The Design Aporia of the Organism: Kant’s Teleology, its Reception, and the Self-Transformation of Cognition

Recent scholarship on Kant’s teleology has focused primarily on the question of whether purposiveness has a reflective, regulative, or constitutive status in biological cognition. These alternatives leave largely unquestioned the premise from which the problem of the organism arises in Kant: that human understanding is necessarily discursive. Organisms require us to understand the whole as formative of its parts; yet for a discursive understanding, the only available model of such a whole-parts relation is design, which Kant disallows as the ground of natural organization. The article refers to this tension as the design aporia. It reconstructs this aporia in Kant, traces its reception, and systematically classifies the positions of the contemporary debate. It argues that the aporia persists as long as the premise of discursivity stands, and asks whether the cognitive activity through which organisms are apprehended can itself be transformed so as to become responsive to organic self-formation. Drawing on German idealism, Goethean morphology, and recent work on living organization, it develops a third epistemic relation alongside reflecting and determining: realizing. Realizing cognition transforms discursive cognition by imaginatively reconstructing the formative processes through which organic structures arise, while remaining empirically constrained by them. It thereby claims empirical access to the organism’s purposiveness as an objective feature intrinsic to its formation and transformation.