BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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Critique, most of the proof is presented in a highly abstract language. He
starts by stating that our experience presupposes that we think of
substances as standing in dynamic, reciprocal relations. This is easily
confirmed by experience, he claims. Had it not been for the dynamic
relations of our world, we would never have been able to direct our
senses from one object to another. So far, the style of the passage is
abstract. The dynamic reciprocal relations under consideration are
described as involving substances and our senses, but without specifying
what these objects or senses are.
Then it is as if the text moves to a completely different level. In the
middle of a sentence, as if what follows is the most natural way of
continuing, Kant starts to talk about eyes and light, and how the light
plays between our eyes and the heavenly bodies. 80
From our experiences it is easy to notice that only continuous
influence in all places in space can lead our sense from one object to
another, that the light that plays between our eyes and the heavenly
bodies effects a mediate community between us and the latter and
thereby proves the simultaneity of the latter, and that we cannot
empirically alter any place (perceive this alteration) without matter
everywhere making the perception of our position possible; and only
by means of its reciprocal influence can it establish their simultaneity
and thereby the coexistence of even the most distant objects (though
only mediately). (A 213/B 260)
What is remarkable in this passage is the ease with which it passes from
the abstract level of transcendental discourse to the level of physical
objects, and even more than this, how the subject or self who is all along
abstractly present is suddenly disclosed as an embodied self with eyes and
other organs. This ease more than suggests, I think, that this domain of
physical objects and embodied selves is tacitly presupposed all the time as
the obvious context in which the reflection proceeds.
Another possible explanation, compatible with the first, of why the
embodied aspect of human existence is not dealt with more explicitly in
the Critique, is that Kant deliberately chose to keep this aspect in the
background. Perhaps his conception of the ideal form of a philosophical
work induced him to formulate his reflections in an abstract language in
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THE BODY IN THE CRITIQUE
The heavenly bodies, i.e the moon and the earth, were also mentioned some
pages earlier at A 211/B 257.