# Nature Looks Designed. Is It? Speaker: Reed Winegar Course: Kant’s Three Questions Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-nature-looks-designed-is-it Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-nature-looks-designed-is-it/transcript/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utcz61RuHEU When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL. In this lecture, Reed Winegar explores Kant's complex treatment of natural teleology across his career, with a focus on the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The lecture begins by situating Kant's interest in teleology within the broader architecture of the three Critiques, particularly the gulf between freedom and nature. Winegar then traces Kant's engagement with physico-theology from the early Beweisgrund through the first Critique's rejection of traditional arguments for God's existence. The heart of the lecture examines how the third Critique develops a nuanced position on organisms as self-organizing beings that resist mechanical explanation, while also resisting the physico-theological argument. Winegar analyzes Kant's discussion of the intuitive understanding, the three options regarding organisms and the supersensible, and why teleological thinking remains necessary despite its limits. The lecture concludes by showing how Kant's account of teleology ultimately connects to the highest good, unifying our practical and theoretical engagements with the world. ## Natural Teleology in the Critique of Judgment The focus of this lecture is going to be Kant's views regarding natural teleology, which play a very large and major role in the third and final critique, namely the *Critique of the Power of Judgment*. I'm going to say a little bit in the beginning to situate some of Kant's interest in the topic of teleology. And then we'll be looking at the very nuanced take that he has regarding natural teleology, where on the one hand, he's certainly a critic of a lot of traditional views of natural teleology, but he also retains a certain conception of natural teleology in his philosophy as well. ## The Gulf Between Freedom and Nature Kant is very famous for talking about the relationship between freedom and nature. And Kant himself claims that in his writings before the third critique that there's a way in which he has separated freedom and nature such that there seems to be a kind of gulf between the realms of freedom and the realms of nature. In Kant's theoretical philosophy, he argues that for all objects of possible experience, all such objects are subject to the law of cause and effect. Everything is causally determined. He argues, however, at the same time that beyond the realm of experience, we as things in themselves might very well possess free will, a kind of independence from that natural causal determinism. He also goes at some points to claim that we have not just the possibility of free will, but we have this practical, he sometimes says practical knowledge of our own free will. But nevertheless, there's a divorce between the natural laws of nature and then our status as free beings subject to the moral law. ## Bridging the Gulf: The Highest Good To some extent, you might think that Kant aims to bridge this gulf in his discussions of the highest good. In the second critique, discussion of the highest good, Kant has given an argument there that we should see a conformity between the moral law and then the natural laws, causal laws of the natural world. Because in the second critique, he had argued that we should believe that God exists as the creator of nature and has created nature in such a way that at least in the very long run of things, the highest good will be realized as the moral law demands, so seeing an accordance between the demands of morality and the laws of nature. Nevertheless, in the third critique, Kant indicates that this gulf hasn't really been fully bridged or properly bridged. And you might wonder, what is it exactly that he thinks remains as a concern or remains as a gap between the two? One way of understanding part of the project of the third critique is to see Kant as taking his earlier arguments to have shown that simply from a practical perspective or a practical viewpoint, we're licensed or justified in believing in a conformity of nature and morality, but that we need something more than just that practical viewpoint or practical outlook. After all, when we just look at the world around us, nature might seem to us massively indifferent to the moral law or to moral demands. It could be the case that the voice of practical reason is, you should believe that nature's in accord with moral demands. But when we look at the world around us and see what appears to be just total indifference, then we might start to question that voice of practical reason. We might start to wonder if practical reason is lying to us or if we really should be adopting the viewpoint of practical reason. In the third critique, what Kant seems to want is he seems to want to start from a merely theoretical consideration of the natural world and to show actually that a merely theoretical consideration of the natural world ultimately takes us to a viewpoint that accords with the viewpoint that practical reason had led us to in the second critique. So that our experience of the natural world need not simply seem to be in tension with the claims of practical reason, but rather there's aspects of the natural world that ultimately lead us to the same sort of endpoint or perspective that the practical viewpoint had initially pointed us to. Kant's discussions of teleology in the third critique are embedded within this larger overall project of thinking about the relationship between the natural world and the moral law, and looking for ways in which our theoretical consideration of nature can nevertheless lead us to see nature as a moral arena, in accordance with the moral law. So what I'll do then is I will talk about his views on teleology, and just articulate them on their own. And then at the end, we'll bring back in a bit of the relationship to morality and the way in which the discussion of teleology is related to this larger project of the third critique. ## Physico-Theology