Kant’s Organicism
This book is oriented by the conviction that Kant should be fitted into a framework that has begun to take shape in a number of fields when it comes to thinking about the mid- to late eighteenth century, a framework that can be called something like “organic thinking” or, better yet, “organicism.” Organicism can be defined by its view of nature as something that cannot be reduced to a set of mechanical operations. The stage for organicism was historically set by investigations into the connected concerns of natural history and embryogenesis, investigations leading to inevitable conclusions regarding nature’s vitality and power. And while historians of science have long understood the centrality of these investigations to the late eighteenth century as a whole, it is increasingly the case that disciplines outside of science are now producing studies of the period along similar lines. At this point there are numerous accounts of “epigenesist poetry” and “epigenesist literature”; there are political theorists who speak of “Enlightenment vitalism,” and the utopian literature of the period is said to employ “the language of epigenesis” when describing the ideal society. Indeed, in light of all this activity one cannot help but reach the conclusion that the latter half of the long eighteenth century is a period best defined by its organicism. For organicism, used interchangeably with “epigenesis,” a term borrowed from embryological theory, seems best to describe the response by science and art, in politics and literature, when grasping the problems and possibilities of an irreducibly living nature.1
Now it has become customary for literary critics and historians alike to pay passing tribute to Kant’s role in this narrative, a tribute paid almost without exception to Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, a book devoted to an investigation of nature and art. Kant’s language of “reflective judgment” and his appeal to transcendental principles as heuristic guides for “orientation” were modes of epistemic caution that were for the most part ignored as the possibilities for connecting teleology and mechanism and for discovering freedom within nature and art were taken up instead by Kant’s successors. There are in fact numerous points of contact between the Critique of Judgment and the Romantic science that would follow, but I want to investigate the degree to which Kant—and not just Kant as he was appropriated through the third Critique—can be located within a period defined by its organicism in order to discover in what manner Kant too would be attracted to the model offered up by “epigenesis” for thinking about questions of origin and generative processes in general. For it is my sense that epigenesist models had a significant role to play for Kant’s theory of cognition, for what one might even go so far as to describe as his epigenesist philosophy of mind. And I believe that it is in fact only through attention to this influence, to seeing Kant’s organicism as it were, that we can both make sense of the transcendental deduction at the heart of Kant’s theory of cognition and discover the means by which his work in natural history can be meaningfully integrated into the critical system as a central part of the whole.
Before turning to Kant, however, it is worth pausing briefly to rehearse the general state of the life sciences as Kant would have first come to appreciate them in the 1750s and 1760s. By 1772 Thomas Ramsay could write that “natural history is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterize the eighteenth century in the annals of literature.”2 Answering the question as to why natural history would achieve the kind of popularity it would enjoy well into the nineteenth century would take us too far afield, but at least a few of the contributing points can be made so far as these set the stage for organicism. By midcentury, for example, serious challenges had been laid down against the reigning theory of generation and indeed the general portrait of organic life as a whole. For much of the century before this, those working in the life sciences could be roughly divided into experimenters and systematists. This division is important to notice, since it is precisely the convergence of what had been parallel tracks, of experimentation with organic processes on the one hand and of the systematic classification of individual organisms on the other, that both established natural history as something that Ramsay would have recognized and became a basis for challenging the received view.
Until the 1740s, theories of generation, and of embryogenesis in particular, were oriented by a belief in the preexistence of all biological organisms. The position sounds fantastic today, but at the time, there were good reasons for its central role in biological theory. The notion that God had created every individual at the beginning of history relieved naturalists of the need to explain the means by which organisms might manage the imposition of form and force on an otherwise lifeless matter; that material being was indeed lifeless apart from God’s agency had firm support from post-Reformationist schools of thought. Preexistence made room, moreover, for the increasingly secluded mechanical philosophy when it came to the explanation of organic generation. No one had been convinced by the Cartesian analysis of generation as a form of fermentation, and thus there was almost a sense of relief when mechanism assumed once more an important role to play for explaining the processes of nutrition and growth in the expansion of the previously formed yet submicroscopic individual. It was in fact the microscope that, more than anything else, lent credibility to the theory once experimenters discovered what they took to be miniature homunculi encapsulated in the “spermatic worms” seen by Leeuwenhoek in the late 1670s. Finally, it was a matter of particular convenience for the systematists to endorse preexistence so far as it ensured that for all the difficulties facing taxonomy the objects of that science would remain stable. As Linnaeus suggested, it might be tricky to determine whether the mulberry belonged with the nettles, but at least one could be sure that mulberries as a species were fixed.
