3
Kant After Geophilosophy: The Physics of
Analogy and the Metaphysics of Nature
Iain Hamilton Grant
I hope to found on incontrovertible grounds a firm conviction, that the
world recognizes for the origin of its constitution a mechanical development unfolding from the general laws of nature; and second, that the kind
of mechanical genesis which we have presented is the true one.1
[I] s it not necessary to represent the very essence of creation ... to be a witness of that power which can be measured by no yardstick? 2
Kant's ... idea of a Copernican revolution puts thought into a direct relation with the earth.3
What is the nature of the relation in which Deleuze and Guattari bond
Kant's critical revolution to the earth? Neither a manifesto for the
necessity of philosophy's transcendent self-grounding, nor an historical
or historicising search for origins or emergent structures, geophilosophy
takes to the earth as the plane on which philosophical territories
(Ancient Greece, Modern Germany, Nietzsche's planet of health
resorts, and so on) emerge and dissipate, forming 'diagrammatic movements of a Nature-thought on the plane'. 4
Yet why bond Kant to this project? Certainly, the well-known political
geography of metaphysics that runs through Preface A of the first Critique constructs a plane where battles and courtrooms coexist without
succession, where nomadic raids are a recurrent threat to successive
governments.^ Yet good sense dictates that this 'geophilosophy' be
understood simply as analogical, and far from calling forth a new people,
let alone a new earth, merely 'inventories' our rational possessions. 6 On
what bond, then, are Deleuze and Guattari calling: geological, or merely
analogical?
It is widely assumed that Kant's precritical mechanistic cosmogonies
and 'universal natural histories' are ended by the insoluble antinomies
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consequent upon the critical revolution. The critical philosophy desubstantiates 'universe' into mere logical 'universality', by which metaphysics is exiled from physics. Yet, even at its inception, critique is
declared preparatory to a 'metaphysics of nature',7 a metaphysics that
Kant did not live to complete, the tortured reiterations of the Opus postumum notwithstanding. However, echoing the search for something to
span the 'great gulf fixed' between practical and speculative reason in
the third Critique? the problem repeatedly posed by the last works is an
elusive 'science of transition' between metaphysics and physics9 - the
problem of the relation of thought to the earth.
And what is the nature of the revolution in question? As Deleuze and
Guattari interpret Kant, revolutions do indeed call forth a new people,
and a new earth. It is the Copernican revolution that Deleuzoguattarian
geophilosophy claims as its precursor, a revolution Kant claims as solely
epistemo-judicial. However, the revolutions which, according to Kant,
do bring forth new earths and new peoples are not epistemological, but
geological. At crucial points in the third Critique and the Opuspostumum,
returning to the cosmological sublime of the Universal Natural History,10
Kant makes reference to a chaos of 'natural revolutions', in which the
earth itself threatens to lay waste to its present, thinking inhabitants.
Geophilosophy, itself perhaps the precursor of the 'philosophy of
nature' on which Deleuze and Guattari were working before their
deaths,11 does not therefore go by way of this physical, first natural transition from metaphysics to physics, but by way of practical, 'second natural' revolutions alone. As we shall see, however, the production of a
second nature demands material, not merely ideational-moral alterations. However, from the Universal Natural History to the Opus postumum, and from the first inception of the critical project to the
announcement of its conclusion in the third Critique,12 the metaphysics
of nature, comprising mechanism, dynamics, geology, biology and physiology, remains a component of, rather than an obstacle to, the metaphysics of freedom. If therefore, metaphysics and physics are separated
by a 'great gulf such as divides nature and freedom, the faces of this
sundered rock meet deep in the earth, and are not merely conjoined by
the technological fix of analogical bridges.
Deleuze and Guattari begin to reassemble the 'objects' or a Kantian
metaphysics of nature: geophysics, revolution, philosophy and new
species. It is, however, the construction of the material-synthetic chiasmus passing between physics and metaphysics, which Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy neglects, to which the present essay is devoted. The
Kant After Geophilosophy
39
metaphysics of nature for which critique was only ever preparatory holds
as its guiding thread to the indissociability of physics and metaphysics, a
moebian chiasmus most explicit in the third Critique. In the broadest
terms, it is the fullest stakes of the practical revolution - the causal efficacy of philosophy upon nature - that defines the Kantian programme of
the metaphysics of nature.
Physiophilosophy: 'how does matter produce a body?' 13
Whatever the infinite distance between the ability to think and the motion
of matter, between the rational mind and the body, it is still certain that man
... is wholly dependent on the properties of that matter to which the Creator joined him.H
Although in the first Critique Kant makes much of disintricating the
empirical from the transcendental in the constitution of the subject, and
of reversing the influences of the former on the latter, questions of that
subject's empirical, i.e., physiological production insistently accompany
those of its conceptual or transcendental constitution, from the universal Natural History, through the second Critique, to the Opuspostumum.
As we shall see, the work being pursued in this context, later continued
by others, 15 attempts to maintain an asymptotic relation between rational-practical activity and natural production without jettisoning some
kind of chiasmatic ideational-neurophysical contact. It is precisely at this
moment of conjuncture, however, that the mechanical impetus to physiological critique emerges, before the Copernican revolution, in the Universal Natural History:
If one looks for the cause of impediments, that keep human nature in such
a deep debasement, it will be found in the crudeness of the matter into
which his intelligent [geistlich] part is sunk, in the unbending of the fibers,
and in the sluggishness and immobility of fluids which should obey its stirrings. The nerves and fluids of his brain deliver to him only gross and
unclear concepts, and because he cannot counterbalance in the interior of
his power of thought the impact of sensory impressions with sufficiently
powerful ideas, he will be carried away by his passions, confused and overwhelmed by the turmoil of the elements that maintain his [bodily]
machine.'6
Here, what Kant will later call the 'occasioning causes' {Gelegenheitsursachen) rather than the 'principle of possibility' of concepts, 17 are criticised if not critiqued: they obstruct and hinder the power of thought.
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But this is not an infantile materialism to be dropped at the first hint of
mature criticism; rather, even at the 'ending' of the critical project in the
third Critique™ the persistence of mechanistic physiology is manifest,
and the problem of how ideas are to become more powerful, is solved.
For Kant admonishes that 'to explain all products and events of nature',
'the mechanical must be given its fullest possible extension' in accordance with the essential condition of our powers.19 On the one hand,
this means that as far as the powers may reach, so must mechanics
follow; on the other, if mechanical explanation is not pursued, there can
be 'no insight into the nature of things'.20 Therefore, the powers themselves must be subject to mechanical explanation, just as the third Conflict of the Faculties, between the medical and philosophical faculties,
suggests that the 'free play of the imagination [is] a mechanical activity'.21 What is important here is not whether such explanations - or their
teleological counterparts - are correct, but rather the establishment of
the principle that 'the sum total of all things' is materially instantiated.
