What problem would Kant have faced if he had encountered a platypus? The terms of the problem became clear to him only in the Critique of Judgment. Judgment is the faculty of thinking of the particular as part of the general, and if the general (the rule, the law) is already given, judgment is determinant. But if only the particular is given and the general must be sought for, judgment is reflective.
By introducing schematism to the first version of the system, as Peirce suggested, Kant found himself with an explosive concept that obliged him to go further: in the direction of the Critique of Judgment, in fact. But, we might say, once we arrive at reflective judgment from the schema, the very nature of determinant judgment enters a crisis. Because the capacity of determinant judgment (we finally find this clearly spelled out in the chapter of 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 (application).» Therefore any concept of an object, if it is to be founded, must be fixed by the reflective judgment, which «must subsume under a law that is yet to be given» (CJ §69).
As far as Kant is concerned, nature is before our eyes, and his native realism prevents him from thinking that the objects of nature are not there, functioning in a certain way, given that they develop by themselves. One tree produces another tree—of the same species—and at the same time grows and therefore also produces itself as an individual; and the bud of one tree leaf grafted onto the branch of another tree produces yet another plant of the same species; the tree lives as a whole at which the parts converge, since the leaves are produced by the tree, but defoliation would have an effect on the growth of the trunk. Therefore the tree lives and grows by following its own internal organic law (CJ §64).
But what this law is cannot be known from the tree, given that the phenomenal teaches us nothing about the noumenal. Nor do the a priori forms of the pure intellect teach us anything, because the entities of nature obey a plethora of particular laws. And yet they should be considered necessary according to the principle of the unity of the manifold, which is moreover unknown to us.
These objects of nature are (apart from those highly general laws that allow us to think of the phenomena of physics) dogs, horses, stones—and platypuses. We must be able to say how these objects are organized into genera and species, but—and mark this—genera and species are not only a classificatory judgment of ours: «[I]n nature there is a subordination of genera and species that we can grasp; in their turn the genera approximate themselves to one another according to a common principle, so that it is possible to move from one to the other, and with that, to a higher genus» (CJ Intr. V).
And so we try to construct the concept of tree (we assume it) as if the trees were as we can think them. We imagine something as possible according to the concept (we try for an agreement between the form and the possibility of the thing itself, even though we have no concept of it), and we can think of it as an organism that obeys certain ends.
To interpret something as if it were in a certain way means proposing a hypothesis, because the reflective judgment must subsume under a law not yet given «and therefore in fact it is only a principle of reflection on objects for which objectively there is absolutely no law or a concept of the object sufficient for the cases that arise» (CJ §69). And it must be a very adventurous type of hypothesis, because from the particular (from a Result) it is necessary to infer a Rule as yet unknown; and in order to find the Rule somewhere or other it is necessary to presume that that Result is a Case of the Rule to be constructed. Of course Kant did not express himself in these terms, but Peirce the Kantian did: it is clear that reflective judgment is none other than an abduction.
In this abductive process, as we have said, the genera and species are not merely arbitrary classifications—and if they were such, they could become established only after abduction has taken place, in an advanced phase of conceptual elaboration. In the light of the third Critique it has to be admitted that, insofar as it is teleological, the reflective judgment assigns a character of «animality» (or of «living being») to the object already in the course of schematic structure. Let us reflect on what would have happened to Kant if he had seen a platypus. He would have had the intuition of a multiplicity of characteristics that obliged him to construct the schema of an autonomous being, not moved by external forces, that could manifestly coordinate its own movements, an organic and functional relation between beak (which permits it to take food), feet (which permit it to swim), head, trunk, and tail. The animality of the object would have suggested itself as the fundamental element of the perceptual schema, not as a successive abstract attribution (which would only have ratified conceptually what the schema already contained).18
Had Kant been able to observe the platypus (its morphology, usage, and customs) as was done gradually over the two centuries that followed, he would probably have come to the same conclusion as Gould (1991: 227): this animal, which was already present during the Mesozoic, before the other mammals of the Tertiary pe riod, and whose evolution never went any further, does not represent a clumsy attempt on nature’s part to produce something better but is a masterpiece of design, a fantastic example of environmental adaptation, which permitted a mammal to survive and flourish in rivers. Its fur seems to have been created specifically to protect it from cold water; it can regulate its own body heat; all its morphology makes it suited to diving into water to find food with eyes and ears closed; its front limbs enable it to swim; the rear limbs and the tail serve as a rudder; the renowned rear spurs equip the male to compete with other males in the mating season. The platypus has, in short, a most original structure, perfectly designed for the purposes to which it is intended. But probably Gould could not have given this «ideological» reading of the platypus, if Kant had not suggested to us that «an organized product of nature is one in which all is end and, reciprocally, means too» (CJ §66) and that the products of nature manifest themselves (unlike machines, moved by a mere driving force, bewegende Kraft) as organisms moved internally by a bildende Kraft, a capacity, a formative force.
And yet Gould, in his attempt to define this bildende Kraft, found nothing better to do than fall back on the metaphor of design, which is a way of modeling nonnatural entities. I don’t think that Kant could have said Gould was wrong; if he had, he would have found himself in a felicitous contradiction. The fact is that the Capacity of Judgment, once it has emerged as reflective and teleological, overwhelms and dominates the entire universe of the cognizable and informs all thinkable objects, even a chair. It is true that a chair, as an art object, could be judged only insofar as it is beautiful, a pure example of an end without a purpose and universality without a concept, a source of pleasure without interest, the result of a free play of the imagination and the intellect. But at this point it does not take much to add a rule and a purpose whence we sought to abstract them, and the chair will be seen in accordance with the intention of the person who conceived it as a functional object, whose end is intended for its function, organically structured so that all its parts sustain the whole.
It is Kant who passes with a certain nonchalance from teleological judgments on natural entities to teleological judgments on products of artifice:
If someone were to perceive, in a seemingly uninhabited land, a geometric figure, drawn on the sand, a regular hexagon let us say, then his reflection, by elaborating a concept of that figure, would realize through the reason, albeit obscurely, the unity of the principle of generation of this hexagon, and so, in conformity with reason, he would deem that neither the sand, not the sea nearby, nor the winds, nor even the animals with their tracks, which he knows, nor any other cause devoid of reason are the foundations of the possibility of this figure: because a coincidence with this concept, which is possible only in the reason, would seem to him so infinitely contingent that there might as well be no natural law in that regard; and it would seem to him as a consequence
