10 - Organism: objective purposiveness

Summary

Strictly speaking, the organization of nature is not analogous with any causality we know.

(CJ 5:375)

What good is it? What is it for? What is it supposed to be? Does it work? These are the commonplace, ordinary-language queries of human agents. They are cognitive queries with practical intent, having to do with how we might use the entities we encounter in the world. Moreover, they betoken capacities in ourselves that we take, in an equally commonplace manner, to be actual and effectual. This is the sphere of “objective purposiveness”. Kant wrote: “the human's reason knows how to bring things into correspondence with his own arbitrary inspirations” (5:368). Once we posit human beings as possessing (and comprehending) this capacity for agency, whereby things of the world are assigned utility, such “relative” purposiveness appears to be thoroughly unproblematic, and Kant generally proceeds exactly in that manner. Yet we must not pass too swiftly over the point that it is only because we have posited the presence of an actual agent – the human being as an entity capable of finding, for its own sake, some utility in other entities in the world – that this very idea of a “relative purposiveness” in the world can go through (5:368). In commonplace considerations, that need hardly give us pause. But when we are trying to understand the transcendental strictures of Kant's critical philosophy regarding knowledge claims, we have reason to go a bit more slowly.