The Universal Natural History's physiology of fluids and fibers, however, is not confined to Kant's primitive, dogmatic mechanicism; it is
echoed even after the third Critique, as for example in Kant's critical
afterword to Samuel Thomas Sömmering's Über das Organ der Seele:
As the immediate organ of the soul, thisfluid... separates the terminating
nerve-fibers from one another so that the sensations from them do not get
confused.22
Although Kant has qualified this physiological description as 'not confounding a physiological with a metaphysical problem', he adds immediately after the above passage that 'we are dealing only with that matter,
which makes the unity of all presentations of sense possible in the mind',
and, in a footnote, that matter here denotes 'powers [Vermögen], not at
all substance'.23 Although therefore something has changed between
1755 and 1796, it is not Kant's attention to the physicality of the mind,
but rather the particular physical theory within which this attention is
framed. Instead of a 'mechanical organization', the later work proposes
'a dynamical one, based on chemical principles'.24
Kant's 'chemical revolution' reveals a twofold continuity: firstly as
regards the material envelope that provides the historical and philosophical basis for the metaphysics of nature and freedom; secondly, as
regards the continuous attempt not only to locate the natural causality whether mechanical or chemical - productive of the human brain and
its powers, but also to produce a reciprocal effectivity on the part of that
Kant After Geophilosophy
41
brain upon those natural causes. In other words, Kant seeks not only to
discover 'the physical causes of human philosophy', but also its 'physical effects';25 n ot only, that is, 'what nature makes of man', but also 'what
man makes of nature'.26 There is a continuum, a physical substrate, on
which nature and freedom depend. Importantly, just because such a
continuum is physical - and even physiological - does not entail that it
is therefore sensible, and thus epistemologically treatable, but only practically manipulable. It is this non-alignment of the physical and the sensible in Kant that creates the conditions for a practical philosophy that
is not reducible to subjective reasoning about actions. Nor does this
physical continuum entail that the causal order of philosophy - its retrofitting effects upon material nature - be reducible to that of the mechanical production of the bodily machine. It does entail, however, the
physicalisation ofphilosophy and the production of another causal order.
It is to this demand that the third Critique accedes in the consideration
of teleology: the maintenance of mechanical causality, while essential in
order to 'gain insight into the nature of things',27 must equally be susceptible to the production of a parallel and irreducible causal order.
Hence, despite the reflective form of the problem in Kant, there is the
following anomalously materialistic conclusion: 'matter can receive
more and other forms than it can get through mechanism'.28 Reflective
judgement cedes the task of determination only to rid itself of the legislative prohibitions of the first Critique, realising its freedom in the production of analogical but nonetheless material causalities.
That nature and freedom, intelligible, sensible and practical powers,
are physically conjunct in the organ of the brain, and that paralogisms
and antinomies, while manifest in ideation, are also neurophysiological
pathologies, had already dawned on the earliest readers of thefirstCritique. Indeed, there are hints of precisely such a project throughout that
Critique, as when, for example, Kant writes that sensibility and the
understanding 'perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown,
root',2SJ from a Grundkraft or 'fundamental power'.30 The research programme to which this principle gave rise in the passage from Enlightenment science to Naturphilosophie, accordingly maintained a parallel
series of transcendental and mechanical explanation. The resultant 'vital
materialist' programme, as it has been called,31 drawing on the physiological researches into the 'vital force' or Lebenskraft undertaken by the
physiologist Albrecht von Haller and the comparative anatomist Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach, was explicitly based on an 'attempt to apply
Kant's epistemological limits on human reason to concrete physiology'.32
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How, accordingly, are the powers [Vermögen) to be conceived? In accordance with their functioning in rational activity, and thus reducible to
ideational structures, or as expressions of physical activity, and thus
complex outcomes of a single Grund- or Lebenskraft} Thus, in his Versuch über den Schwindel [Experiment on Vertigo)?1 the Berlin physician
Marcus Herz, Kant's former student and philosophical correspondent,
and a promoter of Kantian philosophy in physiologico-medical
researches, proposed that the mental forces were like an electrical
stream',54 thus offering a solution to the problem of the physical constitution of the Kantian powers in a single Grundkraft. Having a fixed
quantity of energy at its disposal, this force modified itself into all the
other powers, but all the while attempted to maintain an equilibrium
between them, after the Brunonian model.35
Again, in 'Von der Lebenskraft' ('On the vital force'), Johann Christian Reil attempted to provide a reducibly physical explanation of the
powers of reason and representation from the 'mixtures and forms' of
the 'basic elements of matter' [Grundstoffe)?6 Against Kant's arguments
for the teleological basis of organised bodies, and thus against Kant's
perceived retreat from physical causality in explaining thinking nature,
Reil writes:
[T]he basis of the ordered formation of animal bodies lies originally in the
nature of animal matter: formation and organization are already the
appearance and effect of matter.37
All organic powers, including the mental ones, are therefore a function
of the complexity of the matter from which they are composed. Both
Herz and Reil therefore attempt to answer the question as to the origins
and the effects of the powers on the basis of matter.
However, the more immediate problem in the current context is the
extent to which such a psychophysical parallelism may be pursued
through the third Critique. As we shall see, the 'parallel' is misleadingly
accommodating; rather, these causal orders, conjoint as the two faces of
a moebian band, are brought to the greatest tensions at key points in that
work. The rational (insofar as it is constructed by the understanding) and
actual nature (as the undeducible domain of the power of reflective
judgement) violently diverge under pressure from the latter, buckling the
rational envelope through which the physical is determined. The
prospect of a physiology of the transcendental subject that was subsequently taken up by Herz, Reil and others is a problem for Kant not insofar as such a 'physiological derivation' might be false or incorrect,38 but
Kant After Geopkilosophy
43
rather to the extent that it poses a merely epistemological, and therefore
reductivist, threat to the determination of matter: it would collapse the
distance between the powers of reflective and determinant judgement,
and render material nature as given through deduction alone.
