John Zammito Epigenesis and Looseness of Fit

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 73–109www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

‘This inscrutableprinciple of an originalorganization’: epigenesis and ‘looseness of fit’

in Kant’s philosophy of science

John H. ZammitoDepartment of History—MS42, P.O. Box 1892, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA

Abstract

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with thepracticing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student,Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach.Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in histranscendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis,especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the firstCritique (B167), posed crucial ques-tions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’stheory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leadingto his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses ofreason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear fromthe work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Epigenesis; Empirical law; Kant; Blumenbach; Buchdahl; Girtanner

Blumenbach . . . rightly declares it to be contrary to reason that raw matter shouldoriginally have formed itself in accordance with mechanical laws, that life shouldhave arisen from the nature of the lifeless, and that matter should have been ableto assemble itself into the form of a self-preserving purposiveness by itself; atthe same time, however, he leaves natural mechanism an indeterminable but atthe same time also unmistakable role under this inscrutableprinciple of an original

E-mail address: [email protected] (J.H. Zammito).

0039-3681/03/$ - see front matter 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/S0039-3681(02)00092-4

74 J.H. Zammito / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 73–109

organization, on account of which he calls the faculty in the matter in an organizedbody (in distinction from the merely mechanical formative power [Bildungskraft]that is present in all matter) a formative drive [Bildungstrieb] (standing, as it were,under the guidance and direction of that former principle).1

One of the most important contributions of Gerd Buchdahl to the history and thephilosophy of science was his argument for a crucial ‘ looseness of fit’ between thetranscendental and the empirical elements in Kant’s epistemology.2 The issues ofBuchdahl’s exposition remain at the center of ongoing disputes concerning Kant’sphilosophy of science and indeed Kant’s transcendental method altogether.3 WhileBuchdahl and others seek to rescue Kant from what Peter Strawson once dubbedthe ‘non-sequitur of numbing grossness’ of making natural science a priori, everyonewho has dealt at all carefully with the Kantian texts is aware of the ambiguities inthe Konigsberger’s formulations and the challenge to coherent interpretation theypose.4 Buchdahl generously ascribes this to the ‘ thinness’ of the conceptual languageavailable to Kant for his exposition, and he resists the view that Kant lacked perspi-cuity regarding the questions at issue.5 That is indeed the high road of historicalreconstruction, which renders Kant most charitably for presentist concerns and bypresentist standards. I must confess to a less sanguine view of the historical Kant,though I enlist wholeheartedly in the endeavor to ‘naturalize’ Kantian philosophy ofscience for our own purposes.6 The historical Kant’s intransigence over the questionof ‘hylozoism’ , I wish to argue, put decisive obstacles before any naturalistic coher-ence in his philosophy of science.

One way to situate the issue of the historical versus the reconstructed Kantianphilosophy of science—one where the difference makes a difference—is to considerhow the scientific community of Kant’s own day construed Kant’s proposals.7 Parti-cularly salient in this context is the group of life scientists that Timothy Lenoir morethan twenty years ago dubbed the ‘Gottingen school’ .8 In Lenoir’s view, Kant’sphilosophy of science played a major role ‘ in helping to shape the theoretical foun-dations of the life sciences’ led by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach after 1790. Indeed,‘ from the late 1780s to the late 1790s Blumenbach’s ideas on natural historyunderwent a thorough revision in light of Kant’s analysis of the conceptual foun-dations for the construction of a scientific theory of organic form’ .9 Blumenbach

1 Kant (1790), AA 5, 424.2 Buchdahl (1965), (1967), (1969), (1971), (1984), (1986).3 Friedman (1986), (1991), (1992a), (1992b); Butts (1991); Allison (1991), (1994); Guyer (1990a),

(1990b); Kitcher (1983), (1986), (1993), (1994).4 The allegation, from Strawson (1966), is discussed in all the texts cited above.5 On ‘ thinness’ of language, see Buchdahl (1967), p. 213.6 In particular, I am very interested in the pragmatist-naturalist reconstructions of philosophers of

science like Kitcher (1993), (1994), and Rescher (2001).7 See, e.g., Williams (1973); Barnaby (1988); Gregory (1989).8 Lenoir (1980), (1981a), (1981b), (1988).9 Lenoir (1980), p. 77. The fullest acknowledgment of Kant, entailing abandonment of ideas Blumen-

bach had long held, came after 1797.

75J.H. Zammito / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 73–109

began serious consideration of the philosophy of Kant in 1786 as a direct conse-quence of the dispute surrounding Kant’s reviews of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophieder Geschichte der Menschheit, especially Kant’s controversy with Georg Forster.10

But already five years before, in 1781, Blumenbach proposed the most importantrevision in the eighteenth-century fields of embryology and physiology with his ideaof the Bildungstrieb and his implied endorsement of epigenesis.11 The period between1786 and 1797 brought the Gottingen physiologist and the Konigsberg philosopherinto direct communication, and there is clear evidence that Blumenbach assimilatedmany aspects of Kantianism into his scientific methodology. There is also evidencein the converse direction, i.e., Kant’s assimilation of Blumenbach’s scientific method-ology into his own exposition of philosophy of science. What is not so clear is theultimate cogency of either of these assimilations.

There are important issues of historical reconstruction that remain to be sortedout.12 While one could pursue that in the direction of further developments in thelife sciences, as Lenoir and others have done, I will pursue the other direction: theimplications for Kant’s philosophy of science. In taking up Kant’s philosophy ofscience in what one commentator has provocatively titled ‘ the transcendent science’of biology these scientists encountered head-on the tensions in Kant’s system ofempirical entailment, precisely those issues of the ‘ looseness of fit’ between theconstitutive and the regulative in Kant’s critical epistemology.13

One of the most notable endeavors to assimilate Kantian thought into the practiceof the life sciences at the end of the eighteenth century, and one which has thedistinction of explicit endorsement by both Kant and Blumenbach, is Christoph Girt-anner’s Uber das Kantische Prinzip fur die Naturgeschichte (1796). Girtanner’s workoffers a very useful starting point for assessing how Kant was being understood byBlumenbach and the Gottingen school at the decisive moment. Through Girtannerwe can see how the specific issues at stake in Kant’s biological thought open outonto the deepest issues of his philosophy of science, indeed of his transcendentalphilosophy altogether.

1. Girtanner’s Kantische Prinzip

In Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798) Kant specifically cel-ebrated Christoph Girtanner for the latter’s exposition of the theory of race. Underthe heading ‘On the Character of Races’ Kant wrote: ‘As to this subject I can referto what Girtanner has stated so beautifully and carefully in explanation and furtherdevelopment (of my principles)’ .14 Kant also referred to Girtanner repeatedly as auth-

10 On the dispute itself see Riedel (1980).11 Blumenbach (1781).12 On this crucial and still not definitively interpreted reception, see Lenoir (1980), pp. 89–98; Sloan

(2001); Bernasconi (2001b).13 Zumbach (1984).14 Kant (1798), AA 7, 320.


oritative in the lecture materials for his Physical geography, which Rink edited andpublished in 1802.15 Now, Kant was remarkably chary of publicly praising otherauthors, and rarely did he acknowledge that anyone grasped his thought properly,much less extended it. But Girtanner’s extension of Kant’s work followed just thevein that Kant himself had indicated his theory of race would require were it tobecome a serious scientific research program.16

Rather ungenerously labeled ‘an outsider and an eccentric’ by one of the fewscholars to have written of him, Christoph Girtanner deserves a bit more consider-ation than this would imply.17 It is no small thing to have both Immanuel Kant andJohann Friedrich Blumenbach refer to one’s work as the definitive exposition of acrucial matter in eighteenth-century life science. Girtanner was born in St. Gallen,Switzerland in 1760.18 He studied first at Lausanne, then at Strasbourg, and finallyfrom 1780 to 1782 at Gottingen, where he completed a medical degree under thedirection of Blumenbach. Girtanner’s studies encompassed botany, chemistry andmineralogy before culminating in medicine. His dissertation was on limestone andits organic origins. After a brief stint back home in Switzerland as a physician,Girtanner began to travel. In 1784 he went to Paris, then on to Edinburgh, in eachlocus making crucial intellectual contacts. In Paris, he familiarized himself withLavoisier’s ‘chemical revolution’ . In Edinburgh he came into contact with WilliamCullen and with the theories of the latter’s maverick student, John Brown.19 Girtannerbecame an honorary member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh and aforeign member of the Royal Society of Science of Edinburgh and proved a crucialfigure in transmitting the thought of the late Scottish Enlightenment to Germany. Assuch a crucial intermediary, Blumenbach recommended him in 1786 to become acorresponding member of the Gottingen Academy of Science.20 Back in Gottingenbriefly in 1787, Girtanner became a close friend of the other great scientific mindat that University, Georg Lichtenberg. Then his urge to travel overtook him againand he went on a grand tour which culminated in his witnessing the events of theFrench Revolution in Paris, 1789.21

His first major publication appeared in French in the Journal de physique of 1790,a two-part essay entitled ‘Memoires sur l’irritabilite consideree comme principe de

15 Kant (1802), AA 9, 185, 234, 313–314, 319.16 In a letter responding to the publisher Breitkopf’s invitation to submit a more extended work on race

in 1778, Kant, declining the invitation, explained: ‘my frame of reference would need to be widelyexpanded and I would need to take fully into consideration the place of race among animal and plantspecies, which would occupy me too much and carry me into extensive new reading which in a measurelies outside my field, because natural history is not my study but only my game . . .’ (Kant to Breitkopf,April 1, 1778, AA 10, 227–230). The project of extending consideration of race to animals and plantstook up the bulk of Girtanner’s study.

17 Querner (1990), p. 125.18 Wegelin (1957).19 Ibid., pp. 142–143.20 Querner (1990), p. 124.21 Indeed, Girtanner produced a substantial volume of political commentary on the revolution, but that

is another story.


vie dans la nature organisee’ .22 The first part surveyed thought on the crucial ques-tion of organic form and its medical implications, drawing especially on Haller and—without acknowledgement—Brown. The second part sought to explain the characterof irritability in terms of Lavoisier’s new chemistry. The first part drew down uponGirtanner the probably justified charge of plagiarism (of Brown) and the second theequally justified charge of excessive speculation (on the role of oxygen inphysiology), but the result was to make him a widely known theorist of life science.

Girtanner settled in Gottingen in 1790 as a physician and private scholar. In 1792he published two major contributions to the propagation of Lavoisier’s anti-phlogisticchemistry in Germany.23 In 1794 he published a major work on the illnesses ofchildren which established him as one of the leading clinical writers of the day, astatus confirmed a few years later in a series of massive works on venereal disease(1798), on John Brown’s medical system (1798) and on the work of Erasmus Darwin(1799). This extraordinary string of publications made Girtanner one of the mostimportant authors in medical science in the decade. Still, Girtanner’s study of Kantdid not leap to the public’s attention. Indeed, Girtanner had to write his own reviewof the work for the Gottingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen.24 His book appearedin 1796; the acknowledgments from Kant and Blumenbach came only some yearslater. By 1800, in any event, it could matter no longer to Girtanner, prematurelydead of a lung disorder.

