Kant, Darwinism, teleology

Response to a question on a philosophy list, pertaining to the question of the teleomechanists of the early nineteenth century (see the discussion of two books, below at the end of post, for data on the teleomechanists):

Could you be more specific when you offer that 'Kant virtually prophesies the fate of Darwinism.' Are you referring to some text in his Critique of Judgment?

Actually, yes. Kant in his classic critiques produced both a realization of Newtonian fundamentals, with his answer to Hume, with a built in ambiguity moving toward the idea of freedom, and this theme does indeed appear in the Critique of Judgment, although it is already there in the first critique. There is a considerable literature on this, and in fact I cited two good books on the issues, see below. It is pretty obscure stuff to those unfamiliar with Kant, at least at first sight. But these issues have come to haunt Darwinism and a horde of fundamentalists plagues them without mercy for their methodological sins.

Kant had a theoretical sensitivity to the organism that had been factored out of the reigning physicalist paradigm. Biologists proceeded to do the very thing he was attempting to warn of, and the claims that Darwin was the ‘Newton of biology’ show that Darwinists were naïve and forgetful of the history of philosophy. Kant could see what is increasingly obvious from even a cursory glance at the complexities of DNA, that a new methodology of science is needed. We are dealing, if not with issues of teleology, then at least with organized directional or programmatic complex systems. It is apt, yet a disservice, to inflict the old-fashioned design arguments on this question, complete with all the religious obsessions that lurk in the background. Kant made himself clear on this point, with his rejection of the various arguments by design.

Kant's reintroduction of teleology would be rejected out of hand in terms of current methodology of science, but such a narrow stance deserves precisely the challenge that Kant gave it. And he was a strict proponent of the fundamental place of science. If anything Kant was too Newtonian! Kant’s formulation creates a sense of contradiction or paradox, because it seems to change gears all of a sudden, and it is often pointed out that the first and third critiques seem to differ on the status of causality.
But Kant's work, indeed his very ambiguity, is directly relevant to what occurred later with the rise of positivism. That’s the meaning of my suggestion made in passing that he seems to prophecy Darwinian difficulties. If you ignore Kant and adopt a regime of purely causal explanation (this is a bit abbreviated) you fate is the one described or implied by the critiques of Kant.
Kant's ambiguous depiction of constitutive versus regulative judgments, then again in the third Critique, determinate versus reflective judgment, seems very odd to us now, in an educational system that explicitly rejects even the minimum study of such a figure, but it expresses precisely the difficulty we seen in Darwin's theory where a strict anti-teleological theory spawns its dialectical opposition in the current design movement. It is a classic brouhaha, down to the last Kantian decimal place. Scientific education and the current philosophy of science is so narrow now that none of this even makes sense to those spouting the standard jargon, which is almost impoverished by comparison.

Kant's formulation, between the first and third critiques, seems unsatisfactory, as if he can't make up his mind. In the first critique causal explanation is constitutive, but in the third his position seems to change. It is worth consulting the literature here on this point, it is a longwinded discourse mixed in with Kant’s discussions of the various faculties, and with his elaborated architectonic in the background. But the basic issue is crystal clear, especially in the first critique, if we get down to cases. His caution is double-edged and entirely 'right on' when we look at the Darwin debate.
In a nutshell, what he seems to say is that we must proceed with causal science, but that this will not produce the full picture, a correct understanding of the organism. A teleological component is there that we must approach without any assurances this could ever be science.
That's a pretty fair summary of the inexorable dilemma of evolutionary biology. Teleology isn't scientific and there is no way you can really detect it, but your assumption that it is not there will produce a wrong science. Go look at any text on biochemistry these days. You see the problem. The causal science is splendid in its perfection, but something nags at us, something seems missing. Bringing in the ‘design’ issue is not really helpful. Bad state of affairs, and is it here that Kant seems to suggest that 'regulative judgments' on such issues must have a place. The point is to pass the Scylla of pure causal science and the Charybdis of teleological metaphysics.