However, before the third Critique's inclusive disjunctive synthesis of
mechanics and teleology; before even the chemical revolution that
spawned, in Aus Sömmering', the 'dynamical chemistry' and 'fluid
becomings' of the 'power of the nerves' {Vermögen der Nerven) in the
brain;39 before the extramechanical definition of chemical activity in the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*0 chemistry furnishes Kant
with the prospect of a causal agency irreducible to mechanical determination. Prefacing the 'single and sudden' advent of the Copernican revolution, Kant claims as an avatar the productivist lessons taught by the
influential eighteenth-century chemist Georg Ernst Stahl,41 whose
experiments Kant cites in the B edition Preface of the first Critique,
regarding the reversible transformation of
metals into calxes and the latter back into metal, in that he extracted something from them and then restored it. ... [Thus] students of nature ...
learned that reason has insight only into what it produces after a plan of its
own.42
From the Stahlian inspiration for this manifesto for constructivist chemical philosophy, Kant draws two related lessons. As a natural historian,
Stahl was renowned as founding modern vitalism and therefore, like
Kant, sought a treatment of matter that was materially and ontologically
irreducible to mechanism. Accordingly, Stahlian chemistry distinguishes
two types of chemical combinations: whereas the first, 'mechanical aggregation', could be investigated by breaking it down into its constitutive
elements, the second, 'mixtive union' or 'mixt', could only be investigated by changing its properties.43 Such 'reduction' experiments on any
chemical body had always to be carried out by the use of an 'instrument',
i.e., another mechanical-chemical body such asfire,water or air as a mere
vehicle of chemical change.44 Neutral in aggregates but an agent of alteration in mixts, it is exactly after Stahl's instrumentalism that Kant models
the operations of synthesis, which, he notes, 'in chemistry is sometimes
entitled the experiment of reduction'.45 Synthesis, therefore, is a new
mixt formed as a consequence of reduction experiments.
Synthesis, then, an instrument in the Stahlian sense, is not something
merely brought to intervene in an operation from outside, but an irreducible component of the experimentally resultant mixtive union itself.
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Accordingly, it cannot be examined as a merely logical or epistemogenic
device, nor as a function to be consciously deployed in the production
of representations; rather, it is inescapably the possibilising material
dynamic, the mixtive chemistry of human ideation that Kant will explore
more thoroughly in Aus Sömmering'. This has enormous consequences.
How was it ever possible not to read the Critique of Pure Reason as an
atlas of high-level neurophysiology? In accordance with such readings,
the Transcendental Aesthetic would be at least in part a quaesto facti, a
'physiological derivation' of the means whereby knowledge is possible
for beings of a particular physiological type.46 At this point, however, the
physiological derivation is thus twice relativised: first, as regards the sort
of knowledge a particular physiology enables - the kind of knowledge
human beings can have is dependent upon the physiological constitution they possess; and second, as regards the instantiation ofthat constitution. At the 'blind but indispensable' synthetic core of the subject's
critical power of intellection,47 intellection cannot, by physiological
means alone, be determined as the possession of a single kind of organic
product. This is why, despite praise for the physiological researches into
the derivation of human knowledge by 'the illustrious Locke',48 such
'material' accounts of possession require supplementary justification,
and why that justification must be formal only, a quaesto juris. Without
such an account, physiological derivations alone furnish the basis for an
inclusivist account of 'thinking natures', from which arise Kant's speculations on species and knowledge types: from the wise Saturnians,49
intellectually empowered by their distance from the sun, to species lost
through revolutions of the earth, and those, due to the same causes, yet
to come. At this point, we must emphasise that there is, for Kant, nothing wrong in itself in the production of new species; what is wrong is that
this should come about by physiological accident rather than by physiophilosophical purpose. To appreciate the practical necessity of the production of new species, it is necessary to turn to the third Critique.
Under physio-philosophical scrutiny, the stakes of that work will be
revealed as precisely the practical means open for the preservation or
reinvention of the species, given the natural necessity of their coming to
be and passing away.
The geophilosophical sublime: on the revolutions of the earth
[Geological] views of the immensity of past time, like those unfolded by
the Newtonian philosophy with regard to space, were too vast to awaken
Kant After Geophilosophy
45
ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such infinite extent.50
Species must die out because Timefightsagainst them.31
The definition of the naturally purposive organised body in the third Critique has prompted some commentators to reduce that work to a philosophy of biology, rather than a component of Kant's long-sought after
metaphysics of nature.52 Not only the metaphysics of nature, but also the
history of the sciences, however, casts serious doubt over such reducibility. Firstly, the third Critique contains more of the physical than can be
reduced to biology; and secondly, since biology did not exist as a science
until 1802,5} it is at best anachronistic to suggest Kant pursued such a
project, although, as we have seen, certain of his successors did. From
the perspective of the metaphysics of nature, the principal problem of
such accounts is that they fail to philosophise physiological phenomena.
Such a physiophilosophy will discover that the only properly philosophical treatment of physiological phenomena - of 'what nature makes of
man'54 - is sublime. In the sublime, through which the mind first realises
its 'superiority over nature',55 the 'physical causes of human philosophy'
are pitted against the latter's 'physical effects',56 in order to demonstrate
the technical-practical purchase of the metaphysics of freedom on
nature, the 'material ... totality of all things'.57 The problem of how far
this reciprocal causality extends is, in effect, the grounding problem of
the third Critique, that of judging the relation between mechanism and
teleology. As we shall see, the selection involved in such judging turns out
to have more than merely epistemic or methodological significance.
If, accordingly, we are to demonstrate a physio-philosophical substrate of judgement as a prelude to a physicalist sublime in the third Critique, we must seek the material efficacy of reflection, a physics of
analogy. When Kant writes that 'the concept of the sublime in nature is
not nearly as important and rich in implications as the beautiful in
nature',58 this seems to reject absolutely the prospect of a reciprocal selectivity of teleological judgement and nature such as is found in a judgement of the beautiful in nature. If not beautiful, however, nature's
fearful might impels aesthetic judgement to realise the powers' superiority over, and independence of, nature.59 Thus, although judgements of
natural beauty reveal 'nature's harmony with the free play of our cognitive powers as we apprehend and judge its appearance',60 and, through
this consonance with our cognitive powers, reveals a purposiveness that
demonstrates nature's 'favour' for humanity, the reciprocity of this
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selection from the 'order of the accidental',61 is bound together by analogy only.62 And yet, this 'favour' is possible only on the basis of the relation between the sort of constitution human beings contingently possess
and, in turn, that of the earth. The possible material basis for such a
judgement as a power of selection raises the prospect of a physics of
analogy that threatens to undo the merely reflective limits within which
analogy ought to be confined, ringfencing how far a reciprocal selection
of nature and teleological causation might extend.
