BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

INTRODUCTION 5
I could not fail to notice, however, the almost unanimous resistance
to this interpretation among my colleagues. A standard criticism I
frequently encountered was that this interpretation was incompatible
with basic Kantian ideas. One such idea, frequently ascribed to Kant,
was the idea of a Cartesian mind, a mind constituted solely by mental
acts and processes. Kant’s theory of concepts had to be understood
within this Cartesian context, I was told, as a theory referring to inner,
mental acts and processes and not to embodied practices. 14 Another
objection I met with was that the idea of concepts being practices
belonged to a later period in the history of philosophy. It was a
Wittgensteinian conception, presupposing the intellectual climate of the
late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and could not have appeared
as early as the eighteenth century.
Susan Meld Shell’s work The Embodiment of Reason, 15 in which she
explores the significance of the body in Kant’s philosophical reflections in
works published before and after the Critique, inspired me to pursue my
own investigations into these texts. The results astounded me. While the
Critique presents us with a theory of an abstract subject with certain
abstract skills and abilities which make experience possible, in these texts
Kant explicitly and vigorously defends the idea that man as we know him
is an embodied being, experiencing the world in and through the body,
or better, as a body. In some of these Kantian works we also find what I
will call a life-world perspective that takes into account not only the
material or physical, but also the social conditions under which we live
our lives.
I had originally started to read these texts in order to learn more
about the context in which the Critique emerged. I soon realized,
however, that they also deserved to be studied in their own right. Of
course, in these texts we also find highly abstract and formal arguments
like the ones occurring in the Critique. However, through my reading of
these texts a different image of the famous Königsberger emerged from
that of the abstract and lofty thinker. They revealed a Kant deeply
involved in the philosophical project of exploring the basic significance of
our physical and social existence. As part of this project we find
philosophical theories and perspectives that are stunningly modern, for
instance, what I will call a pragmatic theory of embodied rationality, a
theory inviting us to study rationality at the level of human behavior or
14
For a discussion and criticism of Cartesian interpretations of Kant, cf. Collins
(1999).
15
Shell (1996).