The tide began to turn against preexistence theories in the 1740s, starting with Abraham Trembley’s spectacular discovery of the freshwater hydra. This polyp appeared to be infinitely plastic with respect to its possibilities for regeneration. It could be sliced, severed, turned entirely inside out: in every case the hydra either regenerated the lost part, generated a second individual, or, in the last instance, simply grew a new outside altogether. The impact of this discovery cannot be overestimated for its revolutionizing effect on the life sciences. Questions poured out as a consequence of this discovery: How could preexistence theory explain this capacity? How, in this instance, could one insist on the lifelessness of the animal-machine? It hardly helped matters to note the problem of categorizing the polyp altogether, so far as it seemed to be essentially a plant with a stomach. Problems in classification had in fact begun to multiply as botanists in particular complained of the difficulty in fitting their observations to Linnaeus’s system, and categories assigned to indeterminate species thus slowly began to overshadow the so-called pure lines. In the late 1740s, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, the newly elected president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, began to collect records that he would publish on a family known for its many cases of polydactylity. If, as those records indicated, a trait could be passed on by both female and male members of the family, the basic tenets of preexistence theory had to be wrong: generation must be an active process, one clearly requiring the contribution of both mother and father in the production of an embryo. Against this kind of evidence, it almost seemed beside the point to wonder what God would have had in mind when preforming deformities such as those experienced by the family of polydactyls.
Hybrids, hydras, “monsters”: these were all certainly on Georges Buffon’s mind as he sat down to begin composing what would eventually grow to be some three dozen volumes on natural history. The first three volumes, appearing together in 1749, were almost immediately translated into German, and Buffon’s significance in laying the groundwork for the organic view and the German strain of organicism in particular is clear. Buffon had correctly assessed the central problem facing the taxonomical system as one based on a fundamentally inaccurate view of both nature and knowledge. Nature was not rigidly demarcated along the lines proposed by the taxonomists, nor should one ever hope to completely grasp its manifold principles and operating causes when assessing its effects; at best, according to Buffon, one could adopt the strategy of a kind of game theory, using probabilities as a guide when determining the contours of our species maps. Buffon understood the consequences of his position. If research into organic processes revealed natural agency, then natural history would have to redefine itself as a discipline devoted to the histories of living things; it would need to commit itself, in other words, to the principle that nature was susceptible to change. And the first site of this capacity for change was embryogenesis. Devoting almost the entirety of volume 2 to the problem of generation, Buffon made development the basic biological process, the key to understanding natural history as a science of living nature. For it was here, during the composition of the embryo, that change could be affected by environmental factors such as food and climate. Change produced variation, or “degeneration” in Buffon’s terms, and it both explained the experience of affinities when viewing varieties and grounded a historical sequence capable of linking, to use one of Buffon’s favorite examples, the “proud mouflon” on the mountaintop and the pathetic sheep in the field. It is Buffon, then, who best marks the moment of convergence necessary for the establishment of natural history: the previously parallel investigations into system and process converged in Buffon’s natural history to produce both a new view of organic life and the basis for redefining taxonomy as a form of genealogy.
When it came to describing embryogenesis, Buffon relied on something he called an “internal mold”; it marked Buffon’s attempt to provide a pseudomechanical explanation of the means by which form could be conveyed to the organic material of an embryo. Sometimes described as “mechanical epigenesis” to distinguish it from its more vitalistic conception, the term “epigenesis” was rapidly appropriated beyond any one theory to represent all positions counter to preexistence.3 Epigenesis was, however, an old idea. Aristotle had considered the process by which the male imparted the soul—as source of both information and animation—to material provided by the female in terms that would suggest epigenesis to his later readers.4 Thus in 1651 Harvey understood himself to be following Aristotle when using epigenesis to describe the progressive development of a chicken embryo from homogeneous mass to heterogeneously structured organism.5 Harvey refrained from speculation regarding the basis of this organizational drive, as did Caspar Wolff, who published experimental results that he took, in 1759, to be evidence of a nutritive life force, a force that he called vis essentialis.6 Wolff’s observations suggested a dialectical logic underlying generation, an incessant motion that, in the case of plants, explained development as a back-and-forth motion between fluidity and solids. Epigenesis thus met a need to grasp the power and vitality of nature, but without recourse to the soul or devices such as Buffon’s interior molds, it faced an impossible task with respect to the problem of form. As one critic complained, the epigenesist “needs a force which has foresight, which can make a choice, which has a goal, which, against all the laws of blind combination, always and unfailingly brings about the same end.”7 Despite this concern, epigenesis would soon become the common denominator of organicism: a model for literature and politics as much as for Romantic science itself.