When, therefore, nature in its formless chaos prompts the dynamical
sublime - when 'threatening rocks ..., lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes ..., mighty oceans [and] waterfalls' induce fear in the judging
subject and dissonance amongst the powers63 - analogy is confined to
reflection alone. Reflection on the dynamical sublime nevertheless thus
reveals a purposiveness other than that given in mechanical nature,
whose profligate productivity threatens humanity, epistemologically and
physically.64 That purpose is the subject's capacity to elevate itself above
nature's mechanical forces and to operate in accordance with another,
'sublime' causality, that of 'freedom ... [as] itself an original cause'}5
Moreover, Kant adds that the ability to judge ourselves thus independent of and superior to nature provides 'the basis for a self-preservation
quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered
by nature outside us'.66 But this purpose is itself the product of 'an
object (of nature) the presentation of which determines the mind to think of
nature's inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas'.61 That this 'original'
causal order is materially grounded in the mechanical causality that produces physical creatures capable of such causative actions, reiterates the
inextricability of the material and the teleological, and returns the problem of the sublime to a substrate of freedom and nature that is not solely
intelligible, but also physical. Thus, the problem of the substrate is precisely what is fleshed out in the consideration of mechanics and teleology, as in the sublime. In neither case, however, is the problem of their
physical proximity solved by the restrictions of reflective judgement, but
merely displaced to another level.
For the moment, however, we shall follow the twisted paths by which
the sublime leads the powers from determination by nature to production, from receptivity to natural forms to spontaneous causation. Turning from an investigation of purposiveness in nature, at the level of the
given, to the production of purposiveness, the sublime induces the mind
to abandon sensibility and the merely reproductive imagination through
which natural forms are given. In turn, the imagination becomes 'pro-
Kant After Geophilosophy
47
ductive ... when it creates ... another nature [eine andere Natur] out of
the material [Stoffe] that actual [wirkliche] nature gives it'.68 On the one
hand, the imagination's transformation in the sublime follows the abandonment of sensibility with a productivity that is intelligible only, thus
revealing the nonsensible substrate of nature and freedom. On the other
hand, this substrate anchors the heterogeneous causal mesh of mechanism (the physically realised forms that prompt the sublime through the
mechanico-psychological reproductive imagination), teleology (the purposiveness it reveals as only contingently embodied in natural forms, but
actually only a potentiality of the powers) and freedom (the free production of a second nature), which, while it becomes intelligible through
the sublime, remains materially tied to 'actual nature'.
There is, therefore, a systematic plane of conjunction between matter
and practical causation, so that Kant's metaphysics of nature consists of
an equally systematic hierarchy of causes that places free productivity at
its apex. In the sublime, this hierarchy of causes translates the metaphysics of freedom into that of nature, so that, although desire is
defined, in the second and third Critiques, as the 'power of causing,
through ... ideas, the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the objects of those
ideas',69 it is entirely ineffective if the actuality it causes does not involve
the material alteration of actual nature and the production of a second.
Having thus demonstrated the material substrate of nature and freedom running like a moebius strip throughout the critical corpus, and
forming the basis of the metaphysics of nature and freedom, the problem of a physicalist sublime must now be confronted. As we have seen,
this problem bears on the power of judgement to select amongst the
order of the accidental. What is selected is never a particular natural
product, but rather a form of productivity, i.e., a causal order. Implicit in
the question of the selection of a causal order is the free determinability
of temporal sequencing. However, one of the great physical themes of
the third Critique, one that has secured far less critical scrutiny than has,
for example, the biological basis of teleology, puts precisely the free
determinability of temporal sequences into question in an open confrontation between first-natural revolutions and second-natural productivity. The problem of geology thus articulates the prospect of a
physicalist sublime in nature, outlining the stakes of geophilosophy as
Kant, through the Deleuzoguattarian lens that brought this theme initially to light, conceives them.
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant calls the 'archaeology of nature'
what since the mid-nineteenth century has been called palaeontology70
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He reports the horrific findings of this branch of the 'theory of the earth'
in the Opus postumum:
How many ... revolutions (including, certainly, many ancient organic
beings no longer alive on the surface of the earth) preceded the existence
of man, and how many (accompanying perhaps a more perfect organisation) are still in prospect, is hidden from our enquiring gaze - for, according to Camper, not a single example of a human being is to be found in the
depth of the earth.71
The stark horror of the manifest elimination of once existent species
from the earth, and the creation of newer species, amongst which
humanity figures, reveals the demoniacal prospect of the earth become
'wasteland, gratuitous and without final purpose'.72 Without teleology,
the particular beings that, because their particularity cannot be deduced
a priori from the principles of mechanics,73 make up the 'order of the
accidental',74 merely await extinction, without purchase on the mechanical, necessitarian organism - the 'all-producing globe'75 - that spawned
them. Simultaneously, however, the sketch of a 'chiliastic' or 'eudaimonistic' teleology is apparent in this mechanical speculation.76 What
will be that 'more perfect organisation' still in prospect? Will it count as
humanity's 'preservation, quite different in kind' or its elimination, the
production of another species?77
With the annihilation of humanity goes the annihilation of purpose.
This stark presentation of the problem is ultimately a denial that the
earth can be considered an organic form, insofar as if it were, it would
necessarily manifest a 'natural purpose'. It is the problematic conception
of 'natural purposes' that enables reflection to judge - rather than the
understanding to determine - a natural product to be 'an organized and
self-organizing being'.78 The conception is problematic since, although
Kant insists on circumscribing the applicability of natural purpose to
reflection alone, the very formulation of a natural purpose points immediately beyond the self-limiting realm of critical reflection. Noting, in
apparent contravention of the limits of reflective judgement, that
'matter can get more and other forms than it can receive from mechanism',79 Kant writes, concerning causality according to natural purposes:
That cause [we] can [find] only in [our] idea [of it]. And yet here the result
which conforms to that idea (i.e., the product itself) is given in nature.
