From Natural Products to Organized Beings

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers Kant’s response to Herder and Forster as a case study of how reason’s principles, under the discipline of critique, can be used to make natural history systematic. It argues that in the course of responding to his critics, Kant recognized that the concept of a living natural product bears a tension that threatens the unity of nature as a physical-mechanical system. Qua product, a living natural being is produced within the physical-mechanical conditions of nature. Qua living, it is the producer of itself. His solution required modifications to the conception of judgement presented in the Critique. These modifications undermine the fixity built into his racialized concept of race, opening a wider scope for morphological change than his earlier conception of natural history had allowed.