A Study Of Kant’s Teleological Power Of Judgment

As a kind of reflective power of judgment, teleological power ofjudgment is used to solve two problems, the superficial one is to bridge the gapbetween the domain of the conception of nature as sensible things and thedomain of conception of freedom as supersensible things, the deeper one is,to explain the infinite possibilities of empirical laws and the “truth of fact” inLeibniz’s terminology.The notion of purposiveness is the core of Kant’s teleology; meanwhile, it is acontroversial notion. Kant made a definition of purposiveness in general, buthe fails to use this notion consistently. The only way to determine the exactmeaning of purposiveness is to determine its meaning in its specific use. Kantemployed three distinctions, the formal-material, the subjective-objective,and the internal-external, to describe various types of purposiveness, and todescribe things of purposiveness. The exact meanings of purposiveness arepresented in these specific usages.Kant established organism as natural purpose and explained its internal law bythe notion of inner purposiveness in the teleological judgments of naturalindividuals. The teleological judgments of natural individuals lead to theantinomy of teleological power of judgment. Kant’s solution to the antinomy ofteleological power of judgment is a type of compatibilism, i.e. mechanism iscompatible with teleology, and mechanism is subordinate to teleology. Kant’sargument is not sufficient, because teleology cannot be proved through theimpossibility of the inadequate explanation of nature by mechanism alone, andthere maybe some other laws besides mechanism and teleology.In the teleological judgments of nature as a whole, Kant established nature asa system of hierarchical ends and explained the accidental relations amongthings by the notion of external purposiveness. Essentially, this teleologicalsystem is the representation of one possibility of the empirical law.The processes of teleological judgments arise from the reflection of theparticular contents (sensation) of objects by the epistemic subject. Objects areestablished by the discrimination power which isolated objects from themanifold; the connections among objects and subjects are established by imagination. Rational ideas play the regulative role a priori in the wholeprocess, and present particular contents of objects as lawful things. Therefore,teleology, in essence, is the result of the regulative use of rational ideas.Finally, I will show that Kant solved the problem of “truth of fact” in Leibniz’sphilosophy, i.e. lawfulness of the contingent as such and not otherwise, in asimilar way with Leibniz. Both of them asked God’s help. The difference of theirsolutions is that Kant’s theoretical resource is based on the result of his moraltheology and Leibniz’s is based on the ontological and cosmologicalarguments which were opposed by Kant. Thus, I argue that truth of fact can’tbe explained epistemologically.