The Critique of Judgement was published in
1790; On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Writing
some seventy years before Darwin, one could be forgiven for thinking
that Kant would have nothing to say on evolution, but this would be a
mistake. The popular view that Darwin destroyed a prevailing belief
in divine Creation is as historically confused as the popular view
that Columbus destroyed a prevailing belief in a flat earth. (Both
Columbus and his critics believed in a round planet, they merely
disagreed as to its size – and as it happens, it was Columbus who
was wildly in error in this case).
One quote in particular is frequently proffered with
the intent of showing how wildly mistaken Kant was in respect of the
prospects for understanding the origins of life:
It is indeed quite certain
that we cannot adequately cognise, much less explain, organised
beings and their internal possibility, according to mere mechanical
principles of nature; and we can say boldly it is alike certain that
it is absurd for men to make any such attempt or to hope that another
Newton will arise in the future, who shall make comprehensible
by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws
which no design has ordered. We must absolutely deny this insight to
men.
Sounds like a blunder, doesn't it? But Kant
continues:
But then how do we know that
in nature, if we could penetrate to the principle by which it
specifies the universal laws known to us, there cannot lie
hidden (in its mere mechanism) a sufficient ground of the possibility
of organised beings without supposing any design in their production?
would it not be judged by us presumptuous to say this?
In some respects, Kant was indeed mistaken –
Darwin's natural selection did allow people to imagine
organised beings arising from purely mechanical principles; this
insight was not denied to humanity. But Darwin's theories did not
rise to the explanatory power of Newton's laws; they did not
mechanically explicate a blade of grass – they provided a new way
of thinking about how an ordered design might emerge from natural
laws. And this possibility Kant had afforded.
Indeed, Kant goes on at some length in the final
sections of the Critique of Judgement
concerning various issues that a naïve appraisal might be surprised
to encounter seventy years before On the Origin of Species.
Kant takes the idea of organisms changing – evolving – quite
seriously:
The agreement of so many
genera of animals in a certain common schema, which appears to be
fundamental not only in the structure of their bones but also in the
disposition of their remaining parts – so that with an admirable
simplicity of original outline, a great variety of species has been
produced by the shortening of one member and the lengthening of
another, the involution of this part and the evolution of that –
allows a ray of hope, however faint, to penetrate into our minds,
that here something may be accomplished by the aid of the principle
of the mechanism of nature (without which there can be no natural
science in general).
One can even see the seeds of Darwin's “descent
with modification from a common ancestor” in Kant's text:
This analogy of forms, which
with all their differences seem to have been produced according to a
common original type, strengthens our suspicions of an actual
relationship between them in their production from a common parent,
through the gradual approximation of one animal-genus to another –
from those in which the principle of purposes seems to be best
authenticated, i.e. from man, down to the polype, and again from this
down to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest stage of nature
noticeable by us, viz. to crude matter.
He thus notes:
And so the whole... of
nature, which is so incomprehensible to us in organised beings that
we believe ourselves compelled to think a different principle for it,
seems to be derived from matter and its powers according to
mechanical laws (like those by which it works in the formation of
crystals).
This isn't Kant pre-empting Darwin, but merely Kant
expressing his views on the prevailing discussions concerning the
origins of life in biology at his time, all of which was part of the
background conditions of Darwin's work. And in this regard, it can be
quite surprising to uncover just how much had already been surmised.
Kant comments:
Here it is permissible for
the archaeologist of nature to derive from the surviving
traces of its oldest revolutions... that great family of creatures...
He can suppose the bosom of mother earth, as she passed out of her
chaotic state (like a great animal), to have given birth in the
beginning to creatures of less purposive form, that these again gave
birth to others which formed themselves with greater adaptation to
their place of birth and their relations to each other...
He considers this latter thought “a daring venture
of reason” but acknowledges that “there may be few even of the
most acute naturalists through whose head it has not sometimes
passed.” Rather than Kant failing to anticipate Darwin, as is
usually suggested, Kant was already
thinking in terms of what Darwin was going to deliver – as indeed
were a great many other thinkers at this time. What they lacked, and
what Darwin delivered, was a viable mechanism i.e. natural selection.
Darwin big idea was not, in fact, as explosively novel as is
sometimes suggested, which is in no way to denigrate its contribution
to natural science.
Kant has one final
point he wished to make, and did so in a section he later relegated
to an appendix. He had, through his various Critiques, systematically
debunked each of the proofs of God that had been advanced as being
inadequate (the disproof of the teleological proof of God we saw last
week, for instance). But he advanced a different kind of “proof”
of his own – what Kant considered to be a moral
proof of God. The short version of this argument is that it is
rationally and morally necessary to attain the perfect good, and this
is only possible if there is a God to secure an overarching moral
order and causality. In the absence of God, one could strive
towards perfect good, but it would be impossible to reach. This is
not a “proof” of God as a fact
– it was precisely these kinds of proofs that Kant debunked. It is
a justification for
faith in God.
In exploring his moral philosophy, Kant's central
idea was that humanity, via the power of reason, was capable of
legislating moral laws for itself (an ability he believed, as a
Christian, was God-given). In the Critique of Judgement
he ventures that one may choose to believe that the existence of
creatures capable of ethical reasoning could constitute “the final
purpose of the being of a world” i.e. that humanity as an ethical
being is the culmination of Creation (or evolution). He recognises
that one need not believe this, however, but notes that the
alternatives are “either no purpose at all”(i.e. nihilism)
or “purposes, but no final purpose” (i.e. subjectivism). Kant
obviously favours the first option – the belief that humanity is
the pinnacle of nature, that our ethics are our highest achievement,
and that perfect good is attainable (because it is secured upon God).
Kant divided the kind of things we can mentally
consider into three groups: opinion, fact and faith. Of matters of
opinion, he had little to say. Matters of fact (or knowledge) he
constrained to the faculty of reason and empirical observation of the
world i.e. to science. But matters of faith were wholly separate from
knowledge in Kant view. He stated that faith is “trust in the
attainment of a design” and “the possibility of the fulfilment of
which... is not to be comprehended by us.” To put this
another way, Kant says that even if one has faith in God, it is
absolutely not on the cards that we should understand
God's plan. He even admits “I cannot cognise what God is.” Both
God and God's plan are incomprehensible
to humanity according to Kant.
If this is so, what value in the idea of God? Kant
states:
If it be asked why it is
incumbent upon us to have any Theology at all, it appears clear that
it is not needed for the extension or correction of our cognition of
nature or in general for any theory, but simply in a subjective point
of view for Religion, i.e. the practical or moral use of our
Reason.
Which is an incredible admission – for Kant not
only allows that faith in God is subjective,
but states that the only reason to contemplate God is for the ethical
aspects of religious practice. Treating God as a matter of knowledge
was a grave error as far as Kant was concerned – God should only
ever be a matter of faith,
and even then, the only way Kant allows that one can do God's work is
to combine faith and reason in the pursuit of ethical living. This is
a long way from the blind faith in Biblical authority that actuated
intelligent design, for he did not presume that “God's law” was
static, factual and beyond question. Kant instead believed that
reason has the power to derive
an ethics of the universal that could potentially bring about a
“Realm of Ends”, the state of communal autonomy. Thus Kant
believed that it was up to humanity to pursue what he claimed was our
God-given purpose: learning how to live together.
A new serial begins in April.
Recent Comments