UC Riverside

This dissertation resolves the apparent conflict between human autonomy and nature's self-organization—a tension rendered urgent by complex systems science. Drawing on Kant's "Ideas" (normative frameworks that bi-constitute subjects and their purposive worlds), I argue that nature's self-organizing character follows from the Idea of autonomy itself. Because the highest good requires a purposively unified cosmos, practical reason compels us to postulate nature as self-organizing. Theoretical reason can never establish this; practical reason affirms it as a necessary condition of moral agency. I then demonstrate that for Kant, judging organisms, ecosystems, or even convection cells as self-organizing agents involves treating them as if guided by an immanent Idea following a four-part schema: coherent identity, reciprocal causality between parts and whole, selective engagement with an environment, and a coherency test whereby success reinforces or failure revises the agent's organizational form. Science since Kant has vindicated and articulated this schema. Through Ernst Cassirer, I show this bi-constitutive logic undergirds 20th century science, but also extends across culture. I then provide a critique of complex systems science, examining how graph theory, dynamical systems theory, criticality, and panarchy do not eliminate teleological judgment but rather presuppose and articulate Kant's schema further. The dissertation culminates in a Kantian environmental ethics. Against readers of Kant that can at best establish indirect duties to nature, I argue that the highest good—the ultimate end of our moral vocation—constitutively requires a purposively unified natural world, a maxim that degrades nature's self-organization yields a contradiction in will, generating a direct but imperfect duty to preserve the multi-scalar architecture of natural agency. This duty is internal to the Formula of Humanity: to will the permissible happiness of embodied others is to will a self-organizing cosmos. We are thus obligated to harmonize human autonomy with the integrity of the self-organizing cosmos.