With Kant’s conception of organisms as “natural ends” nature and freedom are represented as harmoniously cohering with each other thereby giving us a special reassurance of reason’s causal efficacy in nature. For Kant, in order to make organic formations intelligible, we must represent the rule of their organization as reciprocal causality. I contend that this rule of reciprocal causality serves as a schema-analogue of reason’s Idea of absolute freedom. Moreover, I proceed to show that the antinomial conflict of teleological judgment is a conflict between two perspectives on nature: theoretical (scientific) in the thesis and practical in the antithesis. Therefore, the solution to the antinomy does not merely offer a justification for the explanatory compatibility of mechanical and teleological explanation in our representation of a single organic formation but also leads to a view of the world according to which the theoretical and the practical representations of nature “must cohere.”

This chapter introduces the most important terms of Hegel’s account of teleology, viz. ‘external purposiveness’ and ‘inner purposiveness’, which Hegel inherits from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement. Kant claims that our inclination to judge nature as analogous to the products of human art, and therefore as having ends as our actions have ends, is not properly justified from an objective standpoint. Consequently, the concept of a ‘natural end’ seems irremediably problematic for him. For Hegel, in contrast, the concept of an ‘objective end’ is an entirely appropriate concept, and, indeed, the concept of a true purpose, which we can apply similarly to both nature and spirit. Hegel sees himself as recasting and reviving Kant’s undertaking with the notion of ‘inner purposiveness’.