in the Eighteenth Century Discussions of natural teleology in the eighteenth century were very heavily connected with discussions of physico-theology and the physico-theological argument for the existence of God. We know that Kant has a very famous criticism of the ontological argument for God's existence in the first critique. And we know that he also has a famous criticism of the cosmological argument for the existence of God in the first critique, and that he also criticizes physico-theology in the first critique. What's important, though, to recognize is that Kant sees an important difference between the ontological and cosmological arguments on the one hand and the physico-theological argument on the other. Along with a number of other eighteenth-century contemporaries, Kant seems to think that the ontological argument and the cosmological argument are these esoteric philosophical arguments that are just of interest to these academic philosophers at the universities, that nobody has ever actually come to something like a religious commitment on the basis of these philosophical arguments, the ontological and cosmological arguments. They're almost like philosophical novelties in a way. Whereas he thinks that the physico-theological argument has actually had a lot more purchase on everyday people's religious commitments or religious beliefs. And so even though in a lot of the twentieth century reception of Kant, emphasis has been placed on Kant as the critic of the ontological argument, there's a certain way in which, for his own contemporaries, what Kant really needs to be providing if he wants to be providing a criticism of traditional arguments for the existence of God is a thorough criticism of the physico-theological argument. And so the discussion of teleology in the third critique, I would suggest, should be seen as part of a development of Kant's overall critical attitude towards the physico-theological argument for the existence of God. What we'll see is that Kant's attitude towards physico-theology is highly ambivalent. It's ambivalent in that there's ways in which he's very critical of it, but there's also ways in which he doesn't think that human beings can fully get away from it. There's ways in which he thinks that certain aspects of it should be rejected and are maybe harmful, but also ways in which he sees certain aspects of it as morally salutary. So we're going to have to be very careful in appreciating the double-edged, double-sided aspect of Kant's take on teleology and its relationship to physico-theology, and thinking about this aspect of Kant's thought. Kant's interest in teleology was a very long-seeded interest. It's not something that suddenly emerged with his writing of the third critique. Rather, there's a lot of discussion of teleology in Kant's, going back to Kant's pre-critical writings from the 1750s and 1760s. One text in which we find a very developed exposition of Kant's early views on natural teleology is a text from 1763, *The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of God*, which is usually known as the *Beweisgrund*, and so I'm just going to call it the *Beweisgrund*. ## Early Views: The Beweisgrund and Possibility Proof In the *Beweisgrund*, Kant develops the following position. In the *Beweisgrund*, Kant already rejects the traditional ontological argument. He already rejects the view that existence is a predicate that can be seen as contained in the concept of God, that we can infer the existence of God from the mere concept of God as the most perfect being or most real being. But at this stage in his career, he's still optimistic about the possibility of providing philosophical arguments in favor of knowledge of God's existence. And so he develops a different argument for God's existence, which is oftentimes referred to as his possibility proof, where he argues that we should claim to know that God exists as the ground of all possibilities. What he has in mind is the following: in order for something to be possible, it needs to be the case that the concept of that thing is not contradictory. And so in order for something to be possible, it needs to be the case that there are various predicates that hold for that thing, where those predicates are not in contradiction with one another. Kant claims that we need some source, some ground for the predicates that belong to the concept of a thing, and he identifies this ground, that's the source of the predicates, with God. And he argues, in short, that it's necessarily the case that things are possible. The only way for things to be possible is if they're not contradictory. The only way for things to not be contradictory is for there to be these predicates that aren't contradicting one another, and the only way for there to be those predicates is for there to be some source of those predicates. And he makes a further argument that we need to see that source of all these predicates as a single necessary supreme being with a mind and a will. In other words, that we need to see the source of all these predicates as God. Now this is a very abstract argument, and it's an argument whose ultimate fate in Kant's philosophy is unclear. But it's one that he's certainly endorsing at this stage in his career. I think a helpful way to understand the argument is when Kant's talking about these possibilities and these concepts, to see him as talking about the essences of things, that something's possible when it has an essence. And in order to have an essence, that essence can't be contradictory. And those essences need to have some ground. There needs to be something that accounts for why there are these various essences. And Kant's claim is that we should see God as the ground of the different essences of things. ## Necessary Teleology: Harmony of Essences But what's important is that Kant does not want to claim that God creates the essences of things. The view that God creates the essences of things or that God creates necessary truths, that's a view that's oftentimes in the early modern period associated with Descartes, who had made this claim. And Kant clearly wants in the *Beweisgrund* to reject that kind of view. He thinks that the essences of things depend on God's nature, that