Turning to Kant now, one discovers that within two years of Kant’s passing the requirements that would allow him to teach, he received special permission to offer a new course, a course that Kant called “Physical Geography,” which in outline carefully followed the path taken by Buffon in the first volume of his natural history. It was 1757, and Kant had already established his interest in the problem of origin. His most important works had so far been devoted to questions regarding cosmological origin, with numerous small pieces devoted to geological formation and natural processes associated with the workings of wind, fire, and earthquakes. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Kant kept abreast of debates regarding organic generation as well. On the whole, he took the prospects for any genuine advance in the life sciences to be gloomy. Physics was easily reducible to a set of mechanical causes, but, Kant asked, “Can we claim such advantages about the most insignificant plant or insect? Are we in a position to say: Give me matter and I will show you how a caterpillar can be created? Do we not get stuck at the first step due to ignorance about the true inner nature of the object and the complexity of the diversity contained in it?” (1:230).8 The problem of generation was simply closed off from examination, at least so far as Kant was concerned.
It stands, therefore, as a tribute to the rising prominence of debates over preformation and the epigenesist alternative that the by then well-regarded Magister Kant took the opportunity to review the options as he saw them in 1763. The problem with preformation was that it relied on an essentially supernatural explanation, and recourses to God at this juncture in the history of science were simply no longer compelling. That said, Kant thought that “it would be absurd to regard the initial generation of a plant or an animal as a mechanical effect incidentally arising from the universal laws of nature” (2:114). What was needed was something different, a means of avoiding the supernatural solution even if all of the mechanical accounts of generation had so far failed. Mindful of the need to provide form, Kant emended the epigenesist alternative. Is it possible, Kant asked, that “some individual members of the plant and animal kingdoms, whose origin is indeed directly divine, nonetheless possess the capacity, which we cannot understand, to actually generate [erzeugen] their own kind in accordance with a regular law of nature, and not merely to unfold [auszuwickeln] them?” (2:114).9 Kant’s suggestion, in other words, proposed a compromise. Form was indeed supernaturally conceived, but while this generically maintained the stability of the species lines, the work of generating individuals actively belonged to nature. And the distance epigenesis had come from Buffon’s account was clear not only from Kant’s direct dismissal of that position as an “entirely arbitrary invention” but from the emphasis placed on a specifically nonmechanical account of organization.10
At this point in history there were a number of ways in which the term “epigenesis” was used. Above all, epigenesis referred to the production, the actual generation, of something new. And it was in this sense that detractors could link the notion to older, discredited claims regarding the spontaneous generation of flies and so on. Epigenesis, so far as it was identified with a theory like Buffon’s, emphasized the fact of joint inheritance and so was associated with an account of “blending.” Also in play were the two earlier accounts: Harvey’s observationally based definition of epigenesis as the development of increasingly heterogeneous structures from out of an initially homogeneous mass and Aristotle’s discussion of the imparted soul.
