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6 - The Domain of Nature as System: Ends
Kristi Sweet, Texas A & M University
Book:

Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment

Published online:

07 August 2023

Print publication:

09 February 2023, pp 157-181
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Summary

Chapter 6 turns to the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It traces Kant’s remarkable line of argumentation from our encounters with living beings (organisms) to culture. Our encounters with living beings justify the use of teleology as a principle to organize our mechanistic inquiries into science. It further allows for us to judge nature, as a whole, as a system. This system, as we come to see, is oriented not only by human life, but specifically by the work nature can do to discharge human beings from its order. This chapter argues that if beautiful things remind us we belong in the world, there is a dialectical reversal in teleology suggesting that we do not belong to the natural order. This comes out in Kant’s discussions of culture and of the sublime, which are ways nature appears to discharge us from its influence. Nature thus supports our moral vocation by releasing us from its influence over us.