3 - Reflexive Judgment and Wolffian Embryology: Kant's Shift between the First and the Third Critiques

Summary

Abstract

The problem of generation has been, for Kant scholars, a kind of test of Kant's successive concepts of fi nality. Although he deplores the absence of a naturalistic account of purposiveness (and hence of reproduction) in his pre-critical writings, in the First Critique he nevertheless presents a “reductionist” view of fi nality in the Transcendental Dialectic's Appendices. This fi nality can be used only as a language, extended to the whole of nature, but it must be fi lled with mechanistic explanations. Therefore, in 1781, mechanism and teleology are synonymous languages. Despite the differences between its two authors, the Wolffi an embryology, exposed in the Theorie der Generation (1764) and debated by Blumenbach's dissertation on Bildungstrieb, enabled Kant to resolve the philosophical problem of natural generation, and subsequently to determine what is proper to the explanation of living processes. Thus, in the Third Critique he could give another account of purposiveness, restricted to the organism and more realist than his former one; this philosophical reappraisal of purposiveness in embryology required the new concept of “simply refl exive judgment” and the correlated notion of “regulative principle.” Thus framed, this naturalized teleology provided some answers to the Kantian problem of order and contingency after the end of classical (Leibnizian) metaphysics.

Introduction

The First and the Third Critiques deal with purposiveness. Although sometimes convergent, their accounts differ slightly. Here I want to clarify the need for a reassessment of purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment, and the changing meaning of this concept. I argue that one central motive for this shift is the embryological question and the epigenetist theory, and I show that this problem is longstanding in Kant's thinking. But the issue raised by this problem and its eventual solution deeply concerns some major conceptual problems, which stem from Kant's criticism of Leibnizian metaphysics.

I begin by giving the background of the concept of purpose in the dialectics of the First Critique, which can be traced back to some of the precritical writings.