BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY IN THE CRITIQUE
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idealism involves the idea that all our experience is representational, that
space and time are nothing but forms of our experience, and that we
have to distinguish between the objects of the world as we experience
them and these objects as they are in themselves, which lie beyond the
reach of human knowledge.
Among Kant’s doctrines, his transcendental idealism has represented
a major interpretative challenge, having given rise to a number of
ingenious hypotheses and corresponding criticisms. The idea that space
and time are nothing but forms of human experience, having their origin
in the subject and not in the world an sich, have led some interpreters to
see in Kant’s idealism the doctrine that the world of our experience is de
facto ‘the artwork of the mind’. 71 Ultimately Kant’s idealism therefore
ends in subjective relativism, they claim. 72 Underlying this kind of
criticism is the idea that his transcendental idealism involves a two-world
theory, on the one hand there is the real world of things in themselves
and then there is the world as it appears to us. These are two worlds,
different in nature and quality, and as Kant continuously maintains that
we have no knowledge of the first, one might ask why we should talk
about it at all. His doctrine of things in themselves seems to sit within his
system as an outdated piece of mysticism. No wonder, then, that within
the analytic tradition his transcendental idealism has come under heavy
attack.
In recent years, however, the trend has been towards demystifying
Kant’s transcendental idealism. Gerold Prauss’s 1974 Kant und das
Problem der Dinge an sich was significant in this development. Prauss
remarks that Kant does not normally use the expression ‘thing in itself’
[Ding an sich] but the adverbial expression ‘things considered in
themselves’ [Ding an sich selbst betrachtet] or something similar. 73 Prauss
deplores the fact that commentators have failed to acknowledge this
properly, and that instead the term Ding an sich has come to occupy a
central role in the discussion. Having the form of a quasi-noun [Quasi-
71
Cf. e.g. Neujahr (1995), 96-98. He concludes: ‘The critical position is not
merely idealist, but solipsist.’
72
Cf. e.g. Quinton (1997), 5 who writes: ‘It is the account he gives of the way the
common world of experience is constructed or synthesized by applying some
piece of mental apparatus – the forms of intuition or categories – to what he calls
the manifold of sensation. The rather elementary question I want to raise about
this theory is that of how the claim can be made good that the outcome of this
process is just one, single world?’
73
Prauss (1974), 13ff.