BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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principle holds concerning map-making. By letting the child make simple
maps of well-known places, it not only learns to understand what a map
is, it also learns to find its way from one position to another better.
When the child is to have its first lessons in experimental physics,
embodied action is also emphasized. The child should be encouraged to
partake in the construction of the apparatus involved in the experiments.
Not only does it then learn to use its hands skillfully, which may be useful
later in life, but this way of learning also gives the child the chance to
further perfect its senses.
The most palpable advantage of these slow and laborious researches
is that they keep the body active and the limbs supple during
speculative studies and continuously form the hands for the work and
the practices useful to man. All the instruments invented to guide us
in our experiments and to take the place of accuracy of the senses
cause the senses to be neglected. 26
I introduced this paragraph by claiming that in Émile Rousseau puts
forward an embodied pragmatism, but what exactly is this embodied
pragmatism? The pragmatic aspect of Rousseau’s theory is most easily
seen, perhaps, by the fact that in all his learning, Émile is encouraged to
become master of practical skills useful in his daily life. Also, Rousseau
vehemently attacks the traditional knowledge of the schools and the
abstract knowledge of books. This knowledge is, in the end, next to
useless.
Even if he does not coin a separate term for it, I think Rousseau, in
his emphasis on practical skills, may be said to promote a pragmatic
theory of rationality. In this theory, not only do the practical skills of
everyday life count as forms of knowledge, but this knowledge is
conceived of as a form of knowledge superior to the theoretical
knowledge of the schools. If we are to express the same point in
Aristotelian terms, we may say that Rousseau turns the Aristotelian
hierarchy of the sciences upside down. The episteme of the theoretical
sciences is no longer regarded as a superior form of knowledge. Its
superior position is now taken by the techné of the productive sciences.
As for Rousseau’s embodied perspective, it is present not only as the
trivial idea that education should include the cultivation of the body, but
I think Rousseau’s idea of embodiment goes much deeper, signaled by
his tendency to equate embodied and rational development. The child’s
26 Ibid., 176.
RATIONALITY AND EMBODIED PRACTICE