Kant was familiar with all of these uses. In his lecture course on metaphysics he contrasted the relative advantages offered by a preformation theory compared to epigenesis for couples, so far as epigenesis would require careful consideration of what the blended progeny might be like (17:416). Kant also regularly found opportunity to criticize Aristotle’s account as fundamentally absurd given the impossibility of dividing or sharing a simple substance like the soul (17:672, 18:190, 18:429, 28:684, 23:106–107). And although he considered the possibility that biological epigenesis might offer a real alternative to mechanical models of generation (17:591), Kant worried over the difficulty of finding a principle that would be capable of explaining the stability of epigenetic development against potentially altering sources presented by the environment (18:574). Kant’s final position regarding organic embryogenesis would sound close to the position that he had first outlined in 1763. Thus in 1790 Kant would describe epigenesis as akin to a system of “generic preformation” according to which “the form of the species [is] preformed virtualiter in the intrinsic purposive predispositions [Anlagen] imparted to the stock” (5:423), a position to be preferred so far as “it minimizes appeal to the supernatural, and after the first beginning leaves everything to nature” (5:424).11 Two senses of epigenesis remain: the sense of it as a type of spontaneous generation and Harvey’s technical description of development as a movement from undifferentiated unity to an interconnected whole of diversely functioning parts. It was these two models of biological epigenesis that would prove to be most influential for Kant’s metaphysical account of cognition, an influence that would in turn clarify Kant’s subsequent investigations into natural history.12
Starting in the mid-1760s Kant’s attention began to turn away from concerns regarding cosmological and biological origin and toward a constellation of problems surrounding the basis of knowledge and, in particular, the origin of ideas. The problems were pressing. In metaphysics and natural science alike confusion reigned, according to Kant, as the result of insufficient attention to the bases upon which claims were being made and the careless, free-flowing use of vocabularies across the sciences. It was simply wrong to take concepts borrowed from physics, concepts like attractive and repulsive forces for example, and apply them uncritically when attempting to explain something like the metaphysical connection between body and soul. And the attempt in the life sciences to establish something like Wolff’s vis essentialis as an actual “principle of life” or soul within matter was no different (28:275, 283). In each case a force was asserted to explain an effect that might very well be acknowledged to exist but that resisted all mechanical attempts at explanation nonetheless (2:331). Mechanical explanation, as Kant came increasingly to believe, was the only kind available with respect to determinate knowledge of nature. Thus while Kant ultimately took generic preformation to offer the most defensible response to the problem of generation, this was an endorsement with a caveat. So long as the keys to organic processes resisted mechanical reduction, they simply could not be known with the kind of certainty afforded the nonbiological sciences of mechanics and physics. Biology could not, therefore, be realized as a complete science, and all hypotheses regarding organic formation and natural history at large would have to remain heuristic at best.
This was not the case, however, for investigations into the cognitive processes underlying the generation of knowledge. Once Kant declared metaphysics to be henceforth known as a science of the extent and limits of knowledge, the first task was to examine the basis of its claims. Taking stock of his options, Kant considered the alternatives offered by Leibniz and Locke. Leibniz, no less than the preformationists, on Kant’s view, relied on a supernatural explanation when it came to the origin of ideas. Locke’s insistence on a sensible basis, however, failed to appreciate the role played by mental reflection when generating concepts that were irreducible to sense data (28:233). In contrast to either of these positions, Kant was ready by 1771 to describe his own position as “epigenetic.” The “real principle of reason,” Kant now argued, rests “on the basis of epigenesis from the use of the natural laws of reason” (17:492). Only one year before, Kant had had to content himself with tracing intellectual concepts back to what he had then described as their “original acquisition” via attention to the lawful workings of the mind. While this had allowed Kant to avoid the alternatives of concepts that were either sensible or innate, the explanation of just what was meant by “original acquisition” was missing. By subsequently identifying epigenesis as the model for cognition, Kant seems, to borrow Darwin’s phrase, to have at last found “a theory by which to work.”13
When Kant began work in earnest on the series of investigations that would lead to the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he stopped publishing entirely in the subject matter of the Critique. It is thus a matter of special significance to see that Kant’s main publications during this period were in natural history, for only these could be conceptually linked to the somewhat parallel investigations into the bases of cognition. Kant’s single appearance in print between 1770 and 1775 was the review of an Italian anatomist’s discussion of the structural similarities between humans and animals, similarities that, in the anatomist’s view, led to the conclusion that all manner of ailments resulted from humanity’s “unnatural” state of two-footedness (2:421–425). In his response, Kant deferred to the medical expertise of the anatomist, but suggested, nonetheless, that a fundamental difference remained so far as humans alone contained “a germ of reason” (ein Keim von Vernunft), which if developed (entwickelt) would destine them for society; it was a point that Kant would continue to raise against Moscati, named or not, in subsequent lectures on physical geography and anthropology. During the remainder of the decade Kant would gradually come to realize the full consequences of what it might mean to have an epigenesist conception of mind, a mind that, like the organism itself, would have to be viewed as operating according to a kind of reflexive or organic logic according to which its unity must be viewed as both cause and effect of itself.