[Hence] the concept of a causality of nature which implies that nature is a
being acting according to purposes seems to turn the idea of a natural purpose into a principle that is constitutive of the natural purpose.80
Kant After Geophilosophy
49
The congruence of the idea of purpose and manifest purposiveness in
nature, however - the harmony of the powers and presentational capacities of human neurophysiology familiar from judgements of beauty cannot rule out the prospect of purposes that remain inscrutable for
merely human judgement, an idea driving the powers to a sublime dissonance or incongruence, unless reflective judgement is to become determinant. This prospect cannot be determinantly eradicated for two
reasons. Firstly, the 'product itself is inherently particular, admitting of
more and other forms than reflection can supply, unless it is to become
a transcendental, thus necessary and a priori, determination of that
product. Secondly, the transcendentalising move would place determinant restrictions upon mechanism's 'unlimited authority',81 restrictions
that cannot be placed upon it since 'without mechanism we cannot gain
insight into the nature of things',82 and since without this, 'there can be
no natural science at all'.83 Despite this, Kant does rule out inscrutable
purposes attaching to natural products. Inveighing against the then current Neptunist school of geology, he writes:
[W]e cannot regard water, air and earth as means for the accretion of
mountains, because there is in fact nothing whatever in mountains that
would require that their possibility have a basis in terms of purposes.84
From the standpoint of a reflective judgement, however, neither can it
be determined that mountains do or do not possess intended purposes
(or even 'will', as the geological Naturphilosoph Henrich Steffens would
shortly argue),85 nor that intentions have mechanistic causes. Since here
reflective judgement has far exceeded its critical bounds,86 it has in
effect become transcendently (not transcendentally)87 constitutive as
regards the sorts of natural products that do not qualify for the ascription of purposes. The earth is judged therefore to qualify only as a
mechanical product, and one that therefore admits only of mechanical
explanation.
It is the business of reflection to judge which natural products may be
selected for the manifestation of purposes, and explicitly, with neither
theoretical nor critical justification, to exclude some of those products.
Thus it is perhaps extraordinary that Kant should support one side
against the other in the Neptunist-Vulcanist debates in late eighteenthcentury geology when the earth has not only been deselected as a purposive being, but is also presented, through the agency of its revolutions,
as the enemy of purposive organisation. Seeking to derive the origins of
the globe as it is from the movements and silt-depositing processes of an
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original 'aqueous solution', Neptunist geology 'dealt with the origins of
the habitable globe' as it is now. That is, it belongs to descriptive natural
history.88 Moreover, since the Neptunist account considered contemporaneously observable phenomena (floods), it was conceivable that the
earth had been formed within a relatively short span of time, according
with the biblical story of the flood. In so doing, Neptunism committed
two errors. Firstly, to mechanical processes it superadded a God inferred
from the 'description' of natural purposes in order to explain those purposes,89 turning physical teleology into physical theology.™ Secondly, in an
important sense which will later become apparent, it removed from geological consideration the prospect of 'immeasurable time'.91 Whereas
physioteleology in general is an attempt by reason to infer, from empirical evidence, a supreme cause of nature 'behind the machinery of this
world',92 a moral teleology would, by contrast, attempt to infer that
cause 'from the moral purpose of rational beings in nature'93: from 'sublime ... freedom ... [as] an original cause'.94
Such rational beings are, of course, contingently to be found only in
humanity, so that we can infer that nature's purpose in producing a creative being capable of purposive reasoning and action, is the production
of humanity. Thus, without humanity, 'all of creation would be a mere
wasteland, gratuitous and without final purpose'.95 Such a wasteland
had indeed been discovered by the Dutch 'natural archaeologist' Petrus
Camper who, following a 'meticulous examination of the traces of ...
natural devastations' had proven to Kant's satisfaction 'that man was not
included in those revolutions'.96
Thus Kant sides with the awesome horror of Camper's catastrophist
version of geological events, which insisted, with the Vulcanist geologist
James Hutton, that in 'the economy of the world' there was 'no vestige
of a beginning, - no prospect of an end'.97 This version of geology is
strictly mechanical, denying the very idea of teleological causation in
nature. The question here has ceased to be the critical one of how far
mechanical and teleological explanations of natural products retain their
legitimacy, and has become the practical one of what purchase the mere
concept of natural purpose can have on nature's manifestly mechanical
revolutions, as revealed by Camper's discovery. Thus, the dilemma is:
either there is no finality in nature whatever (since 'the sphere of developed nature is incessantly busy in expanding itself');98 or, if there is to
be, it must be produced. While in epistemological terms, an arbitrary
product is selected from the order of the accidental to explain all other
products, the stakes of Kant's catastrophism are practical: the selection
Kant After Geophilosophy
51
from the order of the accidental operated through reflective judgement
must be realised in nature.
Kant's geological catastrophism therefore entails not merely the epistemic ordering of nature's products, but also that this ordering in effect
constitutes a causality irreducible to the mechanical, although grounded
in it. It is only at this point that teleological causation becomes instantiated, 'by remote analogy with our own causality in terms of purposes',99
in organised bodies. But there is another basis for this instantiation than
the epistemologically convenient. While Kant is a catastrophist in the
archaeology of nature, he is a gradualist in natural history. 'The different
animal genera', he writes,
approach one another gradually: from the genus where the principle of purposes seems to be borne out most, namely, man, all the way to the polyp,
and from it even to mosses and lichens andfinallyto the lowest stage of
nature discernible to us, crude matter. From this matter, and its forces governed by mechanical laws, seems to stem all the technic that nature displays
in organised beings and that wefindso far beyond our grasp that we believe
we have to think a different principle [than mechanism] to account for it.100
Just as the archaeology of nature poses the problem of an unpresentable
time, so natural history displays such gradual continuity that it seems
beyond reason not to infer a purposive arrangement on the part of
nature. Camper's failure to decipher the least trace of human life from
the depths of nature, however, pits a catastrophist archaeology against
this gradualist natural history, subjecting purpose to material contingency
In nature's revolutions, therefore, the order of mechanical time confronts
that of teleological time. If the sublime is to supply a basis for the preservation of purposive beings different in kind from that prepared by
mechanical nature, that basis must be premised on the triumph of purpose over archaeological catastrophism and speciation's gradualism.
The third Critique poses the mathematical sublimity of phenomena
that are unpresentable within a single intuition in purely spatial terms,
as phenomena that are 'large beyond all comparison',101 a magnitude
such as 'an earth diameter'.]02 The sublime revelation of rational purposiveness in the nonsensible substrate uniting nature and freedom, by
contrast, 'is large beyond any standard of sense [über allen Maßstab der
Sinne gross istY .m Having exemplified the mathematical sublime only by
way of spatial phenomena, however, the implication is that the 'large
beyond any standard of sense' is similarly spatial. The problem of an
unpresentable time, therefore, remains unexemplified in the Analytic of
52
Iain Hamilton Grant
the Sublime.104 Such a sublime, however, haunts geology. As the suspicion grows amongst eighteenth-century 'oryctologists'105 and geologists
that the post-deluvian, Mosaic geology of the physicotheologists offers
too brief a timespan for the earth to have developed, the prospect of
immeasurable time, large beyond any standard of sense, opens up. Even
the uniformitarian methodological appeal only to 'presently active
forces' as admissible into natural archaeology conceals an equally invalid
natural historical assumption: that things have always been as they are
now.106 In other words, such an hypothesis exports the givens of synchronic natural history to the diachronic archaeology of nature, conflating a spatial with a temporal order, inferring temporal sequences from a
contingent uniformity. Hence Kant's catastrophism, profoundly influenced by Buffon's thesis that species may devolve as well as evolve.