It would appear that Girtanner began learning about Kant around the same timeBlumenbach did, and that, like Blumenbach himself, Girtanner was stimulated byKant’s controversy with Herder and Forster, which drew the attention of most ofthe leading life scientists in Germany.25 In 1787 Girtanner corresponded regardingKant’s philosophy of science with Karl Reinhold, who had converted from a defenderof Herder into the decisive popularizer of Kant in 1786.26 In 1788, Girtanner formeda personal acquaintance in Edinburgh with one of Kant’s disciples, Johann Jachmann,who served as an intermediary between Blumenbach and Kant in the 1790s.27 Onceback in Gottingen from 1790 onward, Girtanner participated in the Blumenbach cir-cle during the years—1795–1797—that Lenoir has contended were decisive for theassimilation of Kantianism by Blumenbach and his school.28 These were the yearsof the composition and reception of Girtanner’s work, which he dedicated to Blumen-bach as a contribution to that very endeavor.

Girtanner presented Kant’s thought as the paradigm for a new research programin the life sciences under the rubric of Naturgeschichte, and he exemplified the power

22 I have consulted the English version: ‘Two Memoirs translated from the French of Dr. Girtanner’ ,in Beddoes (1815).

23 Girtanner (1791), (1795).24 See Goettingische Anzeigen 171, St. 2, Bd. 24 (October, 1796). The information that Girtanner wrote

his own review is taken from Querner (1990), p. 123 n.25 See the documentation of this controversy in Fambach (1959), pp. 357–397.26 Sloan (1979), p. 138; Lenoir (1980), p. 99.27 Sloan (1979), p. 138. See Jachmann to Kant, October 14, 1790, AA 11, 201–213.28 Lenoir (1980), p. 88.


of this new research program and its proposed ‘ laws of nature’ through its applicationto racial variation. In invoking racial variation Girtanner was not taking up a periph-eral matter in Kant’s thought. Rather, the question of racial variation had assumedsaliency in Kant’s philosophy of science, as evidenced not only by his two essayson race but above all by his controversy with Georg Forster around that issue.29 Ihave argued that this saliency was already emergent in the original essay on race of1775/77.30 That essay began to set the terms in which the critical Kant understoodhimself and wished to be understood as a Naturforscher.31 Ten years later, provokedby Herder and then challenged by one of the premier natural scientists of the day,Forster, Kant found himself enunciating key premises of his entire philosophy ofscience in the essay, ‘ Uber den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philoso-phie’ (1788). As I have argued extensively elsewhere, these considerations floweddirectly into the composition of the Critique of judgment over the next two years.32

That is, Kant’s theories of the life sciences, embroiled in the question of racial vari-ation, must be construed as far more central to the problem of his general philosophyof science than has hitherto been the case.33

The essential point from which Girtanner departed was Kant’s new conception ofNaturgeschichte. Hitherto the term ‘natural history’ in German science had reallyonly signified natural description. It was heuristic and classificatory, as exemplifiedabove all by Linnaeus.34 But Kant, taking up impulses from Buffon, intended todisplace this with a real and genetic conception of the order of living forms(Naturgattungen in place of Schulgattungen), and therewith to make history centralto the project of the life sciences.35 This new research program would ask, in Girtan-ner’s words, ‘what the primal form of each ancestral species of animals and plantsoriginally consisted of, and how the species gradually devolved from their ancestralspecies’ .36 This was a new and specific science which would explore and explainhow environmental changes on the earth—indeed ‘violent revolutions in nature’—occasioned dramatic changes in life forms. Yet however dramatic, the point was thatthese were not chaotic changes; rather, the variation in observed traits in currentspecies emerged always under the guidance of a ‘natural law’ requiring that ‘ in all

29 Kant (1775/77), (1785b), (1788).30 Zammito (2001b).31 It is extremely important to reflect on the manner in which Kant understood himself vis a vis science;

the starting point is Adickes (1924).32 Zammito (1992), (1998).33 Thus I strongly resist the position taken by Stephan Korner that Kant’s ‘conjectures’ that ‘ the growth

of organisms or the affinity between different species, are not susceptible to mechanistic explanation, donot form part of the critical philosophy’ . They are obiter dicta expressing his strong interest in the scienceof his day and his expectation of its progress’ (Korner, 1955, p. 211). By eliding Kant’s biologicalthought—as even so careful a student of Kant as Michael Friedman (1992b), has done by electing todiscuss only the ‘exact sciences’— just this kind of problem gets concealed.

34 E.g., Blumenbach (1779), which Kant owned.35 Sloan (1979), pp. 127–129; Riedel (1980).36 Girtanner (1796), p. 2.


of organic creation, species remain unaltered’ .37 Kant’s great achievement, in Girtan-ner’s eyes, was his conection of this law to a more determinate ‘natural law’(proposed by Buffon) to explain this process, namely that ‘all animals or plants thatproduce fertile offspring belong to the same physical [i.e., real] species’ , notwith-standing considerable observed variation in traits.38 That is, these organisms musthave ‘derived from one and the same stem [Stamme]’ .39 While there could be heredi-tary variations [Abartungen] within the confines of the governing stem, there couldnot be ‘degenerations’ [Ausartungen], that is, permanently heritable departures fromthe fundamental traits of the ancestral stem.40 Races constituted decisive evidence forthis theory, because their crosses always showed perfect proportion in the offspring:Halbschlachtigkeit (half-breeding). To account for these internal variations withinspecies, Kant offered the view that ‘ the ancestral stem of each species of organic lifecontained a quantity of different germs [Keime] and natural potentialities [naturlicheAnlagen]’ .41 Girtanner followed Kant literally in identifying Keime with the sourceof changes in the parts (organs) of an organic life form, while naturliche Anlagenoccasioned changes only in the size or proportion of such parts.42 Kant used winterfeathers in birds to exemplify the first, and thickness in the husk of grain to exemplifythe second. Girtanner replicated these examples.

To help explicate the process of variation, Girtanner turned to his teacher Blumen-bach. It was ‘ through different directions of the Bildungstrieb, [that] now these andnow those [germs or natural potentialities] developed, while the others remainedinert’ .43 Only climate acting on organisms over extended time could educe suchvariation, such shifts in the ‘direction of the Bildungstrieb’ , and thus permanentlyalter ‘ the primal forces of organic development and movement’ .44 Moreover, oncesuch shifts in direction took place, once certain germs or natural potentialities trig-gered into actualization, the rest atrophied and the process proved irreversible.45 Thisclaim represented one of Kant’s decisive interventions in the theory of race, separat-ing him sharply from Buffon, for example.46

Girtanner was acutely aware of the way in which Kant’s ‘natural history’ interpen-etrated with his theory of organic form. Not only did Kant require a specific theoryof generic transmission, but he needed a theory of organic life in which to cast it.The only form of generation that had been empirically observed, Girtanner noted,was generatio homonyma, the persistence of species, though generatio heteronyma

37 Ibid., p. 6.38 Ibid., p. 4.39 Ibid.40 The term ‘degeneration’ came to be used in very disparate ways in 18th-century natural science; the

way Girtanner employed it signified mutation of species. It is not clear that Kant was so careful in hisown usage of this term. See Sloan (1973).

41 Girtanner (1796), p. 11.42 Despite the considerable departure Blumenbach had by then taken from such terminology.43 Girtanner (1796), 11.44 Ibid., 12.45 Ibid., 27.46 Bernasconi (2001a).


[Ausartung] was not impossible (against reason), but only unheard of (againstexperience). The essential point was that these both contrasted with generatio aequiv-oca (spontaneous generation). ‘That by mechanism organized beings should emergefrom unorganized matter . . . contradicts reason as well as experience’ .47 That is, ‘ itcontradicts all known laws of experience that matter which is not organized shouldhave by itself, without the intervention of other, organized matter, organized itself’ .48

Anti-hylozoism, then, was the essential posit of Kant’s theory of organic form. Girt-anner stressed this about the idea of organism. Not only was it ‘not a machine’ inconsequence of the mutuality of cause and effect, of parts and whole, but neitherwas it the ‘analogue of art’ , for ‘organized Nature organizes itself’ .49

In the terminology of Blumenbach, Kant discriminated between a Bildungskraft—‘ the vis plastica of the ancients, which works merely via mechanism’—and a Bil-dungstrieb which Blumenbach conceived as a ‘nisus formativus that worked organi-cally’ .50 Girtanner was clear that Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb was a Lebenskraft,namely ‘ that force by virtue of which the chemical and physical laws are subordi-nated under the laws of organization’ .51 Because life forms showed characteristics—reproduction, growth through nourishment and assimilation, regeneration of lostorgans and self-healing generally—which could not be assimilated to the mechanisticmodel of natural science, they represented anomalies requiring recourse to teleologi-cal judgment, the analogy of ‘purposiveness’ . This was Kant’s central concern inthe ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ and, as the epigraph to this essay demon-strates, Kant felt that Blumenbach had most perspicuously articulated the properapproach.

2. The unresolved issue of ‘epigenesis’ in Kant

In terms of the broader methodological issues in Kant’s philosophy of science,what is the status of the so-called laws of nature which Girtanner ascribed to him?Did Kant’s philosophy of science permit laws in this domain? More, are these ‘ teleo-logical’ or ‘mechanical’ in character, and can there even be ‘ teleological’ laws ofnature?52 Furthermore, what sorts of entities were ‘germs’ and ‘natural potentialities’for Kant? Clark Zumbach observes, for example: ‘Keime, as part of the generativeforce [Zeugungskraft], are postulated . . . as the inner mechanisms for developmentin future circumstances . . . [T]hey control the permanence of phenotypic traits andare ‘kept back or unfolded’ depending on the situation at hand’ .53 Through themKant sought to characterize the mysterious ‘ inner possibility’ of organic form in its

47 Girtanner (1796), p. 15.48 Ibid., pp. 14–15.49 Ibid., pp. 17–18.50 Ibid., pp. 16–17 n.51 Ibid., p. 17.52 Butts (1990), p. 12, for one, denies it.53 Zumbach (1984), p. 102.


objective reality or real possibility. What kind of ‘ theoretical terms’ did they consti-tute, and what sorts of observational evidence could instantiate them? The cognitivestatus of these concepts is all the more pressing since the new ‘natural history’postulated an original or ancestral form which, at least in the case of humans andin all likelihood for any other life forms, no longer persisted in the present.54 Withoutsome necessary principle of the derivation of current species from these ancestors,the whole approach would be less than an art, it would be arrant speculation.55

In Kantian terms, what made these ‘real possibilities’ and not just wild hypothesesirreconcilable with ‘proper Newtonian science?’ Zumbach suggests that ‘Kant ismaking the broader claim that more than the physicochemical conception is requiredto explain and understand the epigenetic capacities of living things’ .56 Specifically,‘ the difference between the biological point of view and the mechanistic lies in thefact that there is a concept of causality found in the former which is not present inthe latter’ .57 More extensively:

Kant holds both that (i) the conceptual materials available to the mechanical pointof view are insufficient for the construction of our concept of a living system,thus leaving living phenomena inexplicable in terms of the mechanism of nature,and (ii) the basis of this deficiency lies in the fact that the mechanical conceptionof nature lacks this idea of a free cause. That Kant holds both (i) and (ii) is oneof the most closely guarded secrets of the Critical Philosophy. Kant maintainsthat all living processes involve the causality of reason, that is, final causes. Andfinal causes are free causes. Thus to assert that something is a natural purposeentails the view that its internal processes contain events which do not occur withthe necessity that is the mark of inorganic occurrences.58

Yet this leads, in Zumbach’s view, all too far towards ‘vitalism’ . And, he asserts,‘ to fall back on a vital entity to explain the generative, and the rest of . . . the ‘epigen-etic’ capacities of living things, is to fall back on that which science cannot pursue’ .59

Two observations seem appropriate. First, this repudiation is very much in thespirit of the prescriptive character of Kantian philosophy of science. Kant could onlyview the assertion of an empirically actual formative force as hylozoism, and therewas nothing toward which he felt a stronger metaphysical animus, even though hisown struggle with organic form accentuated that possibility. Kant wrote:

54 ‘ Indeed, if we depart from this principle, we cannot know with certainty whether several parts ofthe form which is now apparent in a species have not a contingent and unpurposive origin; and theprinciple of teleology: to judge nothing in an organized being as unpurposive which maintains it in itspropagation, would be very unreliable in its application and would be reliable solely for the original stock(of which we have no further knowledge)’ (Kant, 1790, AA 5, 420).

