The Problem of Biological Experience in Kant’s Critique of Judgement

Walter Benjamin’s early ‘Program for the Coming Philosophy’ designates the problem faced by ‘every great epistemology’ as linking ‘the question of the certainty of knowledge that is lasting’ with ‘the question of the integrity of an experience that is ephemeral’ (PCP 100). The previous chapter argued that Kant’s transcendental idealism – and subsequently Cohen’s critical idealism – only managed to ‘give a valid explanation’

for the former, rescuing the eidetic approach of Platonic philosophy through a transcendental methodology concerned primarily with universals in the context of knowledge. Because in doing so Kant could secure knowledge only for a reality of ‘a low, perhaps the lowest, order’, he was unable to incorporate the integrity and particularity of the ephemeral. Concerned only with the universal formality of the objectively necessary, the Kantian concept of experience is unable to integrate the majority of phenomenological experience into its system.

The ‘Program for the Coming Philosophy’ suggests that the resources for postulating an alternative model for the possibility of historical experience might be sought in Kant’s third Critique which deals with judgement not in the context of the mathematical sciences, but in its application to artistic and biological experience. When Benjamin claims that one of the greatest problems of Kant’s philosophy concerns the third part of the system and ‘the question of those scientific types of experience (the biological ones)’, he acknowledges that Kant did not ground such experiences in the Logic and raises the question of why he did not do so (PCP 107). By considering the problem of life within Kant’s Critique of Judgement, it will become apparent that the answer to this question lies in the radically unsettling character of biological experience for Kant’s critical metaphysics of nature. This exposes the architectonic of the Kantian system to the troubling possibility of a speculative intuition. The third Critique wards off such a possibility only by insisting on the merely regulative status of the consequent judgement, effectively denying scientific value to the nascent biology of Kant’s age.

Following the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant becomes increasingly concerned with integrating into his scientific system those experiences which evade the conceptual grasp of the mechanically orientated categories of the understanding, from ethical and historical to aesthetic and biological types of experience. In the Critique of Judgement, concerned

with exploring the latter two, he identifies the concept of natural purpose as ‘that stranger in natural science’ which, in the words of Timothy Lenoir, force him to conclude that ‘the life sciences must rest upon a different set of assumptions and that a methodological strategy different from the physical sciences must be worked out if biology is to enter upon the royal road to science’.¹ In Kant’s example, a tree considered as the effective cause of its species in reproduction, of itself in growth, and of its organs in preservation, must also involve an idea of a final cause, in order to explain the ultimate self-organization of, respectively, the reproductive processes, formless plant material, and interdependent organs.

What Kant terms a “natural purpose” is therefore ‘both cause and effect of itself’, or more precisely: ‘the possibility of its parts (as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend on their relation to the whole’, and furthermore, ‘the parts of the thing [must] combine into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and effect of their form’ (CJ Ak. 370 & 373). Natural purposes possess a unique and ‘paradoxical status’ within Kant’s system, being something given in experience which, according to Alberto Toscano, ‘cannot be an object of knowledge, and allows for no direct representation, no subsumption under a concept’.² The faculty of understanding now finds itself ‘not simply incapable of anticipating the form of the organism (which is no reason for alarm, considering our cognitive finitude) but cannot even formulate its possibility’.³ More than this, Kant’s insistence on the uncognizable character of biological organization renders it uniquely inexplicable: unlike the kind of speculative concepts which arise from the transcendental use of reason (the rational Ideas which are thinkable, but not intuitable), natural purposes are nonetheless given to sensibility and therefore intuitable but not thinkable. The problem of biological “life” in Kant therefore corresponds to the seemingly impossible experience of a speculative intuition.

This curious status of natural purposes reveals what Toscano identifies as ‘a certain instability at the heart of the project of transcendental philosophy’, which threatens to undermine not only the stability of science, but the scientific foundations upon which Kant’s transcendental system is constructed.⁴ The ‘essential difficulty’ that troubles Kantian biology is ‘that mechanical modes of explanation’, which proved so effective within natural philosophy and its Newtonian understanding of reality, are nonetheless

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [hereafter CJ], trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1987), Ak. 390; Timothy Lenoir, ‘The eternal laws of form: morphotypes and the conditions of existence in Goethe’s biological thought’, Journal of Social and Biological Structures: Studies in Human Social Biology, 7, 4, (1984), p.319.

2 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze, (Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.30 & 24.

3 Ibid., p.31.

4 Ibid., p.22.

‘inadequate to deal with many processes of the organic realm, where the relationship of cause to effect is completely different from that encountered in the inorganic realm’.⁵ Singular organisms therefore seem to fall within a strange hinterland between the principles of natural mechanism and rational freedom, and hence outside the proper conceptual domain integral to scientific understanding as conceived in the first Critique.⁶ Just as it seems impossible to Kant that there could be a science of aesthetics, so it appears unfeasible from his historical perspective that there could be a “science” of life.

However, Kant does not consider the troubling question of whether his own conception of nature and the mechanistic categories of the understanding which govern it might be amiss. In order to preserve the systematic unity of his transcendental philosophy, he is therefore required to give an explanation for this limitation which accounts for the impossible appearance of natural purposes, and he seeks to do so without undermining the universal applicability of the metaphysics of nature which he had secured for Newtonian science in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant manages to preserve his existing concept of scientific experience by assuming that a different kind of exhibition must be involved in biological experience and sets about explaining this through a diagnosis of the conceptual limitations of human understanding and an appeal to a reflective operation of judgement. The anomalous contingency of natural organisms is therefore explained by ‘the particular that judgement has to bring under the universal supplied by the concepts of the understanding’ (CJ Ak.

