Varieties of Physiology in Kant: A Lockean Inspiration?

Abstract

In this article, we revisit Immanuel Kant’s frequently used description of John Locke’s philosophical project as a “physiology” of human reason and understanding. We unpack this description in a twofold manner. Firstly, we stress the foundational role it might have had for Kant’s attempt to analyse the faculty of the understanding. In line with Michael Wolff ’s proposal in his seminal 1995 book, Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel, we propose to interpret the notion of physiology as part and parcel of the set of organic metaphors used by Kant to characterise his philosophical system. In particular, we argue that the derivation of the pure concepts of the understanding (Kant’s ‘categories’) from the functions of the understanding, the latter of which are identified by Kant as the epigenetic ‘germs and predispositions’ of the understanding, can be viewed precisely as a (metaphorically) physiological undertaking. Secondly, we argue that Kant’s depiction of Locke as a physiologist might also be appreciative in another, more literal sense. Whereas Kant would warn against Locke’s project insofar as it seems to be geared towards an overly empiricist account of human cognition, this is only one aspect of Kant’s discussion of Locke’s project. For Kant, Locke’s physiology is part of a valid epistemological and philosophical project: it can serve as a stepping stone for investigating the empirical occasioning causes for acquiring categories or developing cognition generally. More precisely, we argue that the notion of physiology in the metaphorical sense might have helped Kant to systematise his views on how the categories originate in the faculty of the understanding itself, as well as his views on how those categories enable cognition to arise (part (1)), while in the literal sense physiology corresponded to Kant’s anthropological aspiration to examine how (categorial) cognition commences, develops, and is cultivated (part (2)).