55 Here I am invoking Kant’s language from the Preface to 1786, AA 4, 467–469, a matter to whichI will return.

56 Zumbach (1984), p. 83.57 Ibid., p. 94.58 Ibid., p. 99.59 Ibid., p. 85.


We perhaps approach nearer to this inscrutable property if we describe it as ananalogue of life, but then we must either endow matter, as mere matter, with aproperty that contradicts its very being (hylozoism) or associate it with a foreignprinciple standing in communion with it (a soul) . . .60

Neither seemed acceptable. Thus, Kant did denounce ‘vitalism’ , especially as heconstrued it in Herder, but he also—and ironically enough with the same breath—repudiated ‘materialism’ .61 Yet, second, against the grain of both Zumbach and Kant,everything hinges on what exactly vitalism signifies. Zumbach presumes that vitalismmust mean animism. But this is profoundly to misunderstand the scientific thoughtof the eighteenth century, whose essential endeavor was to discard animism and finda new approach to vitalism—a vital materialism.62 That was the essence of epigen-esis. In contemporary terms, what they were striving after was a theory of emergenceas immanent in nature.

I submit that Kant’s language of Keime and naturliche Anlagen and his acceptanceof the idea of a Lebenskraft as exemplified by Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb commit-ted him to a conception of life science entailing the objective reality of forces whichcould not be reduced to those he admitted in the Newtonian order of physics. And,in fact, there is considerable evidence that, against the grain of his high ‘Newtonian’rigor, Kant tacitly admitted the objective actuality of forces throughout physicalscience.63 That was certainly where he ended up in the Opus postumum, though mostKantians seem inclined to see that work as detached from the ‘critical’ philosophyand hence not necessarily to be taken seriously.64

To give more weight to my claim, I propose to examine more closely Kant’sconception of epigenesis. What did Kant understand by an epigenetic theory of gener-ation? That Kant found it appropriate to draw an analogy of his own transcendentalmethod in philosophy to epigenesis in embryology suggests that something verycentral was involved for him in this issue in the life sciences.65 Indeed, spontaneityand systematicity, two crucial ideas in Kant’s theory of reason, find their empiricalanalogs in the idea of epigenesis in nature. But we must be sensitive to the uses ofanalogy which Kant was prepared to acknowledge, as Hans Ingensiep has argued.66

Ingensiep suggests that Kant did not intend by analogy to extend his formal argu-ment for transcendental philosophy, nor was analogy serving here as a heuristic toenable further discoveries (as in the Kuhnian sense of paradigm); rather, it was onlyfor ‘ intuitive illustration’ [anschaulichen Verdeutlichung].67 At most, Kant gestured

60 Kant (1790), AA 5, 374–375.61 Kant (1785a), AA 8, 48.62 Lenoir (1980), (1981a); Reill (1989), (1992), (1998).63 Okruhlik (1983).64 See Tuschling (1991).65 Kant (1781/1787), B167. See Wubnig (1968); Genova (1974); Zoller (1988); Ingensiep (1994);

Sloan (2002).66 Ingensiep (1994).67 Ibid., p. 385.


to ‘structural similarities’ , and ‘accordingly in no way can it be construed as a claimfor any compelling ontological connection between the respective philosophical andbiological positions’ .68 There remains, even for Ingensiep, however, a clear struc-tural correlation:

As, according to the epigenesis theory, unformed inorganic matter gets transfor-med under the direction of a ‘purposive endowment’ into something entirely newvia the Bildungstrieb and an organism is produced, so via the categories and theraw material of sensibility empirical knowledge is ‘produced’ . The organizingproductivity, however, lies entirely on the side of categorizing understanding. As,via the requisites of the epigenesis theory, from something unformed and unpur-posive gradually something specially formed, purposive (according to the mostinward interfusion of generative fluids) gets produced, so, similarly, one can con-ceive the unifying ordering of the manifold by the categories.69

But this does not yet clarify the tension between the concepts of epigenesis andpreformation as they featured in Kant’s thinking.

The debate between preformation and epigenesis in the late eighteenth century iswell-known to have occasioned both metaphysical and methodological controversiesover the relation of mechanism to vitalism.70 From the beginning, Kant was acutelysensitive to this whole constellation of concerns in both its methodological and itsmetaphysical aspects. Already in his One possible basis for a demonstration of theexistence of God (1763), Kant showed his awareness of the new twist toward epigen-esis introduced by Maupertuis and Buffon, along with the strong rebuttal to itdeveloped by the leading German life scientist of the day, Albrecht von Haller.71

Indeed, there is strong reason to believe that Kant followed Haller’s view very closelyin his own thinking, adopting eagerly the latter’s modified preformation theory bothbecause it seemed more methodologically viable and also—perhaps even more—because it reasserted with full rigor the metaphysical objection against hylozoism.72

The specific form of preformation that Kant endorsed was the sophisticated versiondeveloped by Bonnet and Haller in the early 1760s in response to the challenge firstof Maupertuis and Buffon and then, more fundamentally, of Caspar FriedrichWolff.73 As Gunter Zoller characterizes this form, ‘preformationism is primarily atheory concerning the generation of distinct parts (organs) in the growing embryo.It maintains that growth is quantitative growth of preexisting parts . . . no qualitativeembryological growth or formation of new parts’ . In that light the term Anlagen had

68 Ibid.69 Ibid., p. 387.70 Roe (1979); Gaissinovich (1968); Bodemer (1964); Breidenbach (1995); Rheinberger (1981), (1986);

Mocek (1995); Muller-Sievers (1993), (1997); Dawson (1991); Duchesneau (1985); Haigh (1976); Zam-mito (2001).

71 Kant (1763), AA 2, 114–115.72 Sloan’s work (2001, and 2002) has made this perfectly clear.73 Roe (1979).


a quite specific application, just as Kant articulated it in his first essay on race,namely to ‘‘ conditions of a certain development . . . in so far as the latter onlyconcerns the size and the relation of parts’ . . . [as] opposed to germs (‘Keime’ ),which are conditions for the development of new parts’ .74 That is, the role of Anlagencould be construed in a quasi-mechanistic fashion; the essential metaphysical prin-ciple guaranteeing species difference (and persistence) was assigned to Keime. WhenKant turned to questions of life science in his first essay on race, 1775/77, he clearlyemployed a Hallerian approach to preformation, but he also believed that he couldadvance the argument, both in the formulation of the mechanism of adaptation andvariation—the great weakness of earlier preformation theories—and also in his gen-eral methodological idea of ‘natural history’ , which Haller and the incipient Got-tingen school acknowledged in principle but could not bring themselves to acceptin its Buffonian formulation.75

Thus, by the time he published the first Critique in 1781, Kant considered himselfsufficiently adept in the theory of generation to offer a telling analogy to his theoryof knowledge.

I understand under the ‘Analytic of concepts’ . . . the still little investigated dissec-tion of the capacity of the understanding itself, in order thereby that we searchinto the possibility of a priori concepts, seeking them out in the understandingalone, as their source of birth . . . We will therefore follow the pure concepts upto their first germs and capacities [Keimen und Anlagen] in the human under-standing, in which they lie predisposed, until they finally, on the occasion ofexperience, develop and through exactly the same understanding are displayed intheir purity, freed from their attending empirical conditions.76

This analogy of 1781, as Phillip Sloan has established, is crucial to any assessmentof the more famous analogy of 1787 to epigenesis.77 First, the 1781 language isunequivocally a preformationist analogy. The concepts lie ‘predisposed’ in the under-standing; they are not produced, they are occasioned. As Sloan argues, in terms ofthe philosophical debate about Kant’s relation to innate ideas, this is clearly as ‘nativ-ist’ a Kant as one can find.78 Moreover, Kant meant to suggest an element in theanalogy which would be central to his thinking throughout, namely that just as Keimeand Anlagen were inaccessible to ultimate derivation, so too the concepts of theunderstanding were simply givens behind which we could not seek. The clearestformulation is in the revised version (1787) of the first Critique:

This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apper-ception solely by means of the categories, and only such and so many, is as little

74 Zoller (1988), p. 79.75 Sloan (1979), pp. 122–3; Lenoir (1981a), pp. 120–123.76 Kant (1781/1787), A66, my italics.77 Sloan (2002).78 Ibid. On Kant’s ‘nativism’ see Zoller (1989).


capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functionsof judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition.79

But it was fully entailed in the earlier version, with its speculative gesture to acommon but unknown root of sensibility and understanding.80 The critical point isthat Kant wished to see an analogy between preformation and transcendental philo-sophy, and not between the latter and epigenesis. Indeed, there was no affirmationof epigenesis in any of Kant’s writings before 1787.81

In his dispute with Herder and Forster from 1784 through 1788, i.e. up throughthe time of his revision of the first Critique, Kant remained committed to prefor-mation. Indeed, the insistence upon Keime as fixtures limiting adaptive change inorganisms was the decisive point in Kant’s critique of Herder’s representation ofgeneration theory. ‘The author bases his argument not on germs but on an organicforce . . . The animal soul is the sum of all the forces at work in an organism, andinstinct is not a particular natural force but the direction given by nature to all ofthese forces by virtue of their overall combination’ .82 Kant interjected with contempt:‘But what are we to think of the whole hypothesis of invisible forces which giverise to organisation, and hence of the author’s attempt to explain what is not under-stood in terms of what is understood even less?’ 83 He became more specific in thesecond installment of his review:

As the reviewer understands it, the sense in which the author uses this expression[i.e., genetische Kraft] is as follows. He wishes to reject the system of evolutionon the one hand, but also the purely mechanical influence of external causes onthe other, as worthless explanations. He assumes that the cause of such differencesis the vital principle [Lebensprinzip] which modifies itself from within in accord-ance with variations in external circumstances, and in a manner appropriate tothese. The reviewer is fully in agreement with him here, but with this reservation:if the cause which organises from within were limited by its nature to only acertain number and degree of differences in the development of the creature whichit organises (so that, once these differences were exhausted, it would no longerbe free to work from another archetype [Typus] under altered circumstances), onecould well describe this natural development of formative nature in terms of germs[Keime] or original dispositions [Anlagen], without thereby regarding the differ-ences in question as originally implanted and only occasionally activated mech-anisms or buds [Knospen] (as in the system of evolution); on the contrary, suchdifferences should be regarded simply as limitations imposed on a self-determining

79 Kant (1781/1787), B145–146.80 See Kant (1783), AA 4, 319.81 Zoller (1988), pp. 80–84, discusses uses of epigenesis in Kant’s lectures and Reflexionen but there

is no reason to suspect any of these date significantly before 1786.82 Kant (1785a), AA 8, 48.83 Ibid., 53–54.


power, limitations which are inexplicable as the power itself is incapable of beingexplained or rendered comprehensible.84

Clearly, Kant was invoking Keime in the sense of Haller’s sophisticated prefor-mationism against what he saw as an insupportable hylozoism in Herder. Yet thishylozoism is simply epigenesis as Herder wished it understood! Gunter Zoller is oneof the few commentators to have grasped correctly what Herder was arguing in thecrucial passage on epigenesis in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte derMenschheit which Kant was here critiquing.85 But Zoller himself is not carefulenough about the concept. ‘De facto, Herder’s concept of formation correspondsto Wolff’s and Blumenbach’s concepts of epigenesis’ , Zoller writes, yet of courseBlumenbach argued extensively for the difference of his concept from that of Wolff.86

There is remarkably little consensus about exactly what epigenesis signified ineighteenth-century discourse generally, not just in Kant.87 Modern usage set out fromWilliam Harvey’s 1651 text, On generation, in which he characterized as epigenesisthe characteristic of an organism that ‘all its parts are not fashioned simultaneously,but emerge in their due succession and order . . . For the formative faculty . . .acquires and prepares its own material for itself’ .88 First, Harvey’s concept stressedsequential emergence, and second, it stressed self-organization. Spontaneity and sys-tematicity were thus central features. What is ambiguous in this formulation is thenature of the ‘ formative faculty’ . Is it a causal force or a teleological principle? Whatontological status does it have? When does it emerge? What preconditions in thematerial or in the wider environment are sufficient or necessary? Can such anapproach be assimilated to materialist and to mechanist models of science or is itirreducibly vitalist, indeed animist? Crucially, Harvey and his early eighteenth-cen-tury successors, Maupertuis and Buffon, believed that epigenesis could be assimilatedto a materialist approach to science and that it utilized mechanisms, even if it couldnot be reduced to mechanism. Buffon’s moule interieure was a reformulation ofHarvey’s formative faculty, a principle of design which was an emergent and whichthen set in motion determinate mechanisms of organic development.89 Buffoninvoked an analogy between his ‘microforce’ and Newton’s characterization of grav-ity.90 That became a consistent practice among all subsequent theorists of epigenesis.Ironically enough, Haller’s pathbreaking work on irritability and sensibility rep-resented further elaborations of the very methodology which he found unacceptablewhen called upon in support of epigenesis.91 In 1764 Caspar Friedrich Wolff, in

84 Ibid., 62–63.85 Herder (1887), and Zoller (1988), p. 81. See Zammito (2001a).86 Zoller (1988), p. 81. Blumenbach’s criticism of Wolff is recognized by all the major commentators

on his work. See, e.g., McLaughlin (1982); Jahn (1995).87 Roe (1979), p. 3 n.; Muller-Sievers (1993), (1997); Zammito (2001a).88 Harvey (1943), p. 366.89 Sloan (1979), p. 118.90 Lenoir (1981a), p. 123.91 Ibid., p. 135.


what is taken to be the most important reformulation of epigenesis in the mid-eight-eenth century, elaborated on all these elements. His vis essentialis was conceived asa Newtonian force which induced through certain chemical processes the productionof organic matter out of inorganic matter in accordance with regular and empiricallydemonstrable patterns.92 Herder was drawing directly upon Wolff’s work in articulat-ing his idea of epigenesis in 1784, though he may have been aware as well of Blu-menbach’s work on the Bildungstrieb. It is important to note that in the 1780–1781versions dealing with that concept, Blumenbach avoided the term epigenesis, andthat he consistently sought to discriminate his idea from that of Wolff.93

A. C. Genova identifies three crucial elements in the concept of epigenesis in itsfull-fledged form in the eighteenth century: autonomy, community and reflexivity.94

In my terms, I would stress the radicality of emergence by replacing autonomy withspontaneity. By community Genova signifies the mutuality of cause and effect andof parts and whole which is central to the notion of organic form, especially asKant articulated it. Reflexivity, finally, has to do with the self-regulating, self-formingdimension as a persistent feature of life-forms, over and above the question of theiremergence de novo. Each of these elements poses decisive challenges, methodolog-ically and metaphysically, to a physical science on the sort of Newtonian foundationsKant preferred. At the metaphysical end of this spectrum lie the problems of radicalnovelty in a model that stresses systematic causal determination and, as well, of thedeterminacy of specific life forms: why there is so much regularity in a context ofapparently radical freedom.95 At the methodological end of the spectrum lie the ques-tions of empirical verification and of the degree and nature of mechanical executionof the self-organizing principle in the life forms. Blumenbach found Wolff problem-atic as much—or more—for the metaphysical quandaries as for the methodologicalones. There is a high level of ambivalence and ambiguity in his critique of Wolffand in his assimilation of Kantian principles over the 1780s and early 1790s, suchthat his own position has occasioned widely divergent reconstructions.96 There isgood reason to question whether his ultimate version of epigenesis diverged thatsubstantially from Wolff’s, despite all his efforts to uphold a difference.97

That professed difference, nonetheless, proved central to Kant’s adoption of epi-

92 Wolff (1966); Roe (1979); Gaissinovich (1968); Aulie (1961); Duchesneau (1979); McLaughlin(1982); Mocek (1995); Jahn (1995).

93 Sloan (2002) notes Blumenbach’s aversion to the term epigenesis in his early texts on the Bil-dungstrieb (Blumenbach, 1781, 1792).

94 Genova (1974), p. 269.95 In his influential challenge to C. F. Wolff, Haller hit upon this: ‘why does this ‘vis essentialis’ , which

is one only, form always and in the same places the parts of an animal which are so different, and alwaysupon the same model, if inorganic matter is susceptible of changes and is capable of taking all sorts offorms?’ (cited in Aulie (1961), p. 140).

96 Thus different interpreters see Blumenbach moving towards vitalism or away from it, as achievingthe clear distinctions between constitutive and regulative that Kant required and as dissolving these, e.g.,McLaughlin vs Lenoir on the first, Lenoir vs Larson on the second (Larson, 1979, 1994).

97 Most commentators are hard-pressed to uphold, though they clearly try to articulate what Blumenbachthought distinguished himself from Wolff. For a good discussion, see McLaughlin (1982), pp. 365–367.


genesis. But that is to leap ahead. First, we have to ask how it was that Kant couldeven come to his new and now more famous analogy of transcendental philosophyto epigenesis at B167 of the first Critique. What drew Kant to epigenesis at all? Thefirst answer is that Kant appropriated the term from Herder.98 He found it in a formthat was too radical for his taste, yet he believed that he could seize it from Herderand make it stand precisely for his own position. All that required was a two-stepprocess. First, Kant had to insist that even epigenesis implied preformation: at theorigin there had to be some inexplicable (transcendent) endowment, and with it, inhis view, some determinate restriction in species variation. Thereafter, the organizedprinciples within the natural world could proceed on adaptive lines. This made epi-genesis over into Kant’s variant of preformation. Even so, this seemed to postulatethe objective actuality of these forces for natural science. Hence Kant faced theultimate need for a second step: to transpose the whole matter from the constitutiveto the regulative order. In his Metaphysics lectures, Kant made the point succinctly:‘The system of epigenesis does not explain the origin of the human body, but saysfar more that we don’ t know a thing about it’ .99 This would be the position thatKant would assume in the third Critique. But that came only in 1790. Let us considerthe famous passage at B167 in the 1787 version of the first Critique.

The argument of §27 of the transcendental deduction in B (which includes thepassage at B167) is an elaboration of the argument of §36 of the Prolegomena(1783).100 In both arguments there was a purported disjunctive judgment: eitherexperience generates the categories or the categories generate experience. In both,Kant stipulated that we already know that the categories must be a priori. Therefore,we must conclude that only the second option is really available. In the ProlegomenaKant called the first simply ‘self-contradictory’ . In the B deduction, however, heintroduced the analogy to generatio aequivoca—spontaneous generation—which wasalready an exploded idea in the natural science of the day.101 Zoller suggests thatthe introduction of the analogy to biological theories was Kant’s response to criticism

98 Zoller (1988), p. 81.99 Kant, Vorlesungen, AA 29, 761.

100 ‘ [A] necessary agreement of the principles of possible experience with the laws of the possibility ofnature can only proceed from one of two reasons: either these laws are drawn from nature by means ofexperience, or conversely nature is derived from the possibility of experience in general and is quite thesame as the mere universal conformity to law of the latter. The former is self-contradictory, for theuniversal laws of nature can and must be cognized a priori (that is, independent of all experience) andmust be the foundation of all empirical use of the understanding; the latter alternative therefore aloneremains’ (Kant, 1783, AA 4, 319). ‘There are only two ways in which we can account for a necessaryagreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possibleor these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold in respect of thecategories (nor of pure sensible intuition); for since they are a priori concepts, and therefore independentof experience, the ascription to them of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca. Thereremains, therefore, only the second supposition – a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason –namely, that the categories contain, on the side of the understanding, the grounds of the possibility ofexperience in general’ (Kant, 1781/1787, B166–167).

101 ‘ Indeed, it might be argued that, had not epigenesis become popularly linked with espousal of spon-taneous generation, it would have claimed majority support several decades earlier’ (Bodemer, 1964, 28).


of the first version of his deduction and an effort to make it more intuitively access-ible by an empirical corollary.102

I wish to propose an alternative—or at least a supplementary—gloss. The clue tothe recourse to a biological analogy may well lie in the dramatic elaboration of whatwas simply an appendage to the original Prolegomena formulation. There, Kant hadadded a footnote to the passage in §36: ‘Crusius alone thought of a compromise:that a spirit who can neither err nor deceive implanted these laws in us originally’ .103

In the B deduction, this afterthought was elaborated at length and in the main text(but without mentioning Crusius):

A middle course may be proposed between the two above mentioned, namely, thatthe categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of our knowledge norderived from experience, but subjective dispositions [Anlagen] of thought,implanted in us from the first moment of our existence, and so ordered by ourCreator that their employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature inaccordance with which experience proceeds—a kind of preformation-system ofpure reason.104

What I want to highlight first is Kant’s use of the term preformation with a clearlynegative connotation.