Camper's failure to locate the merest trace of humanity amidst the ruins
of nature's most ancient revolutions, and the general discredit into
which Scheuchzer's 'discovery' oîHomo diluvii testis had fallen even by
the mid-eighteenth century,107 combine to suggest an open, catastrophist
field, unbounded by physicotheological timescales.
Such an unpresentable time, large beyond any standard of (inner)
sense, provokes a geological sublime, a sublime stimulated by the
archaeology of nature. It robs inner sense of any standard of time and,
with the evident violence of nature's most ancient revolutions having
obliterated whole species, it impels the powers to a productivity that
reorients the Grundkraft, just as the imagination is compelled to produce
a second nature 'out of the materials actual nature gives it'.108 If, however, 'second nature' is produced from materials in accordance with
another, spontaneous materially synthetic causality, the powers cannot
salve the open horror of nature's revolutions with these givens of natural
history. If, in confronting nature's present violence, the powers are
impelled to make something of that present nature, then the stakes of
the geological sublime must consist not of a spatial, but a temporal production. With no valid hypotheses by which to export the current to the
most ancient or the farthest future, the powers must invent another
causality, another temporal ordering, in accordance with the nonsensible, spontaneous productivity they acquire through the sublime. In concrete terms, what this means is that, rather than allowing nature's
geohistorical revolutions to usurp the position of humanity at the apex
of current natural production, the 'more perfect organization' to the
presentation of which the productive imagination is driven must be
actualised: to defeat nature's revolutions and maintain purposiveness,
Kant After Geophilosophy
53
the metaphysics of nature and freedom necessitates the production of
new species.
In the late eighteenth century, 'physics' did not yet denote a specialised field of study. Physics was simply the study of 'physical things',
so that, for example, one could talk of Vegetable physics', as Kielmeyer
does as late as 1807. Just as the substrate uniting nature and freedom,
rather than being located in a supersensible realm, is inaccessible to
sense {übersinnlich) precisely insofar as it marks the point of transition
between sensibility and production, so, for Kant, the metaphysical is neither a realm, nor reducibly ideational. Rather, it marks the point at
which the cognitively legislated description of physical nature is conjoined with the latter's transformation in accordance with the spontaneous causality of freedom and the desiring-production of actuality
Wherever we look in Kant, it is the same thing: a productive and a receptive usage of the powers, the former always inaccessible to sense, the
latter always inert. In this sense, the metaphysics of nature is the science
of transition, the philosophical transformation of the physical, including
the constitution of nervous systems (wherever located). From this perspective, the sublime is not reducibly an aesthetic experience, but rather
a purposive selector operative in thinking matter. What a mistake ever to
have called the sublime a matter of aesthetics alone, since precisely what
always gets deselected in the sublime is sensibility. Given that the earth's
contingency hangs over all its inhabitants, all that remains is what selects.
Kant thinks he has done all he can to keep the human species at the top
of the heap, but the sublime necessitates that to survive the natural revolutions rumbling in the abysses of deep time, all of nature must be
remade. What is thus 'preserved' by the understanding, if all of nature,
including the nature in man, has been remade? This, the true scale of the
Kantian revolution, is what the Opuspostumum was in search of, and why
it was never finished. The enormity of the stakes of the metaphysics of
nature - the production of another causal order - has meant that there
have been more deaths than completed works in pursuit of its realisation. The real challenge of a philosophy of nature - the naturphilosophische challenge - as the Kantian metaphysics of nature lays it down, is not
species preservation, but how to select otherwise than 'human , i.e., philosophically, and the stakes of this philosophical selection are the production of new species.
lain Hamilton Grant
54
Notes
1 Kant, UNH, p. 170; A U : 334.
2 Kant, UNH, p. 151; A U : 309.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 85.
4 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 91. In a review of What is
Philosophy? y Jean-Jacques Lecercle mistakenly suggested that the chapter
on 'Geophilosophy' (ibid. pp. 85-113) lay outside the systematic construction of that work (Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 'The Pedagogy of Philosophy',
Radical Philosophy 75 (1996) 44-6; p. 46). However, Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy is not merely lexically a continuation, therefore, of A
Thousand Plateaus - specifically of the chapter '10,000 B.C.: The Geology
of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)' (Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone,
1988), pp. 39-74). Rather, as they signal throughout What is Philosophy?,
the concept of 'Thought-nature' they there develop constitutes an attempt
to conjoin the virtual and nature - artifice and physics - to form a 'philosophy of nature' that had been an implicit component of their work since
Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983)). See also Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M.
Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 155.
5 Kant, CPR, Aviii-ix.
6 Kant, CPR, Axx.
7 Kant, CPR, Axxi.
8 Kant, C/, p. 35;Afe.V: 195.
9 Kant, Op.p., p. 142; Ak. XXII: 496.
10 Ts it not much more proper, or better, is it not necessary to represent the
very essence of creation as it ought to be, to be a witness of that power
which can be measured by no yardstick?' (Kant, UNH, p. 151; Ak\\ 309;
t.m.). Such descriptions recur throughout UNH, and lend credence to the
prospect of a physicalist sublime.
11 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 155: 'Guattari and I want to get back to our joint
work and produce a sort of philosophy of nature, now that any distinction
between nature and artifice is becoming blurred.'
