BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

SPATIAL SCHEMATISM 191
interpretation, for instance, when Kant describes a person with a vivid
imagination who believes he is seeing before him what is actually only in
his head.
The illusion caused by the strength of our imagination often goes so
far that we think we see and feel outside us what is only in our mind
[Kopf]. 30
My point is, however, is that when ‘imagination’ refers to the mental
domain, this is only part of the meaning it has in the Kantian corpus at
large. In its broader sense, it refers to the human capacity for image
production in general. This means that the imagination is at play
whenever a person uses her body to create images or image-like
structures. As for Kant’s theory of schematism, I think ‘imagination’
should be understood here in this extended sense. 31 So the fact that in the
schematism chapter Kant associates schematism and imagination does
not exclude the notion of embodied practices from the theory. On the
contrary, in the geometry example I take the term ‘schema of the
triangle’ to refer to any practice by which a triangle is constructed, such
as the drawing of a triangle on a piece of paper, on the blackboard, in the
sand, or perhaps even in the air, as when a person draws an imaginary
triangle in the air with his hand. I shall also argue that only if we
understand ‘schema’ in this way is Kant capable of solving the question
he opens the schematism chapter with.
30 Ak VII: 178.
31 Kaulbach (1968) comes close to the same conclusion. When ‘imagination’ is
used by Kant in an epistemic context, it corresponds to the capacity of embodied
image production. To Kaulbach, this insight follows immediately from Kant’s
thesis of the emboidied self: ‘Daß das Subjekt, welches beschreibend seine
ursprüngliche Einbildungskraft ins Werk setzt, ein leibliches Wesen sein muss,
resultiert aus dem Gedanken, daß Beschreibung, die mit seinsbildendem
Anspruch auftritt, eine die Figuren produzierende Kraft aufbieten muss. Das
beschreibende Subjekt muß die ursprungliche Kraft haben, durch eine Handlung
des Ausdehnens den Raum figürlich zu bestimmen, ihn zu ‘beschreiben’, wie
man eine bisher leere Tafel beschreibt. Kraft bedeutet hier wie auch anderwärts
dasjenige Vermögen des Subjekts, sich als unausgedehntes Wesen raumbildend
auseinanderzulegen, dadurch erst einen figurierten Raum hervorzubringen.’
(Kaulbach (1968), 285.)