BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

6
INTRODUCTION
practice. This theory, I shall suggest, was developed in part inspired by
Rousseau, who, I think, had a far more profound influence on Kant than
most interpreters have acknowledged. In both Kant and Rousseau we
find expressions of a deep respect for the skills and practices of the
common artisan and everyday life. This, I suggest, is far more than just
superficial admiration, but serves as the basis for revising the very
concept of rationality.
The first part of the present work deals with what I have found most
significant in my reading of Kant’s early publications, as well as some
works published after 1781, the year the Critique first appeared. I see this
first part as an independent work that might have been published
separately because it draws attention to some aspects of Kantian
philosophy that, even if they are now receiving more attention than they
used to, are still too little known within the general community of
philosophers, let alone among the wider public. However, this first part is
included in the present work because I think it also has an important role
to play in understanding the context in which the Critique should be
interpreted.
That a work has to be interpreted in context, and that this should
include what its author wrote at other times, is of course neither new nor
foreign to interpreters of Kant. With a few exceptions, however, the
works I explore in the first part of this work have not generally been
regarded as really relevant to the Critique, and I think this has been
detrimental to our understanding of it. Even if the Critique contains
some philosophical reflections that have few if any parallels outside it, we
also find strong continuities between the Critique and the works just
referred to. A number of concepts with a central function in the Critique
also appear in these other Kantian texts. More than one of the questions
discussed in the Critique is also examined there. By including these texts
in the context within which we interpret the Critique, therefore, we are
in a better position to understand this central piece of Kantian
philosophy than we would be if they were ignored.
Finally, by reading the Critique in this context, we are able to
respond to those who claim that the theoretical reflections of the Critique
cannot be taken to refer to embodied events, skills or practices, because
Kant did not care about the body, or that such reflections were foreign to
the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century. By becoming
acquainted with the writings discussed in part one of this work, we
discover that Kant both could and did ascribe a basic significance to
embodied events, skills and practices in his philosophy in a way that may
seem radical even today. Reading the Critique in the context of these