From the Tree to the Labyrinth (86 page)

By introducing schematism into the first version of his system, as Peirce suggested, Kant finds himself holding an explosive concept that compels him to go further: in the direction of the
Critique of Judgment.
Judgment is the faculty of thinking of the particular as contained in the general, and if the general (the rule, the law) is already given, the judgment is
determinant.
But if
only the particular is given and the general must be sought,
the judgment is then
reflecting
or
reflective.
Once one arrives at reflective judgment from the schema, the very nature of determinant or determining judgments becomes problematic. Because the capacity of determinant judgment (as we learn in the chapter in the
Critique of Judgment
on the dialectic of the capacity of teleological judgment) “does not have in itself principles that found
concepts of objects.
” Determinant judgment limits itself to subsuming objects under given laws or concepts such as principles. “Thus the capacity of transcendental judgment, which contained the conditions for subsumption under categories, was not in itself nomothetic, but simply indicated the conditions of the sensible intuition under which a given concept may be given reality.” Therefore, for any concept of an object to be well-founded, it must be fixed by the reflective judgment, which “is supposed to subsume under a law that is yet to be given” (CJ, para. 69, 257).

His fundamental realistic assumption prevents Kant from thinking that natural objects somehow do
not
exist independently from us. They are there in front of us, they function in a certain manner, and they develop by themselves. One tree produces another tree—of the same species—and at the same time it grows and therefore also produces itself as an individual. The bud of one tree leaf grafted onto the branch of another tree produces one more plant of the same species. The tree lives as a whole on which the parts converge, since the leaves are produced by the tree, but defoliation would affect the growth of the trunk. The tree therefore lives and grows by following its own internal organic law (CJ, para. 64).

But one cannot learn from the tree what this law is, since phenomena do not tell us anything about the noumenal. Nor do the a priori forms of the pure intellect have anything to tell us about it, because natural beings respond to multiple and particular laws. And yet, they should be considered necessary according to the principle of the unity of the manifold, which in any case is beyond our ken.

These natural objects (over and above the extremely general laws that render the phenomena of physics thinkable) are dogs, stones, horses—and platypuses. We must be able to say how these objects are organized into genera and species, but (and this is important), genera and species do not depend on a classificatory judgment of ours: “There is in nature a subordination of genera and species that we can grasp; that the latter in turn converge in accordance with a common principle, so that a transition from one to the other, thereby to a higher genus is possible” (CJ, Intro., v).

And so we try to construct the concept of the tree (we assume it)
as if
trees were the way we can think of them. Something is thought of as possible according to the concept (we try to harmonize the form with the possibility of the thing itself, even if we do not have any concept of it) and we think of it as an organism that obeys certain ends.

To interpret something
as if
it was in a certain way means to advance an hypothesis, because the reflective judgment must subsume under a law that is not yet given “and which is in fact it only a principle for reflection on objects for which we are objectively entirely lacking a law or a concept of the object that would be adequate for the cases that come before us” (CJ, para. 69). Moreover, it must be a very risky type of hypothesis, because we must infer an as yet unknown Rule from the particular (from a Result); and to come up with the Rule we must hypothesize that that Result is a Case of the Rule to be constructed. Kant certainly never put it that way, though the Kantian Peirce did. It is clear however that reflective judgment is nothing more or less than an
abduction.

In this abductive process, as we said, genera and species are not merely arbitrary classifications—and if they were, they could only become established once the abduction had taken place, at an advanced stage of conceptual elaboration. In the light of the third
Critique
it must be admitted that the reflective judgment, insofar as it is teleological, already assigns a character of “animality” (or of “living being”) in the construction of schemata. Let us reflect for a moment on what would have happened if Kant had ever seen a platypus. He would have had the intuition of a multiplicity of traits, compelling him to construct the schema of an autonomous being, not moved by external forces, which exhibited coordination in its own movements, an organic and functional relationship between bill (which allows it to take nourishment), paws (that allow it to swim), head, trunk, and tail. The animality of the object would have seemed to him a fundamental element of the schema of perception, not as a successive abstract attribution (which would have merely served to ratify conceptually what the schema already contained).
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It appears that one must therefore speak of a form of
pre-categorial perception
that precedes conceptual categorization, whereby the animality that one perceives on seeing a dog or a cat has nothing to do with the genus ANIMAL on which semantics has insisted at least since the time of the Porphyrian tree. If Kant had been able to observe the platypus (morphology, customs, and behavior), as has been done in the two centuries since Kant, he would have probably have come to the same conclusion as Gould (1991: 277): that this animal is not just a clumsy experiment of nature but a masterpiece of design, a perfect example of environmental adaptation. Indeed, its fur protects it from cold water, it can regulate its own body temperature, its morphology makes it adapted for diving into water and finding food with its eyes and ears closed, its anterior limbs allow it to swim, its posterior limbs and tail act as a rudder, its ankle spurs enable it to compete with other males in mating season. But Gould would probably not have been able to give this “teleological” reading of the platypus if Kant hadn’t suggested to us that “an organized product of nature is that in which everything is an end and reciprocally a means as well” (CJ, para. 66), as well as suggesting that the products of nature appear (unlike machines, which are moved by mere driving force, a
bewegende Kraft
) as organisms moved from within by a
bildende Kraft,
a capacity, a formative force.