The fundamental analogy structure at B167 invokes the disjunction: either spon-taneous generation or epigenesis; preformation is introduced in connection with themisguided endeavor to insert a third, intermediate position. If the whole analogy wasto make Kant’s way of thinking more accessible to readers who were baffled or putoff by his original formulation, this strategy seems strange. All the more so sinceKant did not explain any of his biological phrases; he simply presented them as ifhis readers would understand them unequivocally. That, however, is implausible bothfor his contemporaries and for us. Granting that we all might share a general senseof the impropriety of ‘spontaneous generation’ , the terms epigenesis and prefor-mation were hardly transparent in the epoch and they have continued to mystifycommentators through this day.

An inadequate grasp of these terms has marred all treatment of Kant’s passage atB167 until Phillip Sloan, even Zoller’s.105 The latter does, however, advance ourunderstanding of the particular usage of preformation at B167, by drawing attentionto the footnote in the Prolegomena and suggesting that it is not at all obvious thatKant meant to invoke Leibniz or his doctrine of ‘pre-established harmony’ atB167.106 While I think his conclusion is false, what set Zoller on his course is con-vincing. That is, Kant was quite clearly criticizing Crusius in the two passages. WhatZoller wishes to argue is that Crusius had articulated a position quite distinct from

102 Zoller (1988), p. 75.103 Kant (1783), AA 4, 319n.104 Kant (1781/1787), B167–168.105 Wubnig (1968/1969); Genova (1974); Zoller (1988); Ingensiep (1994); Sloan (2002).106 Zoller (1988), pp. 78–79.


that of Leibniz, and hence it is misguided to think Kant was addressing himself toLeibniz as well. While there are indeed differences between what Crusius arguedand Leibniz’s doctrine of ‘pre-established harmony’ , there are still very importantparallels. For readers of the day, the Leibnizian connection would have been inescap-able, Crusius (and Zoller) notwithstanding. More, as I will argue when we turn toit, Kant’s formulation of preformation in the third Critique demonstrated a far moreexplicitly Leibnizian orientation, which suggests we should stress—even in the earl-ier text—the parallels for Kant between Leibniz and Crusius, and not the differences.First of all, Leibniz personally subscribed to the old preformationism of encapsul-ation and saw it, moreover, as a striking confirmation of his general theory of pre-established harmony.107 Second, Kant’s characterization of the Crusius view stressedthat the functioning of the categories implanted by God ran in perfect parallel to thecourse of phenomena in the world of experience without any real interaction, thusthe intellectual order and the phenomenal order were in perfect harmony. This isLeibnizian to its core. What Kant harped on was the subjective twist that Crusiusgave to all this. The only warrant Crusius offered for the whole scheme was thefaith that God should have been so benign as to arrange all this for us. But, Kantasserted, we could easily be mistaken, and furthermore, it was a dangerous precedentto start down this path, because we could use analogues of this ‘ faith’ to obviateany and all problems that might arise concerning cognitive validity. Kant’s wholepoint against the intermediate position of Crusius was that we need a stronger bondbetween the categories and experience if we are to take seriously the necessity thatis the essence of transcendental grounding. That bond could only be achieved if itwere self-formed, not endowed, even by God. That is why he italicized the strangeterm self-thought [selbstgedacht]. That is why Kant suddenly invoked the idea ofepigenesis. But that still does not resolve the problem.

In his Metaphysics lectures Kant left us some crucial evidence regarding how heconceived the juxtaposition of preformation and epigenesis.

In chemistry one distinguishes between matter tanquam eductum (e.g., oxidizedpotassium [Potassche Aschensalz] is an educt)—what was there before has onlytaken on a new form, [and] tanquam productum, of which there was nothing therebefore . . . The systems of human generation are 1) involutionis (encapsulation[Einschachtelung] 2) epigenesis, [the claim] that humans are produced entirelyanew. In the first case man is an educt, in the second a product; if we have groundsfor accepting the system of epigenesis, then we should assume man is a product,—propagatio per traducem would then transpire in the case of souls. Is it possiblethat the soul could produce other substances? —This is contrary to first principles,for substances persist—and they would in that case have to be composite—andthe soul is a simple substance. The claim for a propagatio per traducem is absurd[ungereimt] and has not the least concept of possibility . . .108

107 Roger (1968).108 Kant, Vorlesungen, AA 28, 684.


The same ground is covered in slightly different language in another set of notesfrom the metaphysics lectures:

A substance [Materie] is 1) an educt, that is what was once in another substancebut is now presented separately [; or] 2) A product, what before was not yetpresent, but now is generated [erzeugt] for the first time . . . Whoever assumesthe soul is an educt . . . assumes the system of the preexistence of souls. Whoeverassumes the soul is the product of the parents believes in the system of propagation. . . The systems of human generation are twofold: 1) involution (encapsulation[Einschachtelung]): all children lay within their original parents, 2) epigenesis,according to which humans, as far as bodies are concerned, are brought forthentirely new. According to the first, man is a mere educt (educt was alreadypresent before birth, only in combination with other material, so that it appearsby disaggregation). If we have cause to assume the system of epigenesis, thenwe also have cause to assume the soul as a product, because otherwise the soulmust have existed somewhere, and then become conjoined with the newly createdbody. Thus here one would have to assume in connection with the soul a propaga-tio per traducem. But a substance cannot generate another substance, and the sameis true for the soul. A soul cannot put forth other souls from itself, for then itwould be a composite . . . To assume the propagation of human souls per traducemis absurd, because we do not know how to judge it at all. If the soul were aproduct, then the souls of the parents would have a creative force [schopfendeKraft]. All generation of a substance is productio ex nihilo, creation; becausebefore the substance there was nothing. A creature, however, does not itself havea creative, but only a developmental [bildende] force, i.e., [the ability] to divideor to compound things that are already given. There is no alternative, accordingly,but to assume the soul is preformed [praformiert], however it may be with thecreation of the body.109

The student notes are not entirely coherent, but we can make certain clear inferencesfrom these two passages. First, Kant found the contrast of educt and product crucialfor his conceptualization.110 The difference between them is that in an educt all therelevant material preexists, and only its aggregation is shuffled, whereas in a product,altogether new things emerge, presumably by immanent processes (per traducem).Kant saw this as a mode of thought already established in chemistry and he clearlysaw the theories of generation in the life sciences as variants of the same methodof conceptualization. Thus there were, for him, only two theoretical possibilities forthe generation of bodies (or souls), namely preformation (the educt-theory) and epi-genesis (the product-theory). Kant presented epigenesis in both sets of notes as ahypothetical, not an assertoric judgment: if we have grounds for assuming the epi-genesis theory, then . . . Clearly, Kant was not committing himself to the hypothesis;

109 Kant, Vorlesungen, AA 29, 760–761.110 It reappears in a crucial context: Kant (1790), AA 5, 423.


he was not saying ‘since we have grounds . . .’ Indeed, if we are attentive to bothpassages what emerges is that Kant in fact rejected this hypothesis, and thereforerejected epigenesis, as he made clear especially at the close of the second passage:‘ there is no alternative but to assume the soul is preformed’ . Zoller makes the pointthat Kant distinguished in his Reflexionen between an epigenesis psychologica andan epigenesis intellectualis, and it is really the latter, the origin of the categories,that is at issue at B167.111 That is altogether correct, yet what concerns me here isnot the question of the origin of the soul (a transcendent metaphysical concern,according to orthodox interpretation of the critical philosophy) but rather the wayin which Kant conceived of preformation and epigenesis. My point is that in all thismaterial there is still nothing like an unequivocal affirmation of epigenesis, and weare still not entitled to claim that we understand what Kant had in mind by the phrase‘a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason’ .

What could Kant possibly have been thinking at B167? Why, for the first time,would he have put preformation in a negative context and epigenesis in a remarkablyand unprecedentedly positive one? In terms of the educt/product distinction, we havea clearer sense of what Kant thought the essential point of epigenesis was. But wealso see it as problematically creative or spontaneous, from Kant’s vantage, as ascrib-ing too much power to mere created substances. That is, the metaphysical issue withepigenesis was still hylozoism. Was there something that Kant now saw in the ideaof epigenesis that could help him elucidate the peculiar and essential spontaneity ofthe understanding in his transcendental deduction? What did the phrase ‘self-thoughtfirst principles a priori’ signify? If epigenesis needs to be understood on the modelof a product, what were the necessary preconditions for immanent emergence? Kantwanted to stress the difference between a Leibnizian sense of the innate capacitiesof mind and a Cartesian sense of innate ideas.112 The categories themselves shouldnot be seen as preformed, but only as produced spontaneously by an innate capacityor power—a ‘ faculty’ of mind, whose own origin was utterly inscrutable. Like New-ton, Kant would, for convenience, employ the term ‘ force’ [Kraft] in this metaphys-ical context, but he was happier with the idea of a ‘principle’ , precisely because ofits ontological ‘ inscrutability’ .

Spontaneity of the categories was not sufficient for Kant’s transcendentaldeduction, he also needed their constitutive sovereignty over experience. Theordering force of the innate (‘epigenetic’ ) powers of mind had to be efficacious inempirical experience; it had to be able to produce new knowledge (‘synthetic a priorijudgments’ ). That is, it had to be a real cause (of knowledge), though a cause in asense different from what would be asserted within specific empirical judgmentsregarding sensible intuition. Kant’s epigenesis analogy, in short, built intellectualcausation (determination; constitution) into the fundamental structure of the transcen-dental deduction of the possibility of experience.

We have reason to suspect that Kant—however clear he may have been about

111 Zoller (1988), pp. 82–83.112 Genova (1974), p. 269; Zoller (1989), p. 227.


what he wanted to accomplish in the transcendental deduction—may not havegrasped clearly what he was playing with in the analogy to epigenesis. Stealing itfrom Herder may have gratified him; it may even have led him to an increased clarityabout the sort of spontaneity he needed for the origination and systematicity of hiscategories. But he really did not know the best literature in the life sciences on thisquestion, and he was especially ignorant of the revolution in thinking about thisphenomenon inaugurated by Blumenbach in 1781. When Kant did learn of it, hehad to rethink matters.

When did this happen, how, and with what consequences? We need to considerKant’s response to Forster in this light. Kant’s reference to Blumenbach in the foot-note to ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles’ invoked the Handbuch der Naturges-chichte, first edition, 1779, which Kant owned.113 As we know, Blumenbach revol-utionized his thought shortly after publishing that work, developing his theory of theBildungstrieb in 1780/81. In that new work, Blumenbach strongly repudiated anysense of germs [Keime].114 Thus, Kant’s invocation of Blumenbach in 1788 musthave proved an ambivalent experience for the latter, since Kant was invoking aposition he had already repudiated. On the other hand, in Kant’s footnote to Blumen-bach in the 1788 essay we find added the observation: ‘ this insightful man alsoascribes the Bildungstrieb, through which he has shed so much light on the doctrineof generation, not to inorganic matter but solely to the members of organic being’ .115

Thus, Kant had some acquaintance with Blumenbach’s term already in the fall of1787 when he composed the essay. Kant did not own the first version of Blumen-bach’s book, but ownership is a poor index of Kant’s voracious reading. It is not atall impossible that Kant should have read it or about it. Blumenbach was clearly acelebrity in the medical science of Germany in his day, so that his work would verylikely have appeared in bookshops in Konigsberg for the attention of the medicalfaculty of that university. There would also have been reviews of the work, whichKant may have encountered. In addition there were two Latin versions of Blumen-bach’s work, one published in 1785 and a second in 1787.116 Kant did use the Ger-man term, and therefore the likelihood is that he was aware of the German versionof Blumenbach’s theory.

