KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

36 Analytic of Teleological Judgment
judgment. Its main function lies in concept and theory formation in
the empirical sciences.
In the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant takes up
regulative principles once again, this time not as principles for the
understanding but for reflective judgment. Here, he considers
mainly the problems of the classification and ordering of empirical
events and regularities. The point is no longer the sensible use of a
traditional corpus of general principles but rather the search for
regularities in the manifold of empirically given objects and events.
There are numerous parallels and similarities between Kant's
remarks here and those in the Appendix to the Dialectic just discussed;
27 but there is also a decisive difference in that the regulative
principles for reflective judgment deal not merely with nature as
such but also with particular, empirically given things. We do not
merely make the transcendental presupposition that nature as a
whole is purposively constructed for our cognitive activities, that it
is, for instance, divided into genera and species, but rather we also
consider individual objects from the point of view of their purposiveness
— (subjectively) for our feelings of pleasure and displeasure in
aesthetics and (objectively) for one another in the study of nature.
We have just seen that Kant viewed nature as a whole as a
deistic system and proposed this view as a regulative principle for
empirical science. He returns to this principle as well in the Introduction
to the Critique of Judgment in the question of systematizing
empirical regularities. We ought, he says, to consider such empirical
regularities as parts of a system of laws "as if they too had been
given by an understanding (even though not ours) so as to assist our
cognitive powers by making possible a system of experience in terms
of particular natural laws" (Bxxvii; CJ, 19). We make it a regulative
principle to judge nature to be so structured that it corresponds to
our needs for order. When we classify and order empirical objects,
we presuppose that nature has an order. The subjective purposiveness
of nature, that is, the correspondence of nature to our need for
order, is a principle of reflective judgment.
This harmony of nature with our cognitive power is presupposed a priori by
judgment, as an aid in its reflection on nature in terms of empirical laws ...
since without presupposing this harmony we would have no order of nature
in terms of empirical laws, and hence nothing to guide us in using
27 Cf. Liedtke, 1964.