BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

According to Rousseau, embodied activity is also essential to the
further development of the cognitive and rational abilities of the child.
Thus, rather than giving the child books to read, or make it listen to
lectures, he promotes the principle of learning by doing. More
specifically, he advises that the child partakes in certain embodied
practices by which basic skills are acquired. These skills have a double
significance. In addition to being useful, they further develop and refine
the cognitive and intellectual capacities of the child. Thus, for instance,
Rousseau advises that the child is encouraged to make drawings of the
objects of its environment. By doing this, it learns to estimate the shape
and size of these objects, and also develops a deeper understanding for
the laws of perspective.
91
One could not learn to judge the extension and the size of bodies well
without also getting to know their shapes and even learning to imitate
them; for, at bottom this imitation depends absolutely only on the
laws of perspective, and one can estimate extension by its
appearances only if one has some feeling for these laws. Children,
who are great imitators, all try to draw. I would want my child to
cultivate this art, not precisely for the art itself but for making his eye
exact and his hand flexible. 24
If the child is normally talented, it may also acquire the principles of
geometry in this way, that is, by drawing figures, combining them, and
comparing them, Rousseau argues.
I have said that geometry is not within the reach of children. But it is
our fault. We are not aware that their method is not ours, and that
what becomes for us the art of reasoning, for them ought to be only
the art of seeing... […] Make exact figures, combine them, place
them on one another, examine their relations. You will find the whole
of elementary geometry in moving from observation to observation,
without there being any question of definitions or problems or any
form of demonstration other than simple superimposition. 25
The principle of learning by doing may also be illustrated by what
Rousseau says about language. The best way to teach a child the proper
use of language is simply to speak correctly before it. In this way, without
any further instruction, it will soon have acquired a grammar. The same
24 Ibid., 143.
25 Ibid., 145.
RATIONALITY AND EMBODIED PRACTICE