We have lost track of the specifics of our intellectual history. A curtain fell in the wake of the Hegelian generation, and all this got excised from cultural discourse. Kant's gesture toward biology at the end of the eighteenth century is so seemingly archaic now that we have lost any sense that he was onto something. And yet he is in many ways the right response to Newton, and the triumph of physical thinking. It is not some mystical romanticism. It is a direct and practical response to the needs and limits of science.
The revolt against Aristotle that characterizes the rise of modern science is misleading. Such a gesture was essential to the founding of scientific physics. But the generation of Kant and the Romantics and others could see that this was problematical. Especially in biology. This is not the same as the current design discourse we see in the Intelligent Design movement.
The followers of Kant in biology had a much superior methodology, but were displaced in the flood of Darwinism. Nor is this mere history. The embryology of Von Baer (and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, et al.) has resurfaced in the era of developmental genetics and hox genes. This should not be confused with the legacy of Nature Philosophy that proceeds in the wake of Hegel. The teleomechanists were direct descendants of Kant and adopted a very disciplined scientific approach to these matters.

These issues are what allows someone like Thomas Behe to tweak everyone's sense of design with his Black Box argument. But these design arguments are second fiddle to the much more sophisticated Kantian approach.

All of these issues were buried in the onslaught of positivism and Darwinism, after the middle of the nineteenth century. Scientific methodologies contracted around a very narrow set of principles.
In any case, it was Kant's generation, after Buffon, to Larmarck, et al., not Darwin's, that saw the birth of modern biology and the discovery of evolution, a quibble perhaps, but a point of significance. Darwin's methodology is almost in decline after the great era of the Enlightenment, or a figure like Kant (or Hume). His lack of caution with natural selection shows the point. A lot of people tried to warn him (even Huxley who was quite aware of this earlier work), but soon hordes of people were so reconditioned to this line of scientific thought that they outshout all dissent and yet they cannot now defend themselves against fundamentalists, and are puzzled by the current Intelligent Design scams, thinking that natural selection resolved the issue of teleology. And the general public isn’t even aware of the history of refutations of design arguments. Kept ignorant of these difficulties they are easy prey to this attempt to hijack all dissent on Darwinism for religious or political reasons. It is a strange situation.
It was really Lamarck who proposed the first theory of evolution. But the world wasn’t ready. Darwin simply produced a watered down version of his predecessors, and succeeded where they failed to ignite a scientific mainline of evolutionary research. But his theory was flawed, as a host of crtics rushed to point out, frustrated that a theory they were too smart to propose themselves took off like a rocket in the public’s mind.
Thus, as noted, this earlier generation of innovation (with plenty of problems of its own, part of the reason for Darwin’s extreme reaction) was the period of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, etc, and the work of the post-Kantian school of teleomechanists, the developmentalists, etc,.. all this often collated with the more Hegelian or Schelling-esk derived naturphilosphie, which tended to metaphysical excesses. We can clock the change exactly to the 1840's because Marx and Feuerbach like miner's canaries show the transition to a new generation of positivism. Marx is practically in two worlds and makes explicit the transition. Darwin conceives of his theory in the forties, but is too cagey to go public, waiting until 1859.

That teleology has no place in modern science is a myth, one addressed clearly by figures like Barrow and Tipler in The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, where they also discuss the teleomechanists. The formulations of abstract mechanics themselves show a potentially teleological formulation in the minimum principles of Lagrangian mechanics. This is however a subject little explored. Noone has ever found a method to deal with teleology in mathematical terms, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be found. Electronics textbooks often open by mentioning that there is nothing contradictory in systems that act from the future, but then declare them 'physical unrealizable' and scurry oft to their main subject.

Thus, these issues do indeed revolve around the complexities that Kant explored, and the Critique of Judgment does indeed climax that line of enquiry.

So the great heresy of teleology lurks like the dragon outside of science. Kant's classic formulation proceeds haltingly in this vein, and in my opinion rightly.
The summons of teleology is not to be taken lightly, and a considerable and quite different discourse of Hegelian metaphysics is liable to bushwhack discussion here. Whatever the case, I am not referring to Hegel here, and am pointing to the at first sight more constricted approach of Kant.