Until the middle of the 1770s Kant took the generation of representations to be something requiring a juggling of factors directly parallel to those in play when considering organic generation. There had to be something regular, like a set of rules, guaranteeing uniformity of production. There had to be material content, and there had to be some kind of force, something capable of putting the parts together according to the rules. Finally, there had to be something capable of maintaining the unity, if not the identity, of the whole—a simple enough set of requirements perhaps, but the work, as usual, lay in the details. The immediate challenge concerned the specific connections between the various mental faculties in play—the faculty of understanding as home to the rules, sensibility as provider of material content, and eine bildende Kraft,14 a formative power capable of connecting the material to the rules—a challenge exacerbated by Kant’s commitment to a solution relying on neither supernaturally preformed ideas nor the empiricists’ appeal to sense. The intellectual intuition of innate ideas simply smacked of “lazy philosophy,” according to Kant, while the empiricists invited a skepticism that could only damage sciences grown increasingly reliant on induction.
By 1775 Kant had made good progress. Intellectual concepts—concepts like “substance” and “causality”—were now said to be based on rules for the logical positioning of sense data. Logical positioning explained how judgments were formed; indeed it defined cognition as a whole so far as cognition was now said to “consist in judgments” (17:620). Experience would be lawful and skepticism thereby avoided to the extent that cognition predetermined it according to the rules of logical positioning. Kant had in fact already been clear since 1770 on the fact that truth could be won so far as attention was paid to the rules for constructing appearances, rules that amounted to determining the logical connection between predicates in a judgment. The advance since then was to identify concepts with the rules for logical connection (17:614). It was from these rules that Kant could understand the epigenesis of concepts from the use of the natural laws of reason. But what was the status of these laws and rules? Were they in fact as preformed as the supernaturally preformed germs generically maintaining the species lines? Kant’s notes during this period concentrate on the process of judgment formation itself, with page upon page devoted to working out the steps between a “principle of disposition” (Disposition) or “aptitude” (aptitudo) for organization (17:656) and the “exposition” (exposition) of this organization as a kind of exhibition, expounding, or realization of the rules themselves (17:643, 644, 648, 656, 660, 662).15 This exposition of the rule, a representation of logical connection, generated unity, according to Kant, since the connecting of predicates in a judgment was precisely what unified an aggregate of sensation into a meaningful system of representation.
It was at precisely this stage in Kant’s reflections that he took up the option of attaching a short essay to his regular set of course announcements for the 1775–1776 school year. It would be the last time Kant would publish this kind of advertisement, this time to announce that the course on physical geography would be taking up a question of increasing interest in natural history, namely, the explanation of race. Polygenesists had been maintaining that races represented distinct lines of creation, that they were in fact so many different kinds or species. Kant, following Buffon’s adoption of interfertility as the only suitable criterion for determining species, argued instead for mono-genesis. The job for naturalists interested in explaining the grounds of racial difference was therefore twofold, explaining the causal basis of such adaptation—for Kant took the generation of racial characteristics to have originally been an adaptive response to environmental conditions—and explaining the patterns of geographic isolation with respect to these adaptations, explaining, in other words, why similar occasioning causes like high heat and aridity did not seem to have produced similar races in all such locations with those characteristics.