God's nature is their ground, but they're not things that God creates because God creates through his will, and the essences of things do not depend for their existence on God's will. And so we get in the *Beweisgrund* these two important notions of dependence on God, what Kant refers to as moral dependence, not moral in the sense of good or bad or ethical, but moral in the sense of depending on God's will, and then non-moral dependence, things that just depend on God's nature. Kant argues that because the essences of things have their ground in God, and because of God's general status as a supreme perfect being, that there will be a harmony between the various essences of things, some kind of agreement between the essences of things. And that this harmony will ultimately lead to certain kinds of teleological, purposive connections in the natural world. An example that he likes is the example of winds on tropical coasts, where he thinks that the ways that the winds move on the coasts during the day and the night have this salutary effect, that they tend to cool things during the day, but then the cool air goes out over the ocean at night, and so it's not too cold during the nighttime. So there's this kind of regulation, natural regulation of the temperature that then obviously has a kind of beneficial effect for people and animals living on these coasts. What's really important for Kant's position here is that he doesn't think that any aspect of divine will or divine choice or divine artisanship is at work here beyond just God's mere decision to create wind. Once, on Kant's view, God creates the relevant matter, then just given the essence of this stuff, just given what this stuff essentially is, it will inevitably act and operate in such a way that you get this particular kind of effect. So for Kant then, there's a kind of teleology in the natural world at this stage in his thought, that is not seen as a product of divine will or divine choice, rather is seen in terms of what he's calling this non-moral dependence on God. God's the ground of all the essences, the essences harmonize with one another. Given that harmony, if things exist that have those essences, then those things will act in ways that accord with those essences and will end up leading to various kinds of purposive, orderly, teleological outcomes in the natural world. So this is a notion of natural teleology that is clearly very heavily divorced from emphasis on choice and will and artisanship. Although it's not entirely divorced obviously from a theological context, in that Kant's account for why the essences harmonize with one another is that they're all grounded in God. A lot of the purposive teleological connections and relationships that Kant thinks people find in the natural world, he thinks result from this kind of teleology. And I'm going to call this necessary teleology because it's something that's just following from the essences of things. ## Contingent Teleology: Organisms as Exceptions But in the *Beweisgrund*, he does not think that every kind of apparently purposive organization that we find in the natural world can be accounted for on the basis of necessary teleology. In particular, he thinks that the structures of plants and animals, organisms, are such that they can't be accounted for on the basis of necessary teleology. And so in addition to this necessary teleology in nature, he also says that there are certain arrangements that relative to the essences of things and the laws that follow from those essences are contingent in such a way that he thinks we should recognize that their existence does depend on God introducing special artifices or special provisions into nature to account for their existence. Again, plants and animals are what Kant has in mind here. So we also have then what we can call a contingent teleology. A teleology that exists only because of a choice on God's part to introduce special provisions into nature, a teleology that does not just follow merely from the essences of things. ## A New Physico-Theological Argument Now, in the *Beweisgrund*, Kant really liked this notion of necessary teleology, and he wanted to use it to give what he thought was a new and improved physico-theological argument. He noted at the time that many people thought that it would be a problem for physico-theological arguments if nature itself proved to be sufficient for producing the various items that we find in the natural world. Because a lot of traditional physico-theological arguments operated with a kind of God of the gaps view, where there's certain things that can't be explained by nature, certain gaps, and then God is introduced to fill those gaps to account for the things that nature on its own is assumed to be unable to account for. And so the argument for God from contingent teleology on its own would be that kind of a God of the gaps argument, that the plants and animals exist, nature on its own doesn't seem sufficient to account for them, so there must be some further ground of their existence with God, God's choice to create these things, introduce these special provisions into nature. The fewer gaps there are in nature, then the fewer arguments of that kind are available to the traditional metaphysician or philosopher. And so Kant recognizes that many of his contemporaries think that the more you try to show that everything just follows from the essences or from the nature of things, the bigger problem it is for traditional physico-theology. But at this stage in his career, what Kant says is, "That's only a problem for physico-theology if you're focused just on contingent teleology. If you accept my view, where there's this necessary teleology that's grounded on the essences of things, but the reason why the essences of things agree with one another such that you get this necessary teleology is that they all have their ground in God's existence. Then the more, so to say, naturalist view that the natures and essences of things account for everything we find, not everything, but account for the things we're finding in the natural world, is no longer something that's going to undermine physico-theology, but rather itself can be used for the purposes of physico-theology. Whenever you