The Third and Fourth Moments

Abstract

Kant begins the Third Moment by defining purpose or ‘end’ and abstracting from that to a finality of form or purposiveness as to form.¹ That he should then go on to talk of a form of finality or form of purposiveness is not mere carelessness, for he is here specifying the relation between the subject and the object by characterizing how the reference to the object is made. Kant begins by considering ends to distinguish them from finality. The distinction relies on a contrast between an object and a state of mind. He defines an end as ‘the object of a concept insofar as we regard this concept as the object’s cause (the real basis of its possibility); and the causality that a concept has with regard to its object is [finality] (forma finalis)’.² An end is an object whose nature and the conditions for whose existence cannot be understood except as being determined by a particular concept — as if the concept were being followed by a causal agency, and the object, with its parts ordered in the given way, were the realization of a determinate intention. Where the concept of the object is necessary for the object to be realized, as when various materials are brought together in order to construct a watch, there the concept of a watch is essential to, or the ‘real ground of the possibility’ of the object. Hence, we think of an end ‘if we think not merely, say, of our cognition of the object, but instead of the whole object itself (its form, or its existence), as an effect that is only possible through a concept of that effect’.³