12 Kant, C/, p. l;AkN: 170.
13 Kant, Op.p., p. 41; Ah.XXI: 476.
14 Kant, UNH, p. 186; A U : 355.
15 Thus, for example, Reil's Von der Lebenskraft used Kant's first Critique to
construct a 'vital materialism' (Johann Christian Reils, Von der Lebenskraft, Archiv für die Physiologie vol. 1 issue 1 (Halle, 1795)). See LeeAnn
Hansen, 'Metaphors of mind and society: the origins of German psychiatry
in the revolutionary era', his 89 (1998) 387-409. Kant criticised Reil's
Kant After Geophilosophy
55
materialist tenets, since such work 'considers understanding dependent on
the body and produced by the workings of the brain' (Kant, CT, p. 135;
AkNlV. 73). This is not to imply that Kant considered Reil descriptively
wrong, but that the unilinear causality by which such descriptions are furnished ignores the natural basis of the metaphysics of freedom, or, otherwise put, substitutes the physics for the metaphysics of nature. For general
background on the roots of contemporary neuroscience in Enlightenment
and Romantic philosophy, see Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth
Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
16 Kant, UNH, p. 187; Akl: 356; t.m.
17 Kant,CPR,A86/B118.
18 Kant, C/, p. l\AkN: 170.
19 Kant, ÇJ, p. 300; AkN: 415; t.m.
20 Kant, C], p. 295; A^.V: 410; t.m.
21 Kant, CT, p. 199; A^.VII: 109.
22 Kant,AS,A£.XII:33;m.t.
23 Kant,A(?.XII:33;m.t.
24 Kant, Ak.XII: 34; m.t. On the effect of Lavoisier's 'chemical revolution' on
Kant's philosophy of science, see Michael Friedmann, Kant and the Exact
Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 264-90.
25 Kant, RT, p. S4; Ak.VUI: 413-14.
26 Kant, Anth.y p. 3; AkVlh 119.
27 Kant,C/,p.295;Ak.V:410.
28 Kant,C/,p.296;A^.V:411.
29 Kant, CPR, A15/B29.
30 Kant,CPR,A649/B677.
31 This research programme, explicitly derived from Kant, currently shapes
historians of science's approach to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, and has been designated Vital materialism' or 'teleomechanism'
by Timothy Lenoir, 'Kant, Blumenbach and vital materialism in German
biology', Isis 71 (1980) 77-108. Especially relevant in the above context is
Hansen, 'Metaphors'. Phillip Reid Sloan has also argued for the importance of the Kantian programme in the formation of biology in his introductory essay, 'On the edge of evolution', to Richard Owen, The Hunterian
Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May and June 1837, ed. Phillip R. Sloan
(London: Natural History Museum, 1992), pp. 15-34. The current programme is most marked by its continuation of the later nineteenth century's vitriolic hostility towards so-called 'idealist' Naturphilosophie, veering
towards Kant as a safe harbour. I attempt to show here that the critical
island offers only a delusory security, and elsewhere, that the oceans of
nature-philosophical {naturphtlosophisch) speculation are physicalistic. See
Iain Hamilton Grant, On an Artificial Earth: Schelling, Naturphilosophie
56
Iain Hamilton Grant
and Absolute Empiricism (London: Athlone, forthcoming).
32 Hansen/Metaphors', p. 397.
33 Marcus Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel (Berlin: Voss, 1791).
34 Herz, Versuch, p. 61; cited in Hansen, 'Metaphors', p. 398n.
35 Dr John Brown's physiological researches became the subject of heated
debate following their German translation in 1795. Eckart Förster offers a
balanced account of Kant's relation to Brunonianism in a long note to the
translation of Op.p., pp. 270-1, where, despite introducing doubt as to
whether Kant was or was not an adherent of that system in both philosophical and empirical terms, and despite using the Brunonian terminology
in which the Anthropology couches its examination of affects in the 'natural
machine', Förster neither looks for nor indicates the possibility of more
wide-ranging researches on this matter. Kant's constant references to Stoic
virtue, for instance, are merely exemplars of Brunonian prescriptions
regarding the maintenance of health, an application of these virtues that is
clear both in the Anthropology and in the third of the Conflict of the Faculties.
36 Strictly speaking, Reil's is a chemism rather than a mechanicism, as Ayrault
puts it: 'Reil's thought is a tributary of Kantianism: to it, matter is the sum
of the manifestations that our senses record as an object in space; it reduces
the idea of force to a "subjective" relation between the effects that are the
manifestations of these causes. But Reil's "chemism" is also consistent with
this; and as opposed to traditional "chemism", it attributes no other knowable causes to the fact of life than the properties of matter.' Raymond
Ayrault, La Genèse du romantisme allemand, 2 vols. (Paris: Montaigne,
1976), n p. 303.
37 Reil, 'Von der Lebenskraft', p. 44; cited in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Reihe 1, Ergänzungsband zu Werke
Band 5 bis 9: Wissenschaftlicher Bericht zu Schellings naturphilosophischen
Schriften 1797-1800', eds. Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs
and Hermann Krings (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), p. 554.
38 Kant, CPR, A86-7/B119.
39 Kant, AS,Ak.XLI: 34-5; m.t.
40 Kant drew out the distinction between chemical and mechanical action in
the 'Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics': 'The action of moved bodies
on one another through the communication of their motion is called
mechanical; but the action of matters at rest insofar as they change the
combination of their parts reciprocally by their own forces is called chemical. '
(Kant, MNS, p. 87; Ak.N: 530; my emphasis).
41 On Stahl and the history of chemistry, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, trans. Deborah van Dam
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 57-61. On
Stahlian chemistry and Kant, see Friedmann, Kant and the Exact Sciences,
Kant After Geophilosopby
57
pp. 265-8 ff.
42 Kant, CPR, Bxii-xiii; t.m. Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's 'Kalken' by
'oxides' effectively misrepresents Stahl's view as Lavoisier's. See Friedmann, Kant and the Exact Sciences, p. 265 n67.
43 In consequence, Stahl's vitalism stems from the thesis that since the physical complexity of vital bodies entailed more mixts than aggregates, it followed that life as such could not be reduced to mechanism.
44 Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, A History of Chemistry, pp. 57-9.
45 Kant, CPR, Bxxi.
46 Kant, CPR, A86-7/B119.
47 Kant, CPR, A78/B103.
48 Kant, CPR, A87/B119.
49 Kant, UNH, p. 189; A U : 359.
50 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-3), ed. James A. Secord (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 16.
51 Georges Louis de Buffon. Histoire de la nature, vol. v (Paris: de
L'Imprimerie Royale, 1756), p. 62.
52 See Lenoir, 'Kant, Blumenbach'.
53 That science was simultaneously so named in 1802 by Gottfried Reinhold
Treviranus, in Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebendigen Natur, 6 vols. (Göttingen: Rower, 1802-22), and by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, in Recherches
sur l'organisation des corps vivants (Paris: published by the author, 1802).
54 Kant,Art*.,p.3;Afe.VII: 119.
55 Kant, Q , p. 121; A^.V: 261.
56 Kant, KT, p. 84; Afe.VDI: 414.
57 Kant, MNS, p. 3; Ak.JN: 467.
58 Kant, C], p. 100; AkN: 246.
59 Kant, C], pp. 120-1; AkN: 261.
60 Kant, C], p. 260; AkN: 380.
61 Kant, C], p. 287; AkN. 404. I have used Edward Caird's translation of
Gesetzlichkeit des Zufälligen (which Pluhar gives as 'lawfulness of the contingent') due to its more empirical emphasis on accidental products as constituting an order, rather than following a law Edward Caird, Kant's Critical
Philosophy, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1889), pp. 482-3.