find a purposive relation just following from the natural laws of things, then that's reason to think there's a harmony between the essences of those things, and that's reason to think that God exists as the ground of that harmony." So this was his view in the *Beweisgrund*. In the first critique, Kant rejects, in some form, the physico-theological argument. In his general discussions of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, he provides a critique of physico-theology. There is a question, though, of how thoroughgoing the criticism of physico-theology in the first critique is. Kant emphasizes the following point. What he emphasizes in the first critique is that physico-theology cannot demonstrate the existence of God in the sense that physico-theology cannot demonstrate the existence of a supreme being. ## Critique of Physico-Theology in the First Critique What he notes, for example, is that physico-theology, let's say we're talking about an argument from the existence of plants and animals to the existence of God as needed for their creation. That's an argument that says that God needs to play a role in giving matter a certain form and giving matter a certain arrangement. Even if you accepted that argument, it would not get you to the claim that God exists as the creator of matter. God would only need to be seen potentially as having formed arranged matter, but not as having actually been the creator of matter. You might think that God could be like the Platonic Demiurge, in Plato's *Timaeus*, who just arranges the matter. And so that doesn't get you, even if you accept the argument, doesn't get you to a demonstration of the existence of a supreme being. In the first critique, Kant is using the name God to refer specifically to the kind of supreme being, and so you don't get on physico-theological grounds a demonstration of God's existence. He also will say that when you look at the world around you, even if you thought there needed to be some kind of divine being responsible in many ways for its arrangement, would you be licensed in claiming that that being had to be truly omnipotent rather than just very powerful? Would you be licensed in claiming that being had to be omniscient, all-wise, rather than just pretty knowledgeable and relatively wise? Would you really be able to get to those superlative sorts of predicates that you would need in order to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being? And Kant says no. You wouldn't ever have sufficient evidence in favor of claiming the existence of a supreme being rather than just a pretty powerful, pretty smart being. Now, what's maybe potentially surprising about the nature of these criticisms in the first critique is the extent to which they seem to be fairly limited. You might think that a metaphysician would be pretty happy to somehow prove the existence of a powerful and very smart supernatural being that had formed the arrangement of nature, even if the metaphysician wasn't able to prove that that being was literally omnipotent and omniscient. And so one might be surprised that Kant's criticism of physico-theology here in *The Critique of Pure Reason* is relatively limited, that it's just primarily focused on showing that we don't get a proof of God in the strict sense as a supreme being. If somebody had a different conception of God, was happy to call a more limited being God, then they might think Kant's argument here hasn't itself done much to show that God, in that sense, doesn't exist. ## Structure of Teleology in the Third Critique Kant returns to discussions of natural teleology, in an extended form in the third critique. The third critique has two major parts. The first part deals with aesthetics. The critique of the aesthetic power of judgment. That's where Kant talks about beauty and the sublime, fine art. And then the second major component deals with natural teleology, or the critique of the teleological power of judgment. There's ways in which Kant's views of teleology go beyond what he's argued in the earlier texts that I've been talking about, but also ways in which we see interesting continuity between his views and those earlier positions that he had. The conviction that Kant continues to maintain in the third critique is that we are not able, on the means of referring to merely mechanical laws of nature, to referring to just laws of necessity in nature, to account for the existence of organic beings. We've seen that's not by any means a new position on his part. That's a conviction he had in the pre-critical period. ## Organisms as Causes and Effects of Themselves And it's a conviction that by no means is unusual for someone like Kant in his time and place to have. Rather, it's the default scientific position of the time that natural laws, mechanical laws are not able on their own to account for the existence of plants and animals. There are some critics of this position. So someone like Hume in his *Dialogues concerning Natural Religion* pushes back against this view in some ways. But it's by and large the default position in eighteenth century life sciences. In the third critique, Kant begins, however, to articulate a very specific account of how to think about the nature of organic beings and an account of what's special about organic beings in virtue of which they can't be explained in terms of the merely mechanical laws of nature. And what he does is he introduces an account of organic beings that takes organic beings to be causes and effects of themselves. Kant thinks that organic beings are causes and effects of themselves in three ways. First, you have the organic being, and it is able to take in nourishment from its environment and to convert that nourishment and to grow and add the matter gained from that nourishment to its own body. So in this case, you have the organism. It's existing. And it counts as the cause of what's happening because it's what's taking in the nourishment and processing the nourishment. But there's also a way in which it is the effect of that causal process. It's the one that's growing. It's the one that's continuing to survive on the basis of taking in the nourishment. So we can see the organism here, Kant suggests, is in a sense both the