Species

100 Species

He wants species to be useful in reason and understanding—if there were no gaps
in nature, then we could not make sense of it; the fact that things actually are divided
by gaps is therefore fortuitous.
There is no biological discussion in this critique, but he does provide one in the
Critique of Judgement in 1790. In section 64, he states:

In order to see that a thing is only possible as a purpose, that is to be forced to seek the

causality of its origin, not in the mechanism of nature, but in a cause whose faculty

of action is determined through concepts, it is requisite that its form be not possible

according to mere natural laws... The contingency of its form in all empirical natural

laws in reference to reason affords a ground for regarding its causality as possible only

through reason.^236

It seems Kant is saying that contingent forms (i.e., species) can be understood not
as the determinate outcome of mechanisms, but rather as the result of conceptual
necessity. Eco discusses this at length and concludes that the platypus, discovered
and displayed in Europe shortly after Kant’s death, would have given Kant trouble
unless he was able to subsume it under existing conceptual categories (such as “water
mole”).^237 While the platypus, or to use Kant’s own example, a tree, is there and as
a natural purpose produces itself as both cause and effect, generically, our ideas of
it depend on our knowing the purpose or goal of such organized things (§65). Kant
says in §67 of the Judgement,

Hence it is only so far as matter is organized that it necessarily carries with it the con-

cept of a natural purpose, because this its specic form is at the same time a product

of nature. ...

If we have once discovered in nature a faculty of bringing forth products that can

only be thought by us in accordance with the concept of nal causes, we go further

still. We venture to judge that things belong to a system of purposes which yet do not

(either in themselves or in their purposive relations) necessitate our seeking for any

principle of their possibility beyond the mechanisms of causes working blindly. For the

rst idea, as concerns its ground, already brings us beyond the world of sense, since the

unity of this supersensible principle must be regarded as valid in this way, not merely

for certain species of natural beings, but for the whole of nature as a system.

Kant’s teleology is too far aeld from our topic,^238 but it is important to see that he
saw species as the outcome of self-generative organization in nature, as he had in the
lectures of 1775, as well as being things which we needed to think of as goal-directed
in order to understand them. Again, here is the philosophical current of the genera-
tive notion of organic species in play. Famously, Kant was inuential on Goethe, and
through him, Oken, and the morphologists that followed him. In an essay in 1785, he

(^236) Kant 1951; second edition of 1793.
(^237) Eco 1999, 89–96. I very much doubt this is true, however. Eco is giving linguistic constraints undue
priority here, in a Sapir-Whoran fashion. Kant attended to the sciences because he thought that was
where knowledge was gained, empirically. He therefore must think that empirical data can give us
new categories.
(^238) See Lenoir 1987.