62 Kant, Q , p. 99;A£.V:246.
63 Kant, C], p. 118; AkN: 260.
64 '[Nature] demonstrates her richness in a kind of waste', writes Kant in a
Bataillean dithyramb from UNH. More pertinently, he writes, 'Man ... is
not exempted from this law'. Kant, UNH, p. 158; Ak.l: 319.
65 Kant, Op.p, p. 226; A^.XXI: 20.
66 Kant,C7, p. 121; AkN 261.
67 Kant, CJ, p. 127; AkN 268.
68 Kant, C], p. 182; AkN. 314.
58
lain Hamilton Grant
69 Kant, CPrR, p. 9n; AkM: 9n; and CJ, pp. 16-17 nl8; AkM: llln. This
thesis is foreshadowed in Preface B of the first Critique, where practical
reason as a whole is defined, in contradistinction to the conceptual determinations of speculative reason, as what 'actualizes' (Kant, CPR, B ix-x).
70 Kant, CJ, p. 315 n20; AkM: 428n. Although Cuvier and Lamarck had
developed the relevance of the study of fossils for natural history, the term
'palaeontology' was coined by Cuvier's successor to the chair of comparative anatomy at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Ducrotayé de
Blainville, in 1834. See William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 63ff; Toby A. Appel,
The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 212; and W N. Edwards,
The Early History of Palaeontology (London: British Museum, 1976), pp.
40-1.
71 Kant, Op.p., p. 67; Ak. XXI: 214-15.
72 Kant,C/,p.331;A£.V:442.
73 'What the critical Kant wanted was a metaphysics of nature....What he
really got was only the idea of a possible nature', writes George di
Giovanni, in 'Kant's Metaphysics of Nature and Schelling's Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature', Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (1979)
197-215, 214. This effectively parallels Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer's argument in Über Kant und die deutsche Naturphilosophie, in Natur und Kraft:
Carl Friedrich Kielmeyers gesammelte Schriften, ed. F. H. Köhler (Berlin:
Kieper, 1938).
74 Kant, CJ, p. 287; AkM: 404.
75 Kant,(>.p.,p.66;^.XXI:213.
76 Kant, CF, p. 145; Aè.VII: 81.
77 Kant, C/, p. 121; A^.V: 261.
78 Kant, CJ, pp. 252-3; AkM: 373-4.
79 Kant, CJ,p. 296; AkM: 411.
80 Kant, CJ, p. 288; AkM: 405.
81 Kant, C/, p. 303; AkM: 417.
82 Kant, CJ,p. 295; AkM: 410.
83 Kant, CJ, p. 304; AkM: 418.
84 Kant, C/, p. 312; AkM: 425.
85 Henrich Steffens' Beyträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (Freiberg,
1801 ) took from Schelling the idea that all of nature must be thought as the
divergent products of a single, living, 'fundamental form', and from A. G.
Werner, the founder of the Neptunist school of geology, the evidence
that the earth was in continual movement, to suggest that this movement
constituted the 'will' that reached its highest expression in man. For
Steffens' comments on the Beyträge, see the single volume abridgement of
his ten volume autobiography, entitled Lebenserinnerungen (Jena: Eugen
Kant After Geophilosophy
59
Diederichs, 1908), pp. 175-6.
86 Teleology as a science does not belong to any doctrine, but belongs only to
...the critique of...judgement' (Kant, CJ, p. 302; Ak.V: 417).
87 'We shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely within
the limits of possible experience, immanent] and those, on the other hand,
which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent.'' (Kant, CPR,
A295-6/B352).
88 Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 46. For a Hegelian geological take
on the 'Neptunist-Vulcanist' debates in the late eighteenth century, see
Timothy H. Levere, 'Hegel and the earth sciences', in Hegels Philosophie
der Natur: Beziehungen zwischen empirischer und spekulativer Naturerkenntnis, eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Michael J. Petry (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1986), pp. 103-21.
89 Kant, CJ, p. 302; AkV: 417.
90 Kant, C/, p. 324; Ak.V: 436.
91 Kant, CT, p. 161; Ak.VIl: 89.
92 Kant, CJ, p. 327; Ak.V: 439.
93 Kant, CJ, p. 324; Ak.V: 436.
94 Kant, Op.p., p. 226; Ak.XXl: 20.
95 Kant, CJ, p. 331; Ak.V. 442.
96 Kant, CJ, p. 316; Ak.V: 428.
97 James Hutton, 'Theory of the earth; or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and restoration of land upon the
globe', Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788) 304. See also
Lyell, Principles of Geology, pp. 16-17.
98 Kant, UNH, p. 154; A « : 319.
99 Kant, CJ, p. 255; Ak.V. 375.
100 Kant, CJ, p. 304; Ak.V. 418-19.
101 Kant, CJ, p. 103; AkV. 248.
102 Kant, CJ, p. I l l ; AkV. 254.
103 Kant, CJ, p. 112; Ak.V: 255.
104 Although the collapse of successive presentations of sense into a single
instant is described as the imagination 'do[ing] violence to the inner sense'
(Kant, CJ, p. 116; AkV: 258-9), these successive presentations are still
measured against objects that cannot be presented within a single presentation due to their spatial proportions.
105 This is the late eighteenth-century term for what has been known, since the
mid-nineteenth century, as palaeontology. See Edwards, The Early Historyof Palaeontology, p. 41.
106 D. J. Depew and B. H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and
the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997),
p. 97.
60
Iain Hamilton Grant
107 Johann Scheuchzer, Homo diluvii testis (Tiguri, 1726). The Swiss naturalist
Scheuchzer was an early defender of the view that fossils were relics of
formerly living creatures, and published Herbarium Diluvianum, a record of
fossilised plants supposedly dating from the deluge, in 1709. Thus, in
Homo diluvii testis, he published a paper entitled An account of the
remains of a man who had witnessed the Deluge', containing an illustration
of 'the bony skeleton of one of those infamous men whose sins brought
upon the world the dire misfortune of the deluge' (cited in Humphrey
Davy, On Geology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 128).
Georges Cuvier later showed the skeleton to be that of a salamander. See
Edwards, The Early History of Palaeontology, pp. 12-14.
108 Kant, CJ, p. 182; Ak.V: 314.