cause and effect of itself. The second way in which Kant thinks organic beings are causes and effects of themselves is in the case of reproduction. You have an organic being, and then it produces offspring. And in this case, what we have is the species as instanced in one organic being as the cause, because it's producing the next generation. But the species is also the effect because the next generation, the offspring, are also members of the species. So at the species level, Kant suggests that we can see organic beings in terms of causes and effects of themselves. And then the third way that Kant refers to is in the case of regeneration, the case of regeneration, like healing, for example. So, if our body's damaged, then it has this ability to heal itself. It's the body here that is seen as, or the organic being here, that is seen as the cause of the healing. But obviously, what's produced is a part of the same organic being. And so here's another place where the organic being can be seen as a cause and effect of itself. Kant thinks that there's something extremely striking about the abilities of organic beings to do things like take in nourishment, grow, reproduce, heal, regenerate. And he thinks that these processes that take place in organic beings cannot be accounted for in terms of merely mechanical laws of nature. There's some interpretive debate about what Kant means when he is referring to mechanical laws of nature. But I personally think that what he has in mind when he's talking about mechanical laws of nature are undirected laws, blind laws, laws that would result, for example, from the essences of things, laws that aren't depending on any sort of special direction. I think that those laws of necessary teleology in the *Beweisgrund* would count as mechanical laws, even though those are mechanical laws that lead to teleological outcomes. So I don't think Kant's view is that mechanical laws and a kind of teleology are inherently in conflict. Rather, I think he embraces in that case that mechanical laws and teleological outcomes are fully compatible with one another. But he sees organic beings as a special case, given these almost miraculous powers that they have to generate themselves, reproduce themselves, grow, et cetera. And he thinks that those processes that take place in organic beings cannot be accounted for in terms of the mechanical laws of nature. ## Resisting the Physico-Theological Argument You might think then that what Kant needs to do, or what someone in Kant's position needs to do, is to commit themselves to a physico-theological argument. To say, look, there's certain things in nature that can't be explained on the basis of merely mechanical laws. There needs to be some explanation, some account of these things. If they can't be explained in terms of the mechanical laws of nature, then there must be special provisions that account for their existence. Those special provisions must have been inserted by God so that these beings could exist. So you might think that would be a tempting argument that Kant would feel himself backed into. But Kant now in the third critique very much wants to resist that kind of argument. Again, the extent to which he wanted to resist that kind of argument in the first critique is a little unclear. But now in the third critique, he seems very much to want to resist this physico-theological argument from the existence of organic beings to the claim that we know that there's some kind of powerful being that accounted for their existence. So how is it now that Kant wants to push back more strongly against that kind of physico-theological argument? What Kant does now is he stresses his general view that we are not able to have knowledge of the supersensible. We're not able to have knowledge of the ground of nature, and we can't, given that general prohibition, make an argument from the existence of organic beings to the claim to know that some divine being exists who has accounted for the existence of the plants and the animals. But that might not seem like the most convincing argument for a critic of Kant, because you might imagine that the metaphysical critic of Kant would come in and say something like, "Look, Kant, I know that you're making these sweeping claims that we can't have knowledge of the supersensible, but here's a plant, and it had to come from somewhere. And the only account we can give of its existence is one that says it resulted from God introducing these special provisions into nature. It must be the case then that God exists. It must be the case then that we're licensed to claim that we know that God, or at least some kind of limited divine being, very powerful divine being, exists." And so we might think that Kant needs to say more, to satisfy this kind of potential metaphysician, metaphysical critic. And another strain of thought then that Kant develops in his third critique discussion of teleology might seem a bit better positioned for arguing against this critic. ## The Intuitive Understanding: Paragraphs 76-77 What I have in mind here are some very famous passages, paragraph seventy-six and seventy-seven of the third critique, where Kant introduces into this discussion the notion of a potential non-human understanding that he refers to as an intuitive understanding. And where it seems like he wants to make this appeal to undermine this sort of claim being presented by the traditional metaphysician in favor of the notion that there must be special provisions in nature, and then God must exist as a result. What's the argument then that Kant presents? For Kant, we have a particular kind of understanding that he refers to as a discursive understanding. What's characteristic of a discursive understanding is that it's an understanding that operates with concepts. For Kant, concepts are what he calls general representations. So just take a basic example, like a concept chair. The concept chair is not picking out any one individual single chair. Rather, it's general in that all the different chairs fall under the concept chair. For Kant, concepts are a kind of limited representation. He emphasizes that concepts leave out information that's specific to any particular individual. So if I'm coming up with