Immanuel Kant by Anthony Kenny

Author:Anthony Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978–0–281–07655–0
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

12

Teleology in nature

Having completed his analysis of the aesthetic power of judgement Kant offers, in the second part of his treatise on the power of judgement, a ‘critique of the teleological power of judgement’. As a first approximation, what he means by this power is the ability to detect purposiveness in nature.

Natural objects stand to each other in relations of cause and effect. But they also serve one another as means and ends. Philosophers have called the first relationship efficient or mechanical causality, and the second relationship final causality (or, equivalently, teleological causality). Kant maintains that nature cannot be adequately understood without both kinds of causality. If we are to explain, for instance, the structure of a bird, the hollowness of its bones, the placement of its wings for movement and of its tail for steering, and so on, we will find that mere mechanical causality is enough without introducing final causality. But this, he says, is not adequate for the idea of nature as the sum of empirical objects.

To avoid misunderstanding we must distinguish at the outset between internal purposiveness and relative purpos­iveness. River deposits encourage the growth of vegetables that are useful for humans; but this is not to be judged as an internal end of nature. Even if humans find things in nature advantageous (e.g. feathers for clothing and horses for riding) one cannot assume here even a relative end of nature – unless the existence of humans is itself an end of nature. A thing exists as a natural end if it is cause and effect of itself: for example, a tree generates another tree, but also generates itself as an individual. Leaves are products of a tree, yet they in turn operate for its welfare.

A natural product that is also a natural end must be related to itself reciprocally as both cause and effect. Besides mechanical causation,

a causal nexus can also be observed in accordance with a concept of reason (of ends) which, if considered as a series, would carry with it descending as well as ascending depen­dency, in which the thing which is on the one hand designated as an effect nevertheless deserves in ascent, the name of a cause of the same thing of which it is an effect.

(GM, 244)

The parts of a natural whole are reciprocally the cause and effect of their form.

Teleological causality has objective reality, but cannot be drawn from experience. We are led, Kant says, to a concept of nature as a system in accordance with the rule of ends. He is not, however, presenting nature as a system of intelligent design. The scientific study of the purposiveness of nature should be carried out in abstraction from the question whether the ends of nature are or are not the subject of anyone’s intention. We cannot infer the existence of an intelligent designer. It is simply that humans like us can­not conceive of the possibility of a teleological world except by conceiving an intentionally acting supreme cause. But the concept of God should not be brought into natural science.

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