And yet Gould, in attempting to define this
bildende Kraft,
couldn’t come up with anything better than the outdated metaphor of design, which is a way of forming nonnatural beings. I don’t think Kant could have said he was wrong, even if in so doing he would have gotten himself into a happy contradiction. The fact is that the Capacity of Judgment, once it comes on the scene as reflective and teleological, overwhelms and dominates the entire universe of the knowable, and invests every thinkable object, even a chair. It is true that a chair, as an object of art, could be judged only as beautiful, as a pure example of finality without a goal and universality without a concept, a source of disinterested pleasure, the result of the free play of the imagination and the intellect. But at this point you do not need much to add a rule and an purpose where we have already tried to abstract them, and the chair will be seen, as was the intention of whomever conceived it, as a functional object oriented toward its own goal, organically structured so that each of its parts supports the whole.

It is Kant who moves quite nonchalantly on from teleological judgments concerning natural entities to teleological judgments concerning products of artifice:

If someone were to perceive a geometrical figure, for instance a regular hexagon, drawn in the sand in an apparently uninhabited land, his reflection, working with a concept of it, would become aware of the unity of the principle of its generation by means of reason, even if only obscurely, and thus, in accordance with this, would not be able to judge as a ground of the possibility of such a shape the sand, the nearby sea, the wind, the footprints of any known animals, or any other nonrational cause, because the contingency of coinciding with such a concept, which is possible only in reason, would seem to him so infinitely great that it would be just as good as if there were no natural law of nature, consequently no cause in nature acting merely mechanically, and as if the concept of such an object could be regarded as a concept that can be given only by reason and only by reason compared with the object, thus as if only reason can contain the causality for such an effect, consequently that this object must be thoroughly regarded as an end, but not a natural end, i.e., as a product of
art
(vestigium hominis video).
(CJ, para. 64, emphasis in text)

Kant has just told us how one develops an abduction worthy of Robinson Crusoe. And if someone were to observe that in this case art has nonetheless imitated a regular figure, not invented by art, but produced by pure mathematical intuition, we have only to cite an example that occurs shortly before the one just quoted. In that case, as an illustration of empirical finality (as opposed to the pure finality of the circle, which seems to have been invented for the purpose of highlighting all of the demonstrations that can be deduced from it), Kant pictures a beautiful garden, in the French style with its well-ordered flowerbeds and avenues, where art prevails over nature; and he speaks of empirical, certainly, and of real finality, for we are well aware that the garden has been planned with an aim and a function in mind. We may say that seeing the garden or the chair as a organism oriented toward an end calls for a less risky hypothesis, because I already know that artificial objects respond to the intentions of the artificer, while judgment postulates purpose (and indirectly a creative formativity, a sort of
natura naturans
) as the only way to understand it. But in any case even the artificial object cannot help being invested with reflective judgment.

This teleological version of the schema is not developed with absolute clarity even in the third
Critique.
See, for instance, the famous paragraph 59 which has always seduced anyone who attempted to find in Kant the elements of a philosophy of language. In the first place, a distinction is made between
schemata,
specific to the pure concepts of the intellect, and
examples (Beispiele)
, valid for empirical concepts. The idea in itself is not without its appeal: in the schema of the dog or the tree
prototypical
ideas come into play, as if all dogs could be represented by the
ostension
of a dog (or by the image of a single dog). It remains to be seen how this image, which is supposed to mediate between the manifold of the intuition and the concept, can avoid being interwoven with concepts—being the image of a dog
in general
and not of
that
dog. And, once again, what “example” of a dog could mediate between intuition and concept, since it certainly appears that for empirical concepts the schema ends up coinciding with the possibility of “figuring” a generic concept?

Immediately afterward, Kant says that making something perceptible to the senses (“hypotyposis”) may be
schematic
when a concept grasped by the intellect is given the corresponding intuition is given (and this is valid for the schema of the circle, indispensable for understanding the concept of “plate”). On the other hand, Kant continues, it is
symbolic
when, to a concept that only Reason can think of, to which there exists no corresponding intuition, one is provided by analogy, as would be the case, for example, if I chose to represent the monarchical state as a human body. Here certainly Kant is speaking not only of symbols in the logical-formal sense (which for him are mere “characterisms”) but also of phenomena such as metaphor or allegory. But a gap still remains between schemata and symbols (we have only to think of the platypus): there is intuition, but not yet the concept, and I cannot recognize it or define it through a metaphor.

Kant bridges this gap in his
Opus Postumum,
in which he again tries even harder to determine the various particular laws of physics that cannot be deduced from the categories alone. In order to ground physics, he must postulate the ether as matter that, distributed throughout cosmic space, is found in and penetrates all bodies.

External perceptions, as material for a possible experience, which lack only the form of their connection, are the effect of the moving (or driving) forces of matter. Now, to mediate the application of these motor forces to the relations that occur in experience calls for identifying empirical laws. These latter are not given a priori, they need concepts
constructed
by us
(selbstgemachte).
These are not concepts given by reason or experience but
factitious
concepts. They are
problematic
(and we recall that a problematic judgment depends on the Postulate of Empirical Thought in General, so that what is in harmony with the formal conditions of experience is possible).

Concepts of this kind must be thought as the foundation of natural inquiry. We must therefore postulate (in the case of the factitious concept of ether) an absolute whole that subsists in matter. Kant repeats on various occasions that this concept is not a hypothesis but a postulate of reason, but his suspicion of the term
hypothesis
has Newtonian roots. In fact, a concept (built on nothing, so to speak) that renders possible the totality of experience is an abduction, which, in order to explain certain Results, appeals to a Rule constructed
ex novo
.
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