KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

40 Analytic of Teleological Judgment
Schopenhauer, who can here be taken to represent the dominant
tradition of interpretation: 28
In the 'Critique of Teleological Judgment' due to the simplicity of the
material, one can perhaps better than anywhere else recognize Kant's peculiar
talent for turning an idea this way and that, expressing it in various
manners until it has become a book. The entire book wants to say only this:
although organized bodies necessarily appear to us as if they were constructed
according to an antecedent concept of purpose, this does not justify
us in assuming that they are objectively so.
This judgment of Schopenhauer's cannot be denied a certain justification,
at least if restricted to the Analytic; but even with respect to
the Analytic, Schopenhauer oversimplifies considerably. While it is
true that Kant continually repeats himself collecting ever more 'as
if' formulations, nonetheless such psychologizing explanations distract
from the obvious and substantial difficulties Kant is having
with the philosophical material, which force him again and again
to make a new attempt at defining the problem. In the Analytic Kant
attempts to draw the methodological consequences of the introduction
into biology of a general concept of the reproduction of an
organic system by introducing the concept of objective purposiveness.
The constant repetitions become more understandable, once
one realizes that Kant is groping here at the edges of the explanatory
capacities of his philosophical categories. He is more or less compelled
to write a fourth 'Critique' and must attempt, so to speak at
the special request of a particular phenomenon, to determine the
boundaries of mechanistic explanation from the inside.
Although the impulse to a discussion of objective purposiveness,
as Kant makes clear in the course of the "Critique of Teleological
Judgment," comes from actual difficulties in concept formation
in the sciences of his time, Kant structures the discussion as if
he were dealing with a purely abstract question of the various
possible determinations of a concept — in this case, the concept of
purposiveness. This is done presumably to preclude the mistaken
inference that the concept of natural purpose is an empirical concept
derived from experience with a particular kind of phenomenon.
The first section of the "Critique of Teleological Judgment" (§61)
must explicate what is empirical and what is a priori in the concept
of objective purposiveness. Kant begins with the distinction between
objective and subjective purpose.
28 Schopenhauer, Will und Vorstellung, p. 630