The important point, however, is that, whatever Kant may have know of Blumen-bach’s Bildungstrieb, he did not alter his own theory in any significant measure inhis essay of 1788. Most tellingly, he persisted in his use of Keime. What is new—or more developed—in the essay is the idea of purposiveness in connection with theoriginal endowments, and the criterion of purposiveness as a key to species variationand adaptation. When we ask after the specific point for which Kant actually invokedBlumenbach, it was to dismiss what in the Critique of judgment he would call a‘daring adventure of reason’ , namely the transformation of the great chain of being

113 Sloan (2002) recognizes the decisive significance of this.114 Blumenbach (1781); Sloan (2002).115 Kant (1788), AA 8, 180n.116 Blumenbach (1785, 1787).


from a taxonomy to a phylogeny which had been raised by Forster.117 This ‘widelycherished notion preeminently advanced by Bonnet’ , Kant was happy to report, cameunder appropriate critical scrutiny in Blumenbach’s Handbuch der Naturgesichte.118

Indeed, Blumenbach shared Kant’s skepticism about the genetic continuity of lifeforms. What bound them most together was their commitment to the fixity of species.But how could the transmutationist implications of epigenesis be contained withinthe limits of the fixity of species? This was the essential question that Kant hadposed in his second essay on race in 1785, and the stakes of the question were notsmall. Without some regulation in the history of generation, the prospect of thescientific reconstruction of the connection between current and originating species[Naturgeschichte, in Kant’s new sense, or the ‘archaeology of nature’ as he wouldcall it in the third Critique] would be altogether hopeless.

But it was not simply a methodological issue, however dire. There was also anessential metaphysical component. When we read Kant’s highly charged languagein the 1785 essay on race we cannot but discern that again it is the idea of hylo-zoism—of any radical spontaneity in matter itself—that Kant could not abide.119 Allorganic form had to be fundamentally distinguished from mere matter. ‘Organization’demanded separate creation. Eternal inscrutability was preferable to any ‘speculative’science. In the third Critique Kant would twice insist that no human could everachieve a mechanist (he meant, as well, a materialist) account of so much as a ‘bladeof grass’ .120 Kant remained adamant that the ultimate origin of ‘organization’ or offormative force required a metaphysical, not a physical, account: ‘How this stock[of Keime] arose, is an assignment which lies entirely beyond the borders of humanlypossible natural philosophy, within which I believe I must contain myself’ , Kantwrote in 1788.121 He invoked Blumenbach for support in these metaphysical reser-vations.122

In 1789 Blumenbach sent Kant a copy of the second edition of his essay on theBildungstrieb, one which not only expounded its epigenetic aspects but also set itin methodological terms that showed clearly the influence of Kant’s own argumentsabout distinguishing mechanical from teleological explanation. Blumenbach affirmedthis second book version with the advice to disregard his earlier, ‘ immature’ formu-

117 Kant (1790), AA 5, 419n. Forster (1786) had introduced something like this.118 Kant (1788), AA 8, 180n.119 ‘ [I]f some magical power of imagination . . . were capable of modifying . . . the reproductive faculty

itself, of transforming Nature’s original model or of making additions to it, . . . we should no longer knowfrom what original Nature had begun, nor how far the alteration of that original may proceed, nor . . .into what grotesqueries of form species might eventually be transmogrified . . . I for my part adopt it asa fundamental principle to recognize no power . . . to meddle with the reproductive work of Nature . . .[to] effect changes in the ancient original of a species in any such way as to implant those changes inthe reproductive process and make them hereditary’ (Kant, 1785b, AA 8, 97).

120 Kant (1790), AA 5, 400, 409.121 Kant (1788), AA 8, 179.122 Ibid., 180 n.


lations.123 What differences did he introduce? Perhaps most prominent was anexplicit Newtonian analogy.124 Second, as noted, Blumenbach showed awareness ofthe teleology/mechanism problem which Kant highlighted in the 1788 essay. Thatis, in the 1789 version, Blumenbach was self-consciously assimilating his methodol-ogical presuppositions to Kant’s. Above all, Blumenbach repudiated hylozoism: ‘Noone could be more totally convinced by something than I am of the mighty abysswhich nature has fixed [befestigt] between the living and the lifeless creation,between the organized and the unorganized creatures’ .125 This was what Kant foundmost gratifying in the new book, as he reported in his letter of acknowledgmentto Blumenbach.126

By the time Kant came to write the crucial passage in the Critique of judgment,then, we can presume that he was aware of Blumenbach’s sophisticated theory ofepigenesis. One indication, as Phillip Sloan has noted, was that Kant suppressed anymention of Keime in that work, though it still thronged with the term Anlage.127 Butwhat progress had Kant made on the conundrum of preformation versus epigenesis?It is important to distinguish two quite distinct sets of discriminations in the Critiqueof judgment that both point back to B167, but with different implications. The firstdiscriminations come in a footnote to §80; the second come in the main text of §81.The footnote to §80 evokes the familiar term generatio aequivoca in order, as before,to disparage it. The contrast, however, is not to epigenesis or to preformation, butrather to generatio univoca, which Kant further subdivides into generatio homonymaand generatio heteronyma. While spontaneous generation was once again dismissedas contradictory, Kant asserted that transmutation of species [generatio heteronyma]was not contradictory, only unfound in experience. Thus, the issue at stake in thisdiscrimination is the principle of the persistence of species. In §81, however, wecome upon a different schematization. Here, Kant postulated that we must think oforganisms on the analogy of an intelligent creation, and that when we do so we facealternatives that can best be grasped in terms drawn from metaphysics (i.e., theobverse of the analogy at B167). The categories Kant offered were: occasionalismand prestabilism. He dismissed occasionalism as curtly as he had dismissed spon-taneous generation (though, of course, for different reasons), and in turning to ‘pre-stabilism’ he distinguished two subsets: individual preformation, which he identifiedwith the ‘ theory of evolution’ (i.e., encapsulation) and termed an ‘educt’ , and generic

123 Blumenbach (1791), p. 13. But: ‘ In fact, the only clear substantive difference in the key formulationsof the theory of the Bildungstrieb between the ‘more mature’ and the ‘ immature’ phase is the replacementof an ‘ innate’ drive by a ‘general’ drive’ (McLaughlin, 1982, p. 371).

124 ‘The term Bildungstrieb just like all other life forces such as sensibility and irritability explainsnothing itself, rather it is intended to designate a particular force whose constant effect is to be recognizedfrom the phenomena of experience, but whose cause, just like the causes of all other universally recognizedforces, remains for us an occult quality. That does not hinder us in any way whatsoever, however, fromattempting to investigate the effects of this force through empirical observations and to bring them undergeneral laws’ (Blumenbach, 1797, p. 19).

125 Blumenbach (1789), p. 71.126 Kant to Blumenbach, August 5, 1790, Kant, Briefwechsel, AA 11, 176–177.127 Sloan (2001) and (2002).


preformation, which Kant suggested was the proper sense of epigenesis. That is,while a ‘product’ , epigenesis ‘still performed in accordance with the internally pur-posive predispositions that were imparted to its stock’ .128 Kant expressed a clearpreference for epigenesis over individual preformation. What attracted him to epigen-esis, Kant averred succinctly, was that it entailed ‘ the least possible application ofthe supernatural’ in scientific theory.129 Hence even as he was prepared to advocateepigenesis, Kant set strict limits upon it: ultimately this was still just ‘generic prefor-mation’ , i.e., it, too, required the intervention of a transcendent causality.130

This is the decisive passage and it requires careful exegesis. First, it is apparentthat Kant reconfigured his whole conceptualization under the aegis of preformation.Second, there is no strict parallelism between the distinctions of §80 and of §81:the distinction between generatio homonyma and generatio heteronyma does notmap neatly onto that between individual and generic preformation. That suggeststhat a different point is being made in the latter distinction, and indeed this pointhas to do with the character of the causality that must be employed in conceptualizingorganic forms altogether, namely the inadequacy not merely of mechanism but aboveall of materialism.131 Yet there is at least a measure of spillage between the twopatterns of discrimination, for Kant found the idea of the transmutation of species—generatio heteronyma—to induce the very sorts of loose thinking in science thatmight read epigenesis as hylozoism, as a vital materialism. It was this above all thathe wished to circumvent, both with his ontological argument that even epigenesisdepended upon an original creation which instilled organization into inert matter,and with his methodological argument that an empirical science of life forms couldonly work with maxims of reflective judgment imputing purposiveness, and thus thatthe very idea of a natural purpose was merely a heuristic fiction suited to our limitedreason. It was just these elements in Blumenbach’s new work on the Bildungstriebwhich Kant found so gratifying. The leading life scientist of the day seemed to beaffirming just the same metaphysical and methodological discriminations he him-self demanded.

But what is also clear, as Sloan has argued, is that Kant had still not come toterms with the implications for his analogy between epigenesis and transcendentalphilosophy.132 If epigenesis signified what Blumenbach was urging, then the securityof Keime, with their determinate restrictions on species change in biology, wouldhave to be forsaken. And, by analogy, the implications for Kant’s transcendentalgrounding of the categories would be similarly grave. Kant certainly essayed to trans-fer all the metaphysical weight to his notion of Anlagen, but it is not clear thatthis is consistent with Blumenbach’s theory or with the full-fledged epigenesis thatit implied.

Epigenesis incites a fundamental erosion of Kant’s boundary between the consti-

128 Kant (1790), AA 5, 423.129 Ibid., 424.130 Ibid., 423.131 Genova (1974), p. 465; Zoller (1988), p. 90.132 Sloan (2001) and (2002).


tutive and the regulative, between the transcendental and the empirical: a naturalismbeyond anything Kant could countenance, though his own thought carried him there.With epigenesis, the ‘order of nature’ is greater than the order of Kant’s version ofNewtonian physics, and the paradigm for science necessarily exceeds the ‘Newtoni-an’ constraints Kant wished to impose upon it.133 His demand that the life sciencessubmit to the methodological principles of his ‘Newtonianism’ (as in his critique ofHerder and his dispute with Forster, and above all in his Preface to the Metaphysicalfoundations of natural science) was misguided.134 To be consistent, what Kant hadto do was to disqualify his conception of ‘Newtonian’ science in order to make roomfor the ontological possibility of life forces.135 Of course Kant’s escape was to sug-gest an epistemological evasion of this unpalatable ontological prospect. He arguedfor the ‘ irreducibility of biology to physics’ (Zumbach) but not because ontologicalreductionism was unacceptable. Indeed, it was possible—though not comprehensibleby finite human reason—that there could be a physico-chemical basis for organicforms.136 Indeed, Kant went further and supported the methodological program toseek reduction to mechanical explanation.137 However, he argued that just here themethodological program would come up against an insuperable epistemologicalstumbling block—grounded in the limitations of human reasoning, not in the ‘orderof nature’ itself.138 Zumbach phrases it suitably: ‘Kant’s claim that there are freecauses in living processes is elliptical. He is actually claiming that living processesmust be viewed in terms of the idea of a free cause’ .139 That is an epistemologicalstrategy, a heuristic, not a fact. In Kantian terms, there is a subjective necessity—a‘need of reason’— for this move, but no objective necessity, no natural law evidentin the matter at hand (the ‘order of nature’ ).140 This is the famous argument of Kant’sDialectic of Teleological Judgment, and his resolution is that in order to make organicforms intelligible at all we must have recourse to the analogy of purpose or design.141

Kant transposes his metaphysical problem into a methodological one, his ontological

133 And thus his effort to ‘police’ the practices of the experimental physics of his day was unavailing.See Zammito (1998).

