BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

SPATIAL SCHEMATISM 181
Although I think that Kaulbach’s interpretation is basically right, I
feel it could have been supported by more explicit references to the
actual text of the Critique. Kaulbach articulates his interpretation of the
Critique in impressive and poetic language, but it is not always evident
how it applies to what Kant actually says. I also feel that his discussion
often becomes too general, leaving unresolved a number of more specific
problems: How does the schema (understood as self-conscious, embodied
movement) mediate between concept and intuited object, as Kaulbach
claims it does? What is the exact relation between concept, movement
and object? In my own discussion I shall try to give a more detailed
answer to these questions than the one supplied by Kaulbach, and in
doing so also stay close to Kant’s text.
6.1 The production of images
Now, back to the thesis to be defended in this chapter. My claim is that
within his theory of schematism, Kant maintains that in order to
subsume a spatially extended object under its concept, we have, by
means of our body or part of our body, to copy or recreate its shape in an
act similar to drawing. More specifically, such an embodied practice is
what he calls a schema.
My first argument in favor of this thesis is that Kant, in explaining
what a schema is, introduces the term ‘procedure’ [Verfahren] (A 140/B
179). That this procedure must be understood as a practice, moreover, is
confirmed by the following example dealing with the schema of number.
Suppose I put five points one after another. Then these points would be
an image of the number five. The procedure by which this image is
produced is the schema corresponding to the concept of the number five.
The schema of a number in general, Kant then concludes, is the
procedure according to which an image is constructed so that this image
represents the number:
… if I place five points in a row, . . . . . , this is an image of the
number five. On the contrary, if I only think a number in general,
which could be five or a hundred, this thinking is more the
representation of a method for representing a multitude (e.g., a
thousand) in accordance with a certain concept than the image itself,
which in this case I could survey and compare with the concept only
with difficulty. Now this representation of a general procedure
[Verfahren] of the imagination for providing a concept with its image
[einem Begriff sein Bild zu verschaffen] is what I call the schema for
this concept. (A 140-141/B 179)