BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

178
SPATIAL SCHEMATISM
My main emphasis in this chapter is Kant’s theory of schematism as it
is found in the Critique. This theory is officially presented in what I shall
call the schematism chapter, a chapter covering fewer than ten pages and
constituting the first part of the Analytic of principles, which comes
shortly after the transcendental deduction. However, I think that
passages representing this theory may also be found in other parts of the
Critique, as I shall show later. My main thesis, however, is that in Kant’s
theory of schematism the cognitive agent must be perceived as an
embodied agent, and the cognitive acts ascribed to this agent as
embodied acts or practices. Moreover, I will argue that only if these acts
or practices are perceived in this way does the theory solve the problem it
purports to.
The term ‘schema’ has a history dating back to ancient Greece where
it was used to refer to the outer appearance of something or someone. In
a narrower sense it signified geometrical shape. 2
Kant’s use of the term
precedes the Critique by several years. In New elucidation, for instance,
he talks about ‘the schema of the divine understanding’. This pre-critical
use of the term will not be discussed further here. Neither will I discuss
how the term is used in the second and third Critiques. My aim is
primarily to examine the kind of schematism theory that Kant promotes
in the first Critique.
As I see it, the task of this theory is to explain how concepts apply to
objects intuited in time and space. 3 Or to state the question in more
Kantian terms: How is it possible to subsume appearances, which are
undetermined intuited objects in space and time, under concepts? How,
given the radical difference thought to prevail between concepts and
intuitions, may the one be applied to the other? Also, even if Kant
himself is not always explicit on this point, I will claim that it is possible
to distinguish two parts in his answer to this question, one having to do
with temporal schematism (time) and one with spatial schematism
(space). Leaving the question of temporal schematism to a later chapter, I
will focus here on spatial schematism, i.e. the question of how concepts
apply to spatially extended intuited objects. My claim is that within his
2
For a further overview of the history of the term and its use, cf. Stegmaier
(1992), 1252-1259 and also Obergefell (1985), 58.
3
Officially the task of this theory is to explain how the transcendental concepts,
i.e., the categories, applies to the spatio-temporal world of objects, cf. e.g. A 137-
138/B 176-177, however, if we look at the actual discussion taking place in the
schematism chapter and in other related passages, we find that the scope of the
discussion is wider, and may be defined as I just did in the main text.