ABSTRACT
This citation from Kant’s Critique of Judgment sets out a decision to be made,
concerning the production of items in accordance with a perspective on the end
result, between thinking this either as a mechanism of nature, compatible with a
natural causality, or as needing a specification of a new kind of causality,
through which the effects of human freedom or indeed the intendings of a
divine being may be brought into the analysis. The decision here is constrained
by Kant’s presumption that the causality of nature precludes registering these
effects of either human freedom or divine intending, or indeed of Intelligent
Design, since he has an account of natural causality which presumes a greater
degree of homogeneity amongst the forces and phenomena to be brought into
the analysis, than more contemporary accounts of causes in nature might be
inclined to do. Leaving the possibly anachronistic aspects of Kant’s notion of
causality in nature on one side, the question remains whether there is a differ-
ence, as marked up by Aristotle, between efficient and final causes, such that
two distinct forms of linked processes are to be traced out when historical events
and human activity are the focus for concern. The question thus posed reveals
the further puzzle about the loss from the tradition of the notions of formal and
material causes, as distinct from the final and efficient causes, which roughly
speaking map on to the two forms of analysis contrasted here by Kant. When
Derrida, and after him Bernard Stiegler, insist on an originary prosthesis, as
simultaneous with an originary inception, and providing a necessary supplement
for the analysis of its development, they in effect mark up a splitting between a
material cause, and its efficacy, whereby materiality has implications above and
beyond those taken up in the articulations of efficient causality.2 The linkage
presumed between formal and final causes can be similarly syncopated by
insisting on delay and on non-simultaneities in the articulation of formal causes,
such that they do not arrive at a single final realisation.