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If you study, and I hope you will, my eonic model of historical evolution you will find this kind of distinction of constitutive versus regulative summons of teleology built in. I recommend it as a long slow motion study of world history in terms of assessing 'intermittent directionality' as a representation of possible teleology. World History will fool you, but a close accounting of its structure shows one way out of the Darwinian theoretical mess. Getting cured of Darwin’s oversimplification takes work and mental rewiring, this in the face of vigorous denunciations from overconfident Darwinists.
In fact I think I have found a genuine method of approaching the issue without teleological metaphysics, in terms of this intermittent directionality. More on that some other time.


The Strategy of Life : Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology by Timothy LenoirThis is a very important work in the history of biology, more or less ignored in the current paradigm trance, and it is good to see it in paperback. If you are baffled by the current design debate this book will show you how one resolution of the issues emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The onset of Darwinism closes a veil on the generation prior to 1859, save for the direct line of those leading up to Darwin, in the standardized histories that are very selective. The rest is ignored or else dismissed as the wrong conceptions of (German Romantic) Nature Philosophy. But the real picture is more complex and this includes the truly significant and fascinating world of the teleomechanists, springing from the legacy of Kant and his great critiques, especially his third, where the intractable concepts of teleology in relation to causality and Newtonian physics are treated in a very profound way. Most students of modern science could not distinguish Hegel from Kant in any significant way, dismissed as idealists. This fails to see the place of Kant in the history of science, rather than philosphy. At a time when the design arguments of natural theology are being pressed on reductionist Darwinians this potentially far more sophisticated approach deserves a new hearing. The teleomechanists, due to Kant's influence did not allow themselves the pitfalls of the design propagandists. Lenoir's text properly balances the depth of Kant's thinking with the history of the research program this spawned and an appreciation for Darwin. The sudden reaction visible in figures such as Helmholtz, originally a member of this school, has set the tone, indeed the pseudo-antimetaphysical jargon, of the current world of science. One wonders at this battle of the schools of 1848, in the collapse of Hegelianism, Feuerbach, and the onset of Comtean positivism. The successes of this tide of reductionist research, among them those of the Darwinians, have blinded us to the limits correctly predicted by the teleomechanists, and now visible in the inexorable dialectic over natural selection. Lenoir covers the whole ground and concludes with the critique of Von Baer of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the 1870's. Nothing much changes here, and it is significant that Kant virtually prophesies the fate of Darwinism before it even came into existence. See also the commentary on the teleomechanists in The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, by Barrow and Tipler


Kant's Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation: Antimony and Teleology (Studies in the History of Philosophy) by Peter McLaughlin
The current Darwin debate is fixated in a species of dialectical seesaw, metaphysical in essence, in a fashion that blights both scientists and their religious opponents. The study of eighteenth century biology would seem an unpromising venue, but this study of Kant, the dialectic of teleology and the Critique of Judgment, in the context of the early stages of this science, with its imminent discovery of evolution, summons up the key issues that haunts the subject to this day. The Darwin debate can be a source of bewilderment but students of Kant often stumble on the reason for it, and the meticulous effort in this text to trace the distinctions of constitutive and regulative judgements in Kant's early and late works does just that. Kant had a fine sense of the complexity of the organism and, despite his orientation to the legacy of Newton, brought a disconcerting double perspective to his critical system, yet one that cogently highlights the dilemma of scientific methodologies attempting to unify biological understanding, but always with a basic contradiction in tow. Thus the current debate over design versus reductionist selectionism is not so surprising in this context, as the basic difficulty pointed to by Kant resurfaces at once in scientific and public discourse, as if revolving around the 'antinomy of teleological judgment'.



John LandonWorld History And The Eonic Effect2nd EditionSelections from new edition:http://eonix.8m.com
Darwiniana: Evolution Blog
http://eonix.8m.com/darwiniana.htm