3.5 Teleology and Biology
Last modified 05/16/2008
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One of the at first oddest aspects of Kant's critical system is the sudden
appearance of a full-blown discourse on aesthetics at the conclusion of his
critical enterprise. And yet if we stand back we can see the overall logic,
imperfectly intuited by Kant himself, and in the context wherein his thinking is
soon transformed by a variant of non-dual metaphysics, visible in his successor
Hegel. We should be wary of such thinking, but the point for us is that, to use
an old-fashioned jargon never quite given any proper foundation, a dialectic
will attempt to resolve itself in a triadic completion. Presto, we see the
appearance of an enigmatic 'third critique' dealing with issues of aesthetics
and teleology, this to perform the task of bridging the divide between his two
prior critiques. The precision with which Kant 'carries out the calculations',
unwittingly fulfilling a triadic logic, is matched only by the difficulty of
assessing the final result. And yet, his point is brilliantly transparent in one
sense, and overflows the boundaries of his own scientism into the realm of the
biological. We should conclude with the hypothesis that scientific reductionism,
matching Kant's thinking, should do well to seek its completion in the ethical
and the aesthetical, and that this will involve the question of teleology.
The rise of science has perhaps produced confusion here. Its success almost presupposed a rejection of teleological thinking. And yet, while this produced a great breakthrough in physics, the nature of the biological remains elusively beyond this gesture of scientism. And this Kant brilliantly put forth as a renewed consideration just at the dawn of modern biology, which, unfortunately, has dimensioned-down into a rubric of reductionism that has imperfectly resolved the question of the nature of living organisms. In fact, Kant, and his successors, the so-called teleomechanists, should be seen for what they are, a part of the considerable spectrum of thought that graced the birth of modern biology, soon overtaken in the age of Darwin by the limited perspectives of physicalism. |
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