IEP 508: Nature in Romantic and European Thought

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 2. Kant and Nature as Purposive

I. Introduction to Kant

I have already stressed that a number of the readings for this course are difficult.

The reading for this week, 'Analytic of Teleological Judgement' by Kant, is one of the most difficult. However, what’s important is to get a sense of what he’s saying in each section of the reading. It doesn’t matter if there are sentences you don’t understand, or even whole paragraphs or pages. You could try thinking in terms of being able (by the end of doing the reading and working through these notes) to write around 2 sides of A4 summarising and/or assessing what you think Kant is claiming in the reading. If this method works for you, you could post your thoughts to the discussion page.

Kant’s idea of nature is crucial for subsequent continental philosophy about nature. His most important discussion of nature is in his Critique of Judgement (1790), which is divided into two parts: the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement. The latter is concerned with nature, and the idea expressed here that nature should be considered to be ‘purposive’ forms the starting point for subsequent continental thinking about nature. This is, above all, because Kant starts to go beyond the Enlightenment idea that nature is a mechanical system, made up of lots of separate material things in causal interaction with one another. In different ways, all the later thinkers we will look at share this concern to go beyond a mechanistic conception of nature, but they think that Kant didn’t take this far enough.

The fact that Kant discusses nature in the context of ‘teleology’ is significant. Teleology is a traditional branch of philosophy and it is helpful to situate Kant’s claims in relation to it. Telos is the Greek for a purpose or end. Logos is the Greek for discourse, speech or understanding. Thus ‘teleology’ is the branch of philosophy which tries to explain the universe in terms of purposes or ends. Teleology is based on the idea that the universe has a purpose. Traditionally this is understood as God’s purpose, the plan or idea in line with which he organises nature. Thus teleology becomes the idea that the universe is designed, that it reflects God’s design. Here teleology appeals to the way in which nature seems ordered so that each part of it benefits some other part (e.g. various animals feeding off one another within a food chain). It’s this order that’s thought to stem from God’s (beneficent) design. So we can say that traditional teleology has 2 parts: (1) the idea that God designs the universe, (2) the idea that all the parts of nature fit together to benefit one another.

In the period leading up to Kant (esp. in the 18th century) natural scientists continued to make reference to purposes in studying nature. They thought that the order of nature and the self-regulating nature of organisms could not be explained mechanistically and that they had to make reference to purposes. Given that there is this pre-existing body of work called ‘teleology’, it is possible for Kant to give a ‘critique’ of the judgements – the claims about the world – made by teleologists. ‘Critique’ for Kant doesn’t mean the same as criticism. For Kant the word ‘critique’ is an explanation of how something is possible. So a critique of knowledge is an explanation of how it is possible for us to have knowledge (and of what sort of knowledge we can have). In this vein, what Kant studies in the Critique of Teleological Judgement is (as Werner Pluhar explains in his introduction to the text):
‘How much can teleology do? Can it explain? Can it give us knowledge?’ (p. lxxii)

II. The place of the Critique of Teleological Judgement in Kant’s philosophical system

The aim of the Critique of Judgement as a whole is to overcome a tension that had arisen between the earlier parts of Kant’s philosophy – his theory of knowledge (set out in his Critique of Pure Reason) and his theory of morality (in his Critique of Practical Reason). Kant stresses everywhere that the aim of his whole philosophy is to show that we (human beings) are free and therefore capable of acting morally. (Why do we need to be free to be moral? According to Kant, because we need to be able to choose to act rightly even when it goes against what we feel like doing. If we only acted rightly when it suited us to do so, we couldn’t be said to be being genuinely moral at all.)

However, Kant’s theory of knowledge conflicts with his desire to show that we are free. According to Kant’s theory of knowledge, we can only know about the world in the light of certain assumptions and principles which we necessarily bring into play when we try to gain knowledge about the world. (This has been compared to the idea that we have a glued-on set of spectacles so that we can’t help experiencing everything as pink.) We can only know the world as it appears to us in light of these assumptions and principles, but we can’t know how the world may be as it is ‘in itself’, i.e. independently of these assumptions. Among these principles is the category of causality. Kant thinks we are constrained to experience everything as made up of objects causally interacting with one another (in other words our basic view of the world is necessarily mechanistic, and Newtonian).