the concept chair, maybe I'm looking at a bunch of different chairs in the room, and then I am abstracting away what's different from the chairs, where I'm left with what the chairs all mutually have in common. And so I'm leaving out information that's specific to one chair versus another. And then in leaving out that information, I'm left with this limited representation. It's limited in the sense it's arised from limiting the amount of information. I've left some stuff out, and I'm left with this general representation. Our minds operate by utilizing concepts, these kinds of general representations, and subsuming intuition under these general concepts. But there could be another kind of understanding, or at least this other kind of understanding is at least logically possible. We can't rule out the possibility of this other kind of understanding, which Kant refers to as an intuitive understanding. The notion of intuitive understanding is a contrast notion. For Kant, we seem to want to arrive at the notion of this intuitive understanding by negating various aspects of our own discursive understanding. Kant claims that an intuitive understanding here would be an understanding that goes from the whole to the parts. So an intuitive understanding would be an understanding that represents the totality as a whole and then just represents all the different particulars within that overall totality. When God wills to create the world, God knows everything that God has willed to create. And it's not like God first sees this part and then this part and then this part. Rather, God, in a single glance, sees everything that God has willed to create. And so God is presented, we might say, with this representation of the whole and cognizes all the different particulars and their relations to one another within the context of that overall whole. Kant thinks that in regards to organic beings, that for an intuitive understanding that's cognizing all the parts within their place in the whole, that the intuitive understanding does not recognize any aspects of that whole as contingent. So any arrangement of parts that's located in that totality is not taken to be a contingent arrangement of parts. You might wonder why not. Why would you think that you could think that you have the parts that are in the whole, you're seeing the whole, you're seeing the parts in the whole. Great. Why is it the case, though, that the parts don't count as contingent? Why couldn't the whole have been arranged differently? My suggestion here, and I'll note that this is like an interpretive suggestion rather than something that the text screams out, is to stress that for Kant, an intuitive understanding is an unlimited understanding rather than a limited understanding. That limited intellectual representations are general concepts. An abstraction which gives rise to general concepts is a kind of limitation. It leaves out information. And my suggestion would be that Kant's argument here is that the only way that God could look at the actual whole and represent the arrangement of parts as contingent would be if God engaged in an act of abstracting from the actual given arrangement of parts. Or you might imagine, for example, that you have the whole collection of parts. And then I'm like, "Well, this could have been different," like, this could have not been here. But in order to say that, what I have to do is I have to abstract away from the presence of this thing in the overall representation. Now there's just like a blank here. I've left out information from what's present, and an intuitive understanding, by definition, doesn't do that. An intuitive understanding is this understanding that's this unlimited understanding. It doesn't operate with general representations. It doesn't operate with abstraction. And since it doesn't operate with abstraction, it's not able to represent things as contingent the way that we, with our discursive understandings, can represent things as contingent. What's the upshot then? ## Three Options on Organisms and the Supersensible Whatever account one ultimately provides for why Kant's intuitive understanding doesn't represent things as contingent, the upshot of the conclusion is that from this perspective of an intuitive understanding at least, the arrangement of the organic beings would not be contingent, would not be seen as contingent. And since it would not be seen as contingent, it would not be a case of contingent teleology. And so it wouldn't be a contingent teleological arrangement that required appeal to something like divine choices or special provisions to account for its existence. You might wonder, though, is Kant once again giving us a somewhat limited criticism of physico-theology? Because you might wonder, well, is Kant now basically presenting us with a choice between saying that organic beings depend on God's choices as option A, and option B as, no, organic beings maybe don't depend on God's choices, but still depend on God's act of creation. Or maybe that organic beings don't depend on God's choices to insert special provisions, but nevertheless, they still depend on the existence of God as an intuitive understanding. And again, a traditional metaphysician might be kind of fine with saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine." Kant himself, as a traditional metaphysician of a sort in the *Beweisgrund*, had been happy to argue from non-contingent cases of teleology, those cases of necessary teleology, to the existence of God. Again, Kant doesn't speak explicitly to this kind of worry, as in the way that we might like. But one could see him as potentially entertaining the following sort of view, that there are on the table three options. There could be what Kant sees as the traditional option, where you have these organic beings, and it's the case that there is a God who has introduced special provisions into nature that accounts for the existence of those beings. Or it could be the case that there's a God who's an intuitive understanding in Kant's sense and for whom there is no contingent arrangement in nature. And so we take there to be that God existing, but we don't take it to be the case that there's contingent teleology in nature, that we have