406). ‘For the universal supplied by our (human) understanding does not determine the particular; therefore...the variety of ways in which they may come before our perception is contingent’, and it is ‘this contingency that makes it so difficult for our understanding to unify the manifold in nature so as to [give rise to] cognition’. Consequently, the contingency of the particular follows from the limitations of the abstract universal concepts – defined as ‘analytically universal’ – utilised by the human intellect. Whilst they are capable of determining the common characteristics of things, they leave the a posteriori content of the particular undetermined.

This limitation follows from Kant’s separation of the Transcendental Logic from the Aesthetic, and preserves the human understanding as a “power of concepts” but in doing so comes perilously close to permitting a seemingly speculative intuition of a deeper underlying freedom behind phenomena. Kant therefore explains this concept of natural purpose as one reflectively borrowed from the rational concept of human

5 Ibid., pp.317-8.

6 ‘But teleology does not seem to belong to natural science. For natural science requires determinative and not merely reflective principles in order to indicate objective bases for natural effects....So teleology as a science does not belong to any doctrine, but belongs only to critique’ (CJ Ak. 417).

intentionality or purposes, and in this way evades the question of the reality – in this instance, both its transcendental and its empirical reality – of such a concept by referring to its merely regulative status (CJ Ak. 406). In a passage which is perhaps indebted to Kant’s Piestist upbringing, he goes on to draw a distinction between an archetypal and an ectypal understanding of the world which mirrors that drawn more generally in Protestant theology between the archetypal theology of God’s self-revelation (i.e., theology in the infinite mind of the Creator) and the ectypal theology of God’s revelation to his finite creatures (i.e., theology as we apprehend it).⁷ Kant hypothesises an intellectus archetypus capable of possessing an ‘intuition of the whole as a whole’ and consequently of grasping the particular parts and their relation to the formal whole via “synthetical universals” or

“archetypes”.⁸ Such intuitions are denied to our discursive understanding with its power of concepts, precisely because the “archetypal intellect” ‘does not (by means of concepts) proceed from the universal to the particular and thus to the individual’ (CJ Ak. 406).

Toscano notes how the introduction of this opposition and the diversion into reflective judgement is enforced ‘for the sake of the systematic unity of critique and its theistic destination’: ‘the absolute separation of life from matter...the heteronomous nature of causation; the a priori character of the grounds of scientific knowledge; the subordination of biological evidence to mechanism as the legislating authority in the realm of appearances’.⁹ It permits Kant to preserve both the Newtonian certainty of a mechanistic world of forces and the necessarily imperfect understanding of finite creatures. To the extent that Cohen’s fully-fledged idealism moves beyond the finite capacities imposed by Kant, it sacrifices the unity of the mechanical categories and recovers a pure logic whose dialectical structure introduces concepts of “origin” and

7 ‘Reformist orthodox writers...spoke of “archetypal theology” (theologia archetypa) as the perfect and complete theology which exists in God’s own mind, and they described the fragmented and incomplete theology of human beings as an “ectypal theology” (theologia ectypa) which partially and imperfectly reflects its divine archetype’ (Benjamin Myers, Milton’s Theology of Freedom, (Berlin & New York, Walter de Gruyer, 2006), p.73). Due to the ‘necessary chasm between God and creature, as taught by the great reformer John Calvin...God must accommodate Himself to His creatures in order to communicate with them.

Accommodated revelation is called ectypal theology or theologia ectypa. Just the way a signet ring imprints its image in the wax, ectypal theology is build according to the model of archetypal theology and is entirely dependent upon it’ (John Barber, The Road from Eden, (Palo Alto, Ca., Academica Press, LLC, 2008), p.470). The distinction was first coined by Francis Junius – student of Calvin at the Geneva academy in the 1560s, co-translator of the 1579 Biblia Sacra, the standard Latin biblical text of the Reformation, and author of the 1590 De Vera Theologia in which the terms first appear – but ‘it has its origins in the late medieval Scotism’ (Carl R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, (Aldershot, Hampshire & Burlington, VT., Ashgate Publishing, 2007), p.36).

8 In the same sense, Kant in the first Critique defines Philosophy, ‘the system of all philosophical cognition’, as an objective archetype [Urbild], one that serves for judging any subjective philosophizing ‘whose edifice is quite often diverse and changeable’ (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., Ak. A838//B866).

9 Alberto Toscano, op. cit., pp.25 & 44.

“end” as fundamental categories of experience. The regulative status of teleological judgement in Kant’s account of biological organisms is shifted in Cohen’s philosophy from a pragmatic condition of exhibition to the context of an ethical idealization of history. Whilst Kant keeps nature and history separate, treating natural purposiveness as if free, Cohen resolves biology into history: evolution is reinterpreted as the “boundary”

which borders upon the infinite, ideal and moral task of human history.¹⁰

This problem of living organisation or natural purposes provokes Kant’s agnosticism towards the scientific status of the discipline which will only come to be christened “biology” by Lamarck – the “Science of Life” in Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus’s description – a decade later in 1802.¹¹ Whilst the mechanism which Kant puzzled over would be identified half a century later with Darwin’s research into natural selection and evolution, his diversion into reflective judgement at this point nonetheless marks the refusal to countenance other philosophical possibilities. What appears to us in its contingency still features as a universal characteristic of life: this suggests an underlying lawfulness that Kant cannot account for in the usual transcendentally idealist manner, because the absence of a cognizable concept indicates it has not been determinately supplied as a pure form of reason as, for example, causality supposedly has. The “purity” of this content must therefore considered outside of the transcendental or critical idealist explanation.