Our interest concerns Kant’s explanation of adaptation so far as it returns us to the language of germs and dispositions. By this point preexistence theorists had had to respond to discoveries like those regarding the regenerative possibilities of the hydra. And the most successful response, by far, had been put together by the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet. Bonnet had argued that organisms contained innumerable germs, germs containing the imprint of the species, and Kant seems to have had a similar strategy in mind when discussing the basis of biological adaptation.16 According to Kant, the only way to explain environmental adaptation was to suppose the preexistence within species lines of “germs” for new parts and “natural predispositions” for proportional changes to existing parts. Kant took the case of birds as his first example in the course announcement. As he explained it, “In birds of the same kind which yet are supposed to live in different climates there lie germs for the unfolding of a new layer of feathers if they live in a cold climate, which, however, are held back if they should reside in a temperate one” (2:434). But how was one to understand the existence of such spectacular provisions for adaptation? Surely neither chance nor mechanical laws could explain the existence of germs purposed for the possibility of an organism’s adaptive needs. “The human being,” Kant continued, “was destined for all climates and for every soil; consequently, various germs and natural predispositions had to lie ready in him to be on occasion either unfolded or restrained, so that he would become suited to his place in the world and over the course of the generations would appear to be, as it were, native to and made for that place” (2:435). What Kant wanted was a lawful basis for adaptation. The existence of germs purposed for human survival across climate and geography seemed to explain both the fact of adaptation and its inheritance. Like Harvey’s definition of epigenesis as the movement from homogeneous unity to increasingly distinct parts, the natural history of the human species could be viewed similarly with monogenetic unity securing phyletic connection and germs providing the rules for subsequent differentiation. But this kind of conclusion, as always with biological explanations, carried a caveat. So long as the actual histories of species remained unknown, natural history as a genealogical enterprise would fail to offer precisely that set of laws required for its establishment as a science. The “physical system for the understanding” (2:434), as Kant called it in 1775, would never be realized as an empirical science.
Returning to his work on the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was ready to make a distinction, one that would prove to have a deep conceptual impact on the critical project as a whole. There had to be different grounds for unity in cognition: the rule-based unity of judgments at the heart of representation, and the unity of reason itself—in Kant’s words, a “unity of experience” on the one hand and the “unity of the self-determination of reason with regard to the manifold of the unity of rules or principles” on the other (17:707–709, italics mine). By describing the unity of reason as a case of “self-determination” Kant had finally located an epigenetic beginning, an origin that was neither supernatural nor empirical but spontaneous. And it was only in the vein of something that could be metaphysically conceived as self-born that the unity of apperception could be subsequently referred to as “pure spontaneity” or as “transcendentally free.” The rules and intellectual concepts responsible for generating a unified experience would subsequently be described as having been themselves generated, as a set of diversely functioning parts, from out of reason itself. Rather than lying like preformed germs and dispositions, the rules would operate, therefore, like emergent properties,17 constructing experience at the same time that they gave definition to spontaneity itself, realizing or “perfecting” it through their lawful operation. Thus while the unity of reason could be conceptually distinguished from the unity of rules for constructing experience, like an organism, cognition functioned as a set of parts whose thoroughgoing connection realized unity even as the grounds of that unity preceded it. This was a different logic at work than that driving the discursive logic of judgment formation; it was a reflexive logic according to which the unity of apperception was both cause and effect of itself, or, as Kant would put it in another context, both author of and subject to its own laws.
The Critique of Pure Reason finally appeared in 1781. It was a book whose energies were divided between attention to the positive account of rules for coherent experience and the negative work of outlining reason’s capacity for illusion in its desire to push past the boundaries it had itself set as the ground of experience. The necessity ascribed to the rules for experience became a matter of genealogy, as Kant now described the connection between unity of rule and unity of apperception on the basis of their organic affinity. “How,” Kant asked, “are we to make comprehensible to ourselves the thoroughgoing affinity of appearances, whereby they stand and must stand under unchanging laws?” (A113). Kant’s answer lay in neither the kind of “special affinity” affirmed by Leibniz and responsible for connecting innate ideas and intellectual intuition nor the “natural affinity” thought by Hume to form the basis of laws for imaginative association.18 Organic affinity, in contrast to either of these accounts, secured necessity or lawfulness in experience so far as the rules for connection had their “birthplace” in apperception (A66/B90). “The objective ground of all association of appearances,” Kant now declared, “I entitle their affinity. It is nowhere to be found save in the principle of the unity of apperception, in respect of all knowledge which is to belong to me” (A122). This was Kant’s response to skepticism: rules guaranteed the coherence of experience, and the unity of apperception secured the origin and thereby the legitimacy of the rules. “Our skeptical philosopher,” Kant explained, ignored the genealogy of our concepts or rules and thus “proceeded to treat the self-increment of concepts [diese Vermehrung der Begriffe aus sich selbst], and, as we may say, this self-birth [die Selbstgebärung] on the part of our understanding (the same as of our reason), without impregnation by experience [ohne durch Erfahrung geschwängert zu sein], to be impossible” (A765/B793). Only the “self-birth” of reason or, as Kant would later add, the “epigenesis of reason” (B167) could finally secure the coherence of experience. Kant’s transcendental deduction, where “deduction” represents a term borrowed from the legal work to determine rightful inheritance, could not, therefore, have been more aptly named given the vocabularies of origin and birthright at play.