eradicated the appearance of contingent teleology. Now everything is non-contingent. But we still have in the picture God as the ground of things. And then a final picture would be one that said something like, "Look, there might not be an intuitive understanding, might not be the case that things in themselves were created by some divine being, and it might not be the case that they're known by any divine being. But it might nevertheless be the case that they exist as this whole in which the particulars have their place. And if there were a being able to know that whole, it wouldn't recognize the relationship between those arrangements as contingent." And, to say that we can't claim that there is such an intuitive understanding, we can't claim that that intuitive understanding did create whatever whole exists, but there might be such a whole. And if an intuitive understanding were able to cognize that particular whole, then it, in knowing that whole, would not recognize contingency in that whole. With a default assumption that an intuitive understanding would be seeing things as they really are, knowing things as they really are. If it's knowing things in a way where there's not contingency, then there's not really contingency. So in sum, it seems that on the one hand, Kant's appeal to an intuitive understanding is serving to push back against the notion that the existence of organic beings depends on any kinds of special provisions in nature. You could have the view that Kant has rejected special provisions, but nevertheless is still retaining very much a view that the existence of organic beings depends on some kind of God, this intuitive understanding. Or perhaps you could see Kant as trying to make the further claim that we really don't know what the supersensible is like. It might be the case that there's no contingency in these things, even if we're not committed to saying that the things are being cognized by some kind of intuitive understanding. ## Why Teleological Thinking Remains Necessary Well, at this point, what Kant has done is he's given us a kind of negative position, a pushing back against strong claims in favor of contingent teleology in nature, strong claims in favor of a kind of traditional physico-theology. Does Kant want to reject physico-theology entirely? And the answer to that question is no. Kant thinks that even though we recognize that reality might be such that the arrangement of the organisms is not contingent, that because we don't have intuitive understandings, we are in a position where we can't help but need to still think of these arrangements in teleological terms. We recognize that this way that we need to think about organic beings very well might not correspond to the way that things truly, really, ultimately are. But the structures of our understandings are such that we're in a position where we can't help but need to think about organic beings in teleological terms. And what kind of teleology does Kant have in mind here? Kant now seems very emphatically committed to the notion that whatever way we're thinking about teleology needs to be a way that we're able to grasp. And the way in which Kant standardly tries to provide means for us to grasp ideas of reason is via appeals to analogies and symbols. And so in this context, Kant makes an appeal to analogies and symbols to articulate the way in which we are supposed to represent things teleologically to ourselves. Again, this isn't a claim about what the things are really like, but just a claim about how we represent them to ourselves in a way that we're able to get some kind of grasp or comprehension of. The issue is that Kant in the third critique seems to offer two different potential analogies or symbols. On the one hand, Kant oftentimes seems to indicate an artisan analogy, that the relationship between a divine mind and an organism would be such that it would be similar to the relationship between a human artisan and an artifact. And we're going to go ahead and represent this, for example, notion of a divine intuitive understanding in terms of a human artisan. And then represent things in nature symbolically in terms of artifacts. ## Two Symbols: Artisan vs. Vitalist Life Analogy But at other times, Kant seems to suggest a different symbol or a different kind of analogy. Namely, Kant recognizes that we have a control over our bodies, where we take it to be the case that our minds are controlling our bodies, and that our minds have this ability to alter the direction of our bodies. And Kant refers to this principle of spontaneity that we have because of our minds as life. And he sometimes seems to suggest that the right kind of analogy or symbol for whatever processes are taking place in these organic beings accounting for their existence is the symbol of life in the sense of representing them in terms of if there was a mind resident in the organism that was controlling its different processes and accounting for the generation and the healing and stuff like that. The background for this type of view, this symbol, this potential analogy, is the eighteenth century vitalist tradition, associated with people like Stahl. Stahl held that human beings have both bodies and souls, and that the soul, not necessarily the conscious part of the soul, but some part of the soul, was responsible for regulating various aspects and processes that, as the body processes that take place in the body. And so one might think that in contrast to the artisan symbol, we get this alternative vitalist life symbol, for representing the teleology in the organisms or for grasping our notion of teleology in the organisms. One view would be that one of these is right and the other is wrong. Another view would be that Kant presents them both and they're in conflict with one another, and we have a big problem on our hands. And another view would be that Kant sees these two symbols as roughly compatible with one another. And I suspect that Kant has in mind the third option. Perhaps, and again, this is not something that the text itself clearly dictates, but perhaps what Kant has in mind is the following sort of view. That we picture the teleology that we are forced to regard organic beings in terms of as though it were