BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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SPATIAL SCHEMATISM
All this does not prove that, for instance, the movements of the pupils
of the eyes are usually involved in the conceptual recognition of an
empirical object. But Kant’s theory of consciousness does not exclude
this. On the contrary, the theory tells us that such movements could be
involved, even if we were not explicitly aware of making them. They
could be involved, even if they took place in less than a second and
involved only the minutest changes in the positions of the pupils, as when
a musician playing a guitar creates a subtle but stunning effect through
an almost unnoticeable relocation of his fingers.
6.12 The empirical aspect of apprehension
In the previous chapter I argued that Kant’s theory of space in the
Critique may be understood in part as an abstract version of his theory of
the embodied constitution of space. I also argued that his theory of
schematism may be used to support this interpretation. The point is
simple. The theory of schematism is a theory about an embodied agent
confronted with physical objects, and in order to subsume these objects
under concepts, the agent performs certain embodied practices, as
specified above. In order to do this, however, to use Kant’s own
terminology, this agent has first to take up or apprehend the relevant
objects in his empirical intuition. In the Critique, Kant tells us that such
apprehension presupposes that the agent is both active and passive. The
content of our empirical intuitions derives from the affection of the agent,
while their spatio-temporal features are constituted through her activity.
Now, if Kant’s theory of schematism demands that we conceive of
this cognitive agent as embodied and regard the schemata as embodied
practices, then this is also an argument in favor of the idea that embodied
acts are also involved when the agent apprehends an empirical object.
After all, we meet the same agent in both Kant’s theory of schematism
and in his theory of apprehension.
This point may also be stated in more formal terms. In a footnote at
B 162 in the Critique, Kant states that the various syntheses described
are all aspects of one and the same synthetic activity.:
In such a way it is proved that the synthesis of apprehension, which is
empirical, must necessarily be in agreement with the synthesis of
apperception, which is intellectual and contained in the category
entirely a priori. It is one and the same spontaneity that, there
under the name of imagination and here under the name of
understanding, brings combination into the manifold of intuition. (B
162, note, my emphasis)