134 Kant (1786), AA 4, 467–469 and passim.135 ‘Whilst the extensionalist mathematical Newtonian approach offers the potential for (mathematical)

a priori processing of physical nature, the price which this pays is that since forces do not have in thisscheme any basic or ‘essential’ place, they have (because of the conceptual doubt attaching to them) tobe introduced ad hoc (from ‘without’ ), by way of hypothesis only. The objection to this, of course, . . .[is]that such a basic and powerful notion as force (let alone the force of attraction) ought not to be surroundedwith the suspicion which—particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—surrounded any-thing ‘hypothetical’ in science’ (Buchdahl, 1986, 150–1).

136 Kant (1790), AA 5, 388.137 Ibid., 417–418.138 Ibid., 382.139 Zumbach (1984), p. 99.140 ‘ [T]his claim has a decidedly negative import; it is essentially just an affirmation that the mechanical

conception of nature and its conception of causality fails to provide a complete characterization of livingsystems . . . Thus, the claim that there are free causes in living systems has no ontological force. It israther a transcendental claim, i.e., one concerning the possibility of our judgments’ (ibid., 107).

141 Kant (1790), AA 5, 405–410.


need into an epistemological constraint: ‘nature [i.e, the ‘order of nature’ as a system]can only be understood as meaningful if we take it at large to be designed’ .142 Thatis, ‘we need to be able to comprehend all of nature, not as a living being, but as arational analog of a living being’ .143

3. ‘Looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science

As Robert Butts has noted, ‘ It is only in the Critique of judgment that [Kant]comes to deal with science, not as a finished system, but as a research program’ .144

That is, Kant came to take seriously the problem of empirical entailment, in whichrather than merely prescribing to nature, human inquiry had to presume and thenseek out an ‘order’ that was somehow already available for discovery and compre-hension.145 Kant never doubted that concrete empirical laws would need to be found,not simply made. More, he took seriously the finitude of human intellect and sus-pected that the establishment not only of particular empirical laws but especiallyalso their integration into a higher order system would be a task that might wellexceed forever a human grasp. At the same time, however, Kant did insist that genu-ine natural science would have to claim some kind of universality and necessity,those traits he associated with the a priori. We must recollect that one of the waysin which Kant characterized his critical project in philosophy was precisely to dem-onstrate how synthetic a priori judgments of natural science were possible.146 Some-how, empirical laws needed to be grounded—or, in Buchdahl’s more tolerant formu-lation, ‘nested’— in the transcendental a priori principles through which aloneexperience was possible for humans while, at the same time, these empirical lawscould not simply be deduced from a priori principles of reason.147

The ‘mixed status’ of empirical laws and the question of the possibility of theirsystematicity became, accordingly, central issues for Kant’s philosophy of science.148

It was by distinguishing between ‘ transcendental lawlikeness’ , established by Kantin the transcendental analytic of the first Critique, and ‘empirical lawlikeness’ , whichKant explored under the rubric of the ‘hypothetical use of reason’ in the transcen-dental dialectic of that work and then under the rubric of ‘ reflective judgment’ in

142 Butts (1990), p. 5.143 Ibid., p. 7; McLaughlin (1990).144 Butts (1990), p. 1.145 Kant (1790), AA 5, 183; Buchdahl (1965), (1967), (1969).146 Kant (1783), AA 4, 294–326.147 ‘ [T]he pure faculty of understanding, through mere categories, does not suffice to prescribe any a

priori laws to appearances other than those on which a nature in general, as lawfulness of experience inspace and time, depends. Particular laws, since they concern empirically determined appearances, can notbe completely derived from those, although they all stand under them’ (Kant, 1781/1787, B165). ‘To besure empirical laws, as such, can by no means derive their origin from pure understanding . . . But allempirical laws are only particular determinations of the pure laws of the understanding, under which andaccording to whose norm they are all first possible’ (Kant, 1781/1787, A127–8).

148 Guyer (1990a), (1990b); Morrison (1989).


its teleological use in the third Critique, that Gerd Buchdahl sought to make senseof this whole problematic in terms of ‘ looseness of fit’ .149

Michael Friedman, while acknowledging the power and persuasiveness of Buch-dahl’s interpretation, nevertheless raises some very important reservations. He setsout from what Buchdahl seemed to have established, namely that ‘ the law-govern-edness of nature under universal transcendental laws of the understanding does notat all guarantee that nature is also governed by particular empirical laws’ .150 Butthen he invokes the peculiar ‘mixed status’ of empirical laws, which in virtue oftheir empirical character have to be contingent, but in virtue of their status as lawshave somehow to claim necessity.151 For Friedman this means that Kant had touphold the ‘claim that particular empirical laws are somehow made possible by—aregrounded in or determined by—the transcendental principles’ .152 The crucial point isthat ‘even empirical laws too must have a more than merely inductive status’ .153 Theproblem is, Friedman acknowledges, that ‘we are left quite in the dark concerningthe precise nature of this ‘grounding’ .’ 154

While Buchdahl appeared to resort entirely to the regulative role of reason andto the transcendental principle of teleological judgment, and thus to the demand forsystematicity in Kant’s conceptualization of reason as the faculty of ideas, Friedmanbelieves this unduly restricts the role of the understanding and of the transcendentalprinciples of objective experience that Kant had worked out in the transcendentalanalytic of the first Critique and which Kant always believed represented the mostimportant insight he had obtained into theoretical reason. Friedman urges that to goall the way with Buchdahl is to eviscerate the faculty of understanding in Kant’stheory of knowledge. ‘ Indeed, not only is the understanding entirely powerless withrespect to particular empirical concepts and particular empirical laws, but the searchfor such concepts and laws lies rather within the purely regulative province of reflec-tive judgment’ .155 This could not be quite right, Friedman argues, and he thereforeurges the restoration of scope to the properly constitutive domain of knowledge, overagainst the merely regulative, or, in other terminology, to determinant, over againstreflective, judgment.156 Friedman recognizes an important duality in Kant’s notionof ‘constitutivity’ .

149 Buchdahl (1965), (1967), (1969), etc.150 Friedman (1992a), p. 167.151 Thus, Kant was careful always to write that we view empirical laws as necessary and universal; this

in contrast to simply knowing it. See Kant (1783), AA 4, 312.152 Friedman (1992a), pp. 171–172.153 Ibid., p. 172.154 Ibid., p. 174.155 Friedman (1991), p. 76.156 Nevertheless, he does so in a manner which I would contend is far closer to Buchdahl than Friedman

and his critics seem to admit. Buchdahl, that is, seems to invoke some sense of ‘application’ of the samecategories in empirical laws which are involved in the transcendental constitution of the object in general.It is not clear that Buchdahl wants or needs to ascribe all the ‘nesting’ of levels of validity to systematicity.


Kant’s solution . . . is thus to distinguish two senses of constitutivity. The math-ematical concepts and principles (of quantity and quality) are constitutive withrespect to intuition. The dynamical concepts and principles are constitutive withrespect to experience but only regulative with respect to intuition. The ideas ofreason, on the other hand, are not even constitutive with respect to experience:they are purely regulative.157

Holding out for the constitutive role of the principles of the understanding in theformation of empirical laws, Friedman concentrates on the role Kant assigned toNewtonian physics.158 Friedman holds that Kant not only assigned to Newton’s lawof universal gravitation a special status as an a priori universal and necessary law,but that in his account of how that law got constituted for human reason Kant laidout as clearly as he ever managed exactly how such promotion to a priori statuscould be possible for an empirical judgment.159

To be sure, there was an ineluctably empirical moment—in this instance, theempirical concept of matter—but what Friedman shows is that Kant believed thatin the dynamic of reasoning from the merely empirical generalizations of Kepler’slaws through the three laws of mechanics to Newton’s law of universal gravitationhe could demonstrate the advance from the modality of possibility through that ofactuality to the essential domain of necessity.160 Therewith, Friedman argues, Kanthad established

the constitutive principles of determinative judgement are also of fundamentalimportance in articulating the content of at least some empirical concepts. Indeed,in the case of the empirical concept of matter, it is the constitutive procedure ofdeterminative judgement alone that renders it ‘a priori suitable for application toouter experience’ .161

Thus, Friedman concludes, ‘ the constitutive principles of the understanding extendto the very highest genus and very highest law of empirical natural science: theempirical concept of matter and the law of universal gravitation’ .162 These representa ‘special metaphysic’ in Kant’s critical sense, namely a construction grounded intranscendental principles but applied to a general empirical concept.163

157 Friedman (1991), p. 79.158 E.g. Buchdahl (1965), p. 207, (1971), pp. 34–44 and (1986) recognized that the Newtonian laws

were the crucial case for Kant. See also Buchdahl (1970) and Friedman (1990).159 ‘ [T]he Newtonian derivation of the law of universal gravitation precisely illustrates the procedure of

transforming mere ‘empirical rules’ into necessary ‘ laws’ . . .’ (Friedman, 1991, p. 85).160 Friedman (1992a), pp. 177–180. On the relation of transcendental to metaphysical expositions, much

is revealed in the passage from A66 already cited: pure concepts ‘on the occasion of experience, developand through exactly the same understanding are displayed in their purity, freed from their attendingempirical conditions’ (my italics).

161 Friedman (1991), p. 82.162 Ibid., p. 90.163 Buchdahl (1986).


Two concerns arise. First, there is no guarantee that the development of empiricalscience ‘ from below’ will converge neatly with that ‘ top down’ structure establishedby Kant’s metaphysics of Newtonian science.164 For, as Friedman observes,

all the rest of empirical natural science remains solely within the regulative pur-view of reason and reflective judgement, the aim of which is to ascend from lowerlevel empirical concepts and laws towards ever more general empirical conceptsand laws so as eventually (in prospect) to attain a complete classificatory andhierarchical system . . . under the highest level empirical concept and law alreadyconstituted as such in the Metaphysical foundations of natural science.165

This is the notorious problem of a ‘gap’ in the critical system that from at least thetime of the Critique of judgment haunted the Kantian enterprise.166

More drastically still, there was something in the very ‘ top down’ constitution ofthe ‘Newtonian’ metaphysical principles that threatened in principle the ‘necessaryconvergence of constitutive and regulative procedures . . . absolutely essential toKant’s entire project’ .167 This second point arises because Kant purchased the deter-minacy of his metaphysical principles at a significant cost. The binding constraintof the concept of matter he adopted in the Metaphysical foundations of naturalscience was that the laws he generated could apply only to outer sense. This ‘hasthe effect of restricting our attention to nonliving material substances’ .168 This wasa dramatic restriction in scope relative to the transcendental principles, which heldfor all aspects of possible experience, including inner sense. As Friedman notes,

Thus, the metaphysical principles of pure natural science apply only to the activi-ties and powers of nonliving, nonthinking beings: beings represented solelythrough predicates of outer sense. The transcendental principles of the understand-ing, by contrast, apply to all beings without distinction—where, for example, innerprinciples of causality (appropriate to living beings) are just as permissible asexternal causes.169

Friedman elaborates: ‘only thinking beings—or, more generally, living beings—pos-sess inner principles of causality’ .170 But by defining matter as essentially lifeless inorder to construe Newton’s inertia, Kant excluded all such aspects in principle fromconformity to the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and hence precluded

164 ‘So what assurance do we have that the regulative operation of reason and reflective judgement will,proceeding from the bottom up, actually converge in the direction of this already constituted higher level?’(Friedman, 1991, p. 94).

