BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

SPATIAL SCHEMATISM 197
only by interpreting Kant’s theory of schematism in this way does the
theory solve the problem that it is supposed to solve.
Let me state again the question I take to stand at the centre of Kant’s
theory of spatial schematism: how may concepts, which are not
intuitions, still be applied to objects intuited in space? In trying to exhibit
the structure of what I take to be the Kantian answer to this question, the
first point to note is that the objects intuited are actually existing objects,
that is, physical objects present in the same spatio-temporal domain we
inhabit as embodied beings. That Kant takes space to be
transcendentally ideal, and that this ideality also pertains to the spatial
form of intuited objects, does not refute this point. 40
I have argued that what Kant calls a schema in the schematism
chapter is an embodied practice in which the shape of an object is
created or re-created by an embodied agent through the movement of its
body, or parts of its body. The essential insight I take to underlie his
theory of spatial schematism is that only by conceiving of the schema as
such a practice, unfolding in the same space as the one in which the
intuited objects exist, does the theory fulfill its task. A theory of
schematism operating solely at the level of inner representations cannot
answer the relevant question, at least not as long as the objects the theory
is supposed to deal with are empirical, spatio-temporal objects and not
just representational images. A theory of schematism that operates only
at the level of inner representations could perhaps explain how concepts
apply to such representations, but it is incapable of explaining how it is
possible for these concepts to apply also to empirical objects actually
existing in time and space.
This problem pertains, I think, to all those who take Kant’s theory of
schematism to refer to the inner domain of human representations only,
such as Ros, who takes the objects [Konkreta] referred to in the theory of
schematism to be mental images. 41 The problem with a theory of
schematism that deals only with mental images is that it does not go ‘all
the way out’ to the actually existing world of spatio-temporal objects. It
remains within the world of mental representations, where the final
question remains unanswered: how do we connect this mental world with
the world of physical objects that our thoughts, statements and theories
are all about? 42 Once we assume that the schemata of Kant’s theory of
40
This point will be further discussed in chapter 7.
41
Ros (1990), 69.
42
For a somewhat different criticism of the mentalist position, see Bennett (1966),
142.