resulting from a mental power in the organism. But we see the fact that the organisms have this mental soul-like power as itself depending on having been created by a divine being that has created this power and has bestowed a direction on this power. And that's a position that one does find in various early modern writers. For example, Cudworth has this position. There's plastic powers in nature that form things, but it's God who has created these plastic in the sense of forming powers. And so Kant's analogy symbol for representing the teleology that we're forced to think in the organic beings might be similar to that sort of picture. That it's a picture of God as a kind of artisan creating certain kinds of special artifacts, these mental-ish powers that are then resident in the organic beings and account for the different processes the way that someone like Stahl thought that the soul accounts for the different processes in the beings. Now, I said that Kant was kind of ## From Teleology to the Highest Good Always interested in teleology and natural teleology, but that in the context of the third critique, he seems interested in it for a particular reason, namely for the kind of relationship it has to thinking about the correspondence of the natural world with the demands of the moral law. And so the thing I'll conclude with then is just charting how Kant takes this picture that he's arrived at, this complicated, nuanced picture that he's arrived at, how he takes it to relate back to this central issue of the relationship of nature and the moral law. What Kant says at this point is he says, even though it might very well be the case that organic beings do not depend for their existence on teleology, we have to think of them in teleological terms. And then this leads us to need to think of nature as a teleological system of ends. So we think of the organic beings as natural ends. That then leads us to see them as members of a system, a system of ends. And then we're posed with the question of why does this system of ends exist? It seems like there needs to be some ultimate end that accounts for the fact that we have this system of ends. Indeed, it seems like there needs to be in the picture some final end that's the reason why all of nature as this system was created in the first place. And Kant claims that we should see that final end of creation as the human being under moral laws. That if we're to ask what would be a candidate for something that could be the reason why nature was created, what could be a final end that could serve as the reason why nature was created, Kant has the view that the only candidate is the notion of the human being as a free being under moral laws. That sounds extremely anthropocentric, and to some extent, that is an aspect of Kant's position here. But we should at the same time recognize that when he's talking about human beings, it's not obvious he's specifically talking about the biological species, Homo sapiens. Kant's very happy to say that there very well might be, indeed he thinks there are, alien beings on other planets. Some of those beings might very well be free and moral beings, rational beings. By Kant's lights, when he's talking about human beings as free beings under moral laws, it seems what he really has in mind is rational beings as free beings under moral laws. Human being in something more like the traditional definition of rational animal. And other rational animals on other planets would count as human beings in an extended sense. If there were other species on the planet Earth that were rational in Kant's sense and free moral beings, then they would count as human beings in this sense. Doesn't seem like he's specifically tied to a strictly biological sort of conception of human being here. So at the end of the day then, what he's saying is he's saying that we should think of free moral beings under moral laws as the end of creation, final end of creation. When he says that we should see free beings under moral laws as the final end of creation, we can interpret that notion of under moral laws as not simply claiming that human beings have moral obligations and stand under the moral law in that sense, but in the notion that human beings will receive what the moral law demands, that they stand under moral laws in the sense that nature is being directed according to the moral law, that they will receive that which the moral law demands. And so we shouldn't be surprised then that Kant quickly moves into a discussion of the highest good. The notion that the moral law demands that human beings receive happiness, the happiness of which they're worthy, and that this then constitutes the highest good. So the picture that we get in the third critique then is one where we start from this merely theoretical consideration of nature, and we recognize that in nature we see these organic beings. And although we can't claim to know that these organic beings really rely on teleology in some sort of strong sense, nevertheless, in thinking and regarding these organic beings, we're naturally led to a picture of nature as having been created for this final end of human beings under moral laws, which includes the notion of nature being directed in such a way that human beings will receive the happiness of which they are worthy in proportion to their virtue, the highest good. And so in the second critique, starting from the practical perspective, we arrived at this view of nature directed towards the highest good. We had the worry that, well, maybe when we look at nature itself, nature doesn't seem to indicate for us anything similar. There's some huge divorce between nature as we see it, nature as it's presented to us in theoretical inquiry, and the practical perspective. But Kant thinks that no, no, no, in the case of organic beings, we're led to the same sort of picture that we had from the practical perspective as well. And so there's an agreement then between our practical and theoretical engagements with the world. Both of the ways of engaging with the world lead us to the same general overall worldview or outlook, which for Kant is the worldview or outlook in which we should be orienting our lives and orienting our various paths. Thanks.