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This paper explores the similarities and differences between Kant and Fichte that are wound around a single, seemingly tangential subject: their arguments from biology. The most extensive discussions of biology in their work both came in the last decade of the eighteenth century, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and in Fichte’s System of Ethics and Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. On first reading the accounts appear extraordinarily similar. But the two philosophers begin to diverge as they move forward. Both invoke the notion of a formative drive that guides and impels self-organization, the Bildungstrieb that features prominently in the writing of Blumenbach. Kant, though, praises Blumenbach not so much for his ideas as for his caution in applying them, and interprets the drive as nothing more than the “ability of an organized body to take on … organization.” Fichte, on the other hand, characterizes the Bildungstrieb as “a drive to form or shape or to cultivate and ... a drive to allow oneself to be formed or shaped or cultivated.” There is a far more obvious way in which the two philosophers differ, though. Hardly anything seems less Kantian than a discussion of biology, and biological drives at that, in a System of Ethics. The moral law flies in the face of all inclination, and what are those inclinations but the promptings of our nature as physical organisms? From a Kantian perspective it is hard to see how biology could help us comprehend or comply with a law that is grounded in something utterly apart from our physical being. By incorporating it into his ethical treatise, though, Fichte seems to be moving in just that direction.

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