With the Critique of Pure Reason in place, Kant was able to return with greater clarity to natural history. Reviewing Johann Herder’s attempt to avoid both preexistence and mechanism in his appeal to a “genetic force” at the basis of adaptations, Kant was ready to agree
only with this reservation, that if the cause organizing itself from within were limited by its nature only perhaps to a certain number and degree of differences in the formation of a creature . . . then one could call this natural vocation of the forming nature also “germs” or “original predispositions” without thereby regarding the former as primordially implanted machines and buds that unfold themselves only when occasioned as in the system of evolution, but merely as limitations, not further explicable, of a self-forming faculty, which latter we can just as little explain or make comprehensible. (8:62–63)19
In 1775, Kant’s effort to discover the means for lawful adaptation had stopped with the supposition of germs purposed toward the adaptive needs of an organism. By 1784 Kant was prepared to heuristically mirror the language of cognition such that heritable traits, no less than the rules for experience, emerged to limit and therefore realize, constrain and thereby form, a freely exercised power of life.
Without a mechanical explanation of necessary inheritance, Kant turned to a basic tenet of the first Critique, namely, that all necessity without exception must have a transcendental ground (A106). The unity of apperception was the transcendental ground guaranteeing the necessary coherence of experience. But in the natural history of the human species no such ground could ever be discovered. It could only be asserted therefore as a transcendental principle: a principle serving as a condition—not for the construction of experience but for the possibility of orientation within it. How can we understand natural history as a genealogical exercise, one capable of providing, in Kant’s words, a genuine “archaeology of nature” (5:419)? In the case of the human species it is by asserting the monogenesis of our kind, a phyletic unity requiring the possibility of differentiation from the start given the vagaries of climate and geography (8:99).20 But the lawfulness of original adaptation, the necessity of subsequent inheritance, these can therefore only rest on a transcendental principle regarding the unity of our species, a principle we supply as a unifying law of reason, a law that reason gives to itself in its investigation of nature as seen through the lens of teleology. This was Kant’s solution to the complaint he had first voiced in 1763 regarding the need for recourse to some kind of explanatory principle besides mechanism or God. It was a solution that could yield a productive means for the investigation of nature while still remaining faithful to the limits of our claims.
By setting limits on the use of transcendental principles regarding nature’s unity and purposiveness, Kant expressed a note of epistemic caution that would go unheard by his successors. Convinced of nature’s vitality, naturalists and philosophers would make use of Kant’s work as they saw fit. The most significant transformation of Kant’s work concerned the use of transcendental principles themselves, since these tools for thinking about nature would be subsequently ascribed to nature itself. This so-called constitutive use of what was meant to be only a transcendental principle for reflective judgment betrayed its lineage as more than an epistemic device, as something that was indeed itself forged out of Kant’s synthesis of biological and epistemic concerns. Thus when Goethe described “intuitive perception” as the ability to “see the ideas” at work in nature, he was identifying the archetype as something that functioned both epistemically and as the biologically active ground of metamorphosis.21 This would be the case for Darwin’s appeal to “common descent” as well. Descent with modification, the guiding idea behind the theory of natural selection, represented a claim meant not only to orient our investigation of nature but to ground the interconnection of nature itself. Common descent functioned like a transcendental principle so far as it oriented classification toward the search for nature’s unity via phyletic lineage between organisms. But it was also more than a mere heuristic by which one could think nature’s interconnection; it was the organically real ground of biological affinity, the only basis upon which Darwin could declare comparative anatomy to be “the soul of natural history.”22
In the end, while Kant’s real role in natural history might have operated through the manner in which he was appropriated, his place in the organicism of his time is best secured by his account of the epigenesis of reason, an epigenesis that was far more radical than the one Kant was willing to accord natural organisms via “transcendental principles,” and one that locates Kant as a genuine forerunner of investigations into “epigenetics” and the “emergent properties” of genes that are central to discussions of embryogenesis today.