BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

210
SPATIAL SCHEMATISM
However, even if the Critique may contain the idea of such a
primitive space, we are seriously misled if we believe we have now
reached the core of Kant’s critical theory of space, because this theory
aims much wider. Its task is to explain how it is possible for us to have
knowledge of objects in space, and of the shape and the reciprocal
relations of these objects. To know this, more is required than just to be
affected by these objects, even if this affection has a spatial structure in
the way that Falkenstein claims. What is required is activity: the cognitive
agent has to be able to move. This is what I take to be Kant’s insight
before, in and after the Critique. And when in the Critique he describes
this activity with a terminology that seems to suggest that the activity in
question is mental or internal, for example when he uses the term
‘synthesis’, a further examination reveals that this is not the case after all.
The acts referred to by the Kantian term synthesis also include embodied
acts. 61
Falkenstein fails to see this by uncritically adopting a far too narrow
conception of the term ‘synthesis’, according to which the synthetic acts
described in the Critique are purely intellectual acts whose main function
is to unite material supplied by the senses, material that already has a
temporal and spatial form. Thus, he conceives of even the figurative
synthesis as intellectual. However, Kant classifies it as an imaginative
synthesis, and if I am right, it corresponds to what Kant calls the
syntheses of apprehension and reproduction. As I have argued, it needs
to be conceived of as a constructive activity involving the body. With his
far too narrow conception of synthesis, Falkenstein fails to see this point.
6.14 The embodied agent
According to Hans Blumenberg, most scientific and philosophical
theories rest on a basic metaphor. 62
The term ‘metaphor’ is here used in
the sense of an image serving as a model from which the basic structure
and concepts of the theory are derived, without, however, entering the
field of abstract discourse itself, except through occasional references.
The metaphor belongs to what I have called the background or horizon
within which the more abstract theory is developed. 63
