KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

38 Analytic of Teleological Judgment
aesthetic sentiments, but rather with an "objective" purposiveness,
that is, with a means-end relationship that is supposed to subsist in
the object of cognition not in the relation of the object to the subject.
The question is not whether something is conveniently arranged for
our faculty of knowledge, but whether a thing (or a subsystem) can
be purposive for another thing or subsystem (or both of them mutually
purposive). Furthermore, it must be asked what it means for a
thing if we can sensibly say that something else can be useful to it.
It is particularly important at the beginning of this study of
Kant's critique of teleology to achieve some clarity about the kind of
teleology and the kind of purposes under investigation. Kant is dealing
with the telos of the artisan in the fabrication of a labor product
not with the telos of a moral agent performing a good action. The
subject is technique not morals, "technical-practical" purposes not
"moral practical" purposes. Kant emphasizes this point in the introduction
to the Critique of Judgment. The causality of purposes
under discussion here is a kind of phenomenal causality, which can
be ascertained in every product of art or labor. "The will, as the
power of desire, is one of the many natural causes in the world,
namely, the one that acts in accordance with concepts" (Bxii;
CJ, 10). As long as we are dealing with concepts of nature (i.e. technique)
and not with concepts of freedom (i.e. morals), then our subject
consists in "corollaries" to theoretical philosophy and not in
moral philosophy. The technical-practical prescriptions of reflective
judgment belong to theoretical philosophy as corollaries; the
"Critique of Teleological Judgment" is an addendum to the Critique
of Pure Reason not an extension of the Critique of Practical Reason.
Moral-practical purposiveness as such plays no role whatsoever in
the "Critique of Teleological Judgment": it is only mentioned in the
introduction in order to be excluded explicitly (Bxiii-xv; CJ, 10-12).
There is however an ambiguity in Kant's use of the concept
"purpose" even in its purely technical sense. Since the cause must
precede the effect in time, it is clear that the result of the production
process is not in any sense a cause, but rather that the idea, representation,
or concept of the result can be seen as a cause. Now, a
concept can enter into the process of production in two different
ways: As an anticipation of the finished product (causa formalis), a
concept or representation guides production; and as an anticipation
of the desired effects of the product (causa finalis), a concept or
representation initiates the process of production. To take up a