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).11
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
