Understanding life – how we know the reality of self-formation, teleology, and agency of an organism

Organisms represent a persistent challenge for science and philosophy. Reductionist approaches increasingly appear insufficient, while organicist accounts describe the essential features of living beings without explaining their possibility. Immanuel Kant showed that organisms must be conceived as teleologically structured and self-forming wholes in order to be recognized at all. Yet his critical philosophy also reveals the limits of such recognition: while the understanding cannot perceive organicity as an objective feature of nature, reflective judgment can attribute purposiveness only in a merely regulative way. In this paper, I examine in detail the epistemological conditions for recognizing a developing organism and argue that the cognition of organic structure, development, purposiveness, and agency requires the coordinated operation of sensory apprehension, imaginative reproduction, conceptual recognition, and spontaneous apperception. Each of these faculties entails a distinct relation between subject and object. I show that in the cognition of development, purposiveness, and agency, the Kantian separation between understanding and reason becomes strained, for the subject–object division presupposed in the application of the categories progressively diminishes. I propose that this tension indicates a limit of Kant’s framework and motivates a systematic extension of it: the “causality of the concept,” which for Kant remains merely regulative, becomes a constitutive condition for the possibility of experiencing an organism as a self-organizing and agential whole. Such an expanded epistemological analysis suggests corresponding ontological implications and enables a deeper understanding of the reality of living beings.