165 Ibid., pp. 90–91.166 Forster (1987).167 Friedman (1991), p. 95.168 Friedman (1992a), p. 185.169 Ibid., p. 182.170 Ibid.


by definition any empirical (‘bottom up’ ) integration of empirical concepts and lawsin these domains which could converge with the ‘ top down’ foundation of hisscience.171

It is here that Henry Allison makes a telling criticism of Friedman’s reconstruction.Allison takes up Friedman’s claim that ‘ transcendental principles have a greaterscope than the metaphysical principles, since the former apply to all entities in thephenomenal world, including living and thinking things, while the latter ‘apply onlyto the activities and powers of nonliving, nonthinking beings’ ,’ but he alleges thatFriedman ‘effectively denies [the] significance’ of this difference.172 Friedman pro-ceeds as if the determinations expressed in the metaphysical principles must holdubiquitously for the scientific ‘ lawlikeness’ of an empirical ‘order of nature’ .173 This,Allison correctly observes, precludes the extension of science to the domain of innersense. Indeed, there is considerable textual evidence that this was Kant’s own view,not simply Friedman’s inference.174 But there is a more drastic implication whichAllison does not raise: not just a science of ‘ inner sense’ , such as psychology, but anyscience involving ‘ internal purposiveness’ becomes irreconcilable with ‘Newtonian’science. Indeed, this is the point toward which my whole exposition has been aiming,for it brings into glaring salience the problem of reconciling biology at all withKant’s prescriptions for science. Organisms rupture the ‘ top down’ /’bottom up’ inte-gration of Kant’s scientific system.

I think it is essential to dwell for a moment on Kant’s suggestion that there is aradical incongruity between his notion of organic form as ‘ intrinsic purposiveness’and the conventions of natural science: ‘ its form is not possible according to merenatural laws, i.e., those laws which can be cognized by us through the understandingalone when applied to objects of sense’ .175 First, in Buchdahl’s terms, is Kant hereaddressing ‘ transcendental lawlikeness’ or only ‘empirical lawlikeness?’ 176 Giventhat it is ‘understanding alone . . . applied to objects of sense’ , one might infer themost extreme construction that organisms are incoherent according to the transcen-dental possibility of objective experience.177 But let us settle for the weaker claim:organisms are not amenable to empirical laws after the fashion of mechanism: ‘ It is

171 ‘The inertia of matter is and signifies nothing but its lifelessness, as matter in itself. Life means thecapacity of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle, of a finite substance todetermine itself to change, and of a material substance to determine itself to motion or rest as change ofits state. Now, we know of no other internal principle of a substance to change its state but desire andno other internal activity whatever but thought . . .’ (Kant, 1786, AA 4, 544).

172 ‘ I think it is fair to say that for Friedman the transcendental principles stand in roughly the samerelationship to the metaphysical principles as the categories stand to their schemata. Just as the schemata,as transcendental determinations of time, both realize the categories and restrict the range of their appli-cation to what is given in sensible intuition, so the metaphysical principles, by linking their transcendentalcorrelates to the empirical concept of matter, both ensure their applicability to corporeal nature, quamerely corporeal, and limit this applicability to the same sphere’ (Allison, 1994, p. 295).

173 Ibid.174 See Kant (1786), AA 4, 471.175 Kant (1790), AA 5, 370.176 Buchdahl (1971).177 Lenoir (1981a), p. 149, recognizes this radical possibility.


indeed quite certain that we cannot even become sufficiently knowledgeable of, muchless provide an explanation of organized beings and their internal possibility accord-ing to mere mechanical principles of nature’ .178 What does ‘ internal possibility’ sig-nify here? How does it relate to the ‘ real possibility’ which Buchdahl and othersinsist it is Kant’s main object as philosopher of science to establish?179 And what arewe to make of the distinction Kant introduces between knowledge and explanation inthis passage? Is ‘knowledge’ an intelligibility which we can distinguish from determi-nate constitution (‘explanation’ )—i.e., is this a formulation of theregulative/constitutive distinction?180

Robert Butts provides us with some fruitful ideas here. He sets out from the notionthat for any actually practiced science there are always ‘ recalcitrant particulars’ , thatis, ‘ items in experience that cannot be fully understood, and for which no specifictheoretical concepts are ready at hand’ .181 To make sense of them, Butts suggests,we need to resort to judgment. That is, we work ‘ from below’ to reintegrate theseanomalies into our reigning paradigm (to use Kuhnian terms and invoke Kuhnianimplications).182 My point is, some anomalies prove so ‘ recalcitrant’ that it is notthey but the paradigm that will require adjustment or even abandonment.

Butts notes that there is a peculiar uniformity among many of the ‘ recalcitrantparticulars’ in Kant’s scheme of things, namely their association with design or pur-pose. To become in the least intelligible, Butts continues, these anomalies ‘all presup-pose an understanding of purposiveness modeled on human purposive action’ .183

Quite simply, we conceive of organic forms as purposive without purpose; we imputedesign but deny a designer (to ascribe literal design would indeed fall back into flatanimism). Here Butts recognizes something that has not occasioned enough attention:Kant’s characterization of these anomalies ‘ reflects reliance on perfect knowledgeof our own purposive behavior’ .184 That is, ‘basic to Kant’s treatment of teleologyis the unquestioned assumption that we have an already perfect understanding ofhuman purposive action because we ourselves act purposively’ .185 To claim that theprojection of design or purposiveness enables us to make organic forms intelligibleis to claim that purpose can be transparently comprehensible for the human intellect.But are we warranted in this comfortable self-interpretation? What Butts implies,and what I wish to stress, is that this presumption may be unjustified.

Indeed, purpose-thinking—the very form of viewing human practice as causal by

178 Kant (1790), AA 5, 400.179 Buchdahl (1974), (1981), (1986).180 Zumbach suggests that and more: ‘ there is an a priori principle absent from the mechanical view of

nature which the biological point of view instantiates’ (Zumbach, 1984, p. 80). But this is to suggest thatthis transcendental principle bears upon theoretical reason, not practical reason, and has to do with cog-nition, not just (rational) belief. Here we need to resort to Buchdahl and the discrimination of ‘subjective’from ‘objective’ necessity.

181 Butts (1990), p. 2.182 Kuhn (1970).183 Butts (1990), p. 3.184 Ibid., p. 5.185 Ibid., p. 15 n.


design—is as much a function of the limitations of human discursive reasoning ascausal thinking of the specific sort Kant described in the dialectic of teleologicaljudgment.186 How it is possible for us to have purpose is no more theoreticallytransparent than it is for organisms to appear purposive for us. We, after all, are yetsome organic forms among others. That suggests that objectively we are fully asmysterious as any other organisms. The whole structure of purposiveness rests uponthe presumption of the ontological coherence—the real possibility—of ‘ intrinsic pur-posiveness’—or, in other language, an ‘end in itself’—acting efficaciously in thephenomenal world. While it is possible to ‘ think’ this, and to think ourselves underthat concept, it is by no means clear that it can play any theoretical role whatsoever.

The very possibility of reasoning by analogy with this presumed character ofhuman action, upon which teleological judgment is founded, presupposes the realpossibility or objective reality of humans as such ends in themselves: a theoreticalmatter. What I wish to suggest is that Kant’s argument for the very intelligibility oforganic forms presses to the verge of an ontological claim what he asserts can onlybe a practical one. Kant is comfortable with this precisely because (though he doesnot claim to know it determinately) he presumes that we are in fact endowed witha soul. To use Kant as cruelly with his own words as he wished to use Herder inpenning them: is this not to seek to understand what we do not know by invokingwhat we know even less?187 Either Kant must entertain the ‘objective reality’ ofsome end in iself, some actual purpose—as an ontological matter—or his wholesystem of analogy in teleological judgment—the invocation of the causality of ideasas a model—simply lacks any warrant.

But that does not put the point perspicuously enough. For us, it is not merely thetheoretical possibility of making sense of the ‘order of nature’ as a rational systemaccessible to our intelligence, a merely epistemological concern, but the ontologicalpossibility of beings like us—intrinsic purposes—in an ‘order of nature’ that is ulti-mately at stake. What we have tumbled upon is a nest of Kant’s most adamantmetaphysical commitments—to the possibility of moral freedom and therewith tothe compatibility of moral freedom with causal order in physical nature—and hiscompulsion to limit understanding to make room for faith. The problem of organicform—because we are caught up in it at our most fundamental ontological, notsimply epistemological essence—brings all this into urgent articulation. In the wordsof the Introduction to Kant’s Critique of judgment which I take as the clearestexpression of his ultimate philosophical concerns:

186 ‘ [T]his maxim of the reflecting power of judgment is essential for those products of nature whichmust be judged only as intentionally formed thus and not otherwise, in order to obtain even an experientialcognition of their internal constitution; because even the thought of them as organized things is impossiblewithout associating the thought of a generation with an intention’ (Kant, 1790, AA 5, 398). ‘ [W]e under-stand completely only that which we ourselves can make and bring about in accordance with concepts.Organization, however, as the internal end of nature, infinitely surpasses all capacity for a similar presen-tation by art . . .’ (ibid., 383). ‘Strictly speaking, the organization of nature is therefore not analogouswith any causality that we know’ (ibid., 375).

187 Kant (1785), AA 8, 53–54.


[A]n immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, thesensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that notransition from the sensible to the supersensible (and hence by means of the theor-etical use of reason) is possible, just as if they were two different worlds, the firstof which cannot have any influence on the second; and yet the second is to havean influence on the first, i.e., the concept of freedom is to actualize in the worldof sense the purpose enjoined by its laws. Hence it must be possible to think ofnature as being such that the lawfulness in its form will harmonize with at leastthe possibility of [achieving] purposes that we are to achieve in nature accordingto the laws of freedom.188

In short, Kant’s theory of organic form can only be contained within the criticalsystem by the kind of radical disjunction between transcendental lawlikeness andempirical lawlikeness that Buchdahl has striven to establish, and yet its purport iseven more profound, for it betokens Kant’s ultimate metaphysical need to makeroom for the possibility of freedom and hence for human moral actualization.

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