this and only this structure given these particular
parts could only be grasped if an additional causality according to
purposes was assumed. The second problem lay in the fact that
these structures or organizational forms have certain abilities
which occasion further explanatory difficulties, in particular the
ability of the whole to confer new properties on its parts.
Kant brings the discrepancy mentioned to a head and formulates
it as a direct contradiction using the argumentational figure of
the antinomy, in order to pose and resolve the problem in principle.
The solution lies in the introduction of a conceptual distinction
between mechanism and causality such that mechanism is determined
as a species of the genus causality whose differentia specifica
consists in the stipulation of the determination of the whole by the
parts. Causality itself remains as one of the categories constitutive
of the objects of experience, but mechanism has only subjective
validity in as much as it rests on a peculiarity of our understanding
that is not constitutive of nature. Due to this peculiarity of our
understanding we cannot understand, conceive, or even "become