But since we have to understand ourselves also as made of causally interacting objects, what scope is there for human freedom? It seems that we can only act insofar as we are affected – causally – by events impinging on us from outside, so that all our actions form part of the ordered causal sequence of the world. Kant therefore needs to find a way of reconciling the conclusions of his theoretical philosophy with those of his practical philosophy.

His answer (in those two books) is that although we must understand ourselves as part of a causal chain because we have to apply the category of causality to ourselves, this leaves open the possibility that in ourselves (independently of how the category of causality makes us appear) we are independent of the causal chain and able to act freely. It may be that really we are free; we just have no way of knowing this. But for moral action, this is enough. As long as it’s conceivable that we are free, then we are justified in assuming that we are free, and as long as we can assume that we are free we can make the effort to act morally.

Nonetheless, Kant came to think he hadn’t gone into this reconciliation fully enough – that morality and theoretical understanding needed to be reconciled at a deeper level. This is the aim of his third Critique – to show in greater depth how human freedom is compatible with a world of causally interacting objects. How can this be done? We can see how once we overview the main arguments and ideas of the Critique of Teleological Judgement.

III. Overview of Kant’s main arguments

Kant uses this term in several ways in the Critique of Teleological Judgement. But he gives this general definition:
“…a purpose is the object of a concept insofar as this latter is considered the cause of the former … ; and the causality of the concept in respect of its object is the purposiveness.”

Something is a ‘purpose’ if it is caused by its own ‘concept’ or future possibility. For example, a cat is a purpose because when it was younger (a kitten) its possibility of becoming a cat caused it assume the cat-like form it now has.
The paradigm case of a purpose is a product of human design such as a house or a knife – a knife is a purpose because it’s produced according to a concept of how a knife should be, what its function is.
The actions of the human designer are ‘purposive’ – they realise the purpose. So a kitten can also be described as purposive. By extension, the cat and the house can be called purposive, because they ‘indicate design’ and point back to the process that’s brought them about.
[This is very clearly explained in Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, p. 65]

Kant refers to the purposive entities that exist within nature (like kittens, say) as ‘natural purposes’.
There are two specific applications of his idea of purposiveness:

(1) we have to understand organisms as purposive, not merely mechanical.

We have to see them as organised according to some sort of ‘plan’, taking the form they have because of such a plan. We have to regard organisms like this in order to make sense of their activities of reproduction, taking in and digesting food, and renewing the parts of their own bodies. These activities can only be made sense of on the assumption that the possibility of the activity (e.g. the possibility of reproduction) drives the organism to engage in the processes, develop the structures, that will enable it to reproduce.
Another reason why we have to understand organisms as purposive is because all of their parts depend on one another and only exist in the form they do because of their function within the whole organism (e.g. the heart only exists in the form it has so that it can pump blood around the body).
Kant says that organisms are intrinsically purposive. The contrast here is with what he calls external or extrinsic purposiveness. A thing that’s externally purposive serves a purpose for something else (e.g. worms are externally purposive for birds). An internally purposive thing serves its own purposes, it develops according to its own steering principles. [cf. this is similar to the distinction between ‘intrinsic’ value and ‘extrinsic’ value]

(2) we also have to think of nature as a whole as if it were organised according to a plan.

This is the only way of understanding its regularity and the way all its features interlock, benefit and depend upon one another. Kant refers to the plan which must be assumed to be behind nature as the ‘purpose of nature’. He also says that things which are included within this plan are ‘purposes of nature’ (e.g. insofar as nature’s presumed plan includes the existence of worms to feed birds, worms are a ‘purpose of nature’).

The last crucial piece of terminology which Kant introduces is that the assumption of purposiveness in nature and natural organisms is merely regulative. This means, as Robert Richards explains (p. 67), that the assumption is ‘a heuristic assumption that allows us to work out, if only partially, the mechanical causes that we can suppose to be really operative in organic systems (the ‘really’, of course, refers only to the phenomenal world …)’ [the world as it appears to us in light of our application of the category of causality]. We need to understand this by looking at Kant’s contrast between regulative and constitutive (or determining) judgements.

A constitutive principle is, for example, the judgement that A causes B. It is a judgement which draws on those categories, such as causality, which we necessarily must apply in order to have any ordered experience or knowledge at all. Thus, necessarily, any world we can understand and experience must be a causally ordered one. The world as it is ‘in itself’ might not involve causality (i.e. we might be really free, and so might other things), but we have no way of knowing about this world in itself.

On the other hand the assumption of purposiveness can only guide the way we study particular causal connections. Take for example the assumption that the heart exists to pump blood around the body. This assumption can only help biologists to examine the causal mechanisms by which the heart carries out its pumping activity. Having identified some of these causal mechanisms, biologists can organise their knowledge and carry it further only by adopting the further assumption of purposiveness. So the causal approach is more basic and only when we then reflect on the knowledge it gives us do we step up to a purposive approach. The reason why we have to think of nature as purposive is then to make sense of an experience of it which is already causal at a more basic level.
Another way Kant expresses this is to say that we can only approach natural things as if they were purposive. The principle of purposiveness ‘regulates’ our understanding – it governs the detailed accounts of nature we produce – but it does not ‘constitute’ the way in which we have to understand nature if we are to experience it at all.

In general, then, Kant aims to reconcile freedom and causal determinism by showing that we have to think of nature as a whole as if it exhibited a kind of freedom – its purposiveness, its self-organising character. This supports the claim that we also have to think of ourselves as if we were free. Nonetheless, Kant still holds on to mechanism in saying that we must really understand nature to be causal, and only think of it as if it were purposive.

One key question is whether the distinction between reflective and constitutive judgements holds up, and how well Kant argues for this distinction, and how well his own examples of natural phenomena bear it out. This is something you could bear in mind as you read through the Kant sections and try to make some sense of them.

IV. Overview of the reading from Kant, with questions

The following gives an indication of the main themes of the passages from the reading, to give you some guidance. There are also some questions. If you find them helpful to work through, you could post your responses to the discussion site.

§63. Kant distinguishes between intrinsic purposiveness and ‘extrinsic’ (or ‘relative’ purposiveness).

How do his examples illustrate this distinction?

§64. Kant introduces the concept of a ‘natural purpose’, saying (p. 249) that it is both cause and effect of itself. He then discusses how we must think of certain natural things, such as trees, in this way in order to make sense of how they reproduce, nourish themselves, and preserve themselves.
How do the features of trees which Kant considers support the idea that trees must be considered to be purposive?

§65.Kant gives two conditions which a natural thing must meet in order for us to have to consider it purposive. (a) its parts must be as they are only because of their place in the whole; (b) the parts must also produce the whole through their interactions – the whole can exist only insofar as its parts support it.
Kant therefore says that natural purposes are self-organising: they produce the parts which they depend upon.
Kant also introduces here the idea that the concept of natural purposes is merely regulative, not constitutive. He introduces this idea at the top of p. 255 as the conclusion of an argument which he begins to make 2 pages before in discussing watches.

What is the argument he makes here to show that the concept of natural purposes is merely regulative?

§66. Kant discusses further what is involved in regarding natural things as purposive, saying that this way of viewing them cannot be derived from empirical investigation but rather provides a ‘maxim’ that governs empirical studies.
How do his claims here follow on from those about regulative judgement in the last section?

§67. Kant now goes back to ‘extrinsic’ purposiveness and whether nature as a whole can be said to be organised upon a ‘plan’ whereby all its parts benefit one another. This leads to the question of whether natural purposive things are also ‘purposes of nature’, i.e. things whose existence is anticipated in nature’s overall ‘plan’. Again Kant says that we do have to assume that nature as a whole pursues a grand plan in this way (top of p. 259). And, again, he says this is a merely regulative assumption.

§68. Kant says that science must have a teleological element – it must include the assumption that nature is purposive – but this must be distinguished from taking a theological approach to nature (p.262). Given everything we’ve seen about Kant so far, and what he says in this paragraph, how does he distinguish his approach to the purposiveness of nature from the more traditional theological approach?

Finally, here are a few very general questions on Kant which you could keep in mind, or perhaps take as point of departure for thinking about a possible essay on this topic:

Is Kant right to claim that we can judge natural things to be purposive on only a ‘regulative’ basis? What are his arguments for this claim? How satisfactory are they?

Suggested further readings on Kant and the purposiveness of nature:

Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life (Chicago University Press, 2002), pp.62-69
Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s account of teleology in nature’, in Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, ed. Stephen Houlgate (SUNY Press, 1998), pp.168-172
Werner S Pluhar, Introduction to Kant's Critique of Judgement (Hackett, 1987), secs. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge, 1999), ch. 9 ‘The Complete Critical System’ - this offers helpful background on the place of the Critique of Judgement in Kant's broader system, including the tension between freedom and causality.
Douglas Burnham, Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

Web notes by Alison Stone updated 2005