Spinoza, Kant, Whitehead, Organism

Since Kant holds that the concept of Purposiveness is essential to the concept of Organism, his dissatisfaction with Spinoza's treatment of the former amounts to a challenge to the capacity of Spinozism to accommodate the latter. In scientific terms, Kant rejects the reduction of Biological nature to Mechanistic nature, and interprets Spinoza's system as purely Mechanistic. In contrast, Whitehead judges that his 'philosophy of organism' is "closely allied" with Spinozism, perhaps noting, as Kant seems not to, that Spinoza asserts that all created entities, human or otherwise, are "animated". In other words, Whitehead seems to reject the interpretation of Spinozism as Mechanistic. If so, however, he thereby seems to overlook his own grounds for criticizing Spinoza. For, his scheme categorically distinguishes between living and non-living entities, whereas, for Spinoza, any difference is only one of degree. Furthermore, that distinction is based, for Whitehead, on the irreducibility of the thought 'I want X' to Efficient Causality, a reducibility which Spinoza seems to affirm. Thus, it is open to Kant to respond that Whitehead's system is not in fact allied with one in which living entitities are not motivated by Teleological Causality. In other words, despite Whitehead's support, Spinoza's non-Teleological notion of animation lingers as problematic. One, and perhaps the only, solution, is for Spinoza to admit into his system another kind of Causality, such as Formal Causality, in which all intentions function as determinative of action qua the shaping and guiding of motion. Otherwise, he seems to be committed to accepting either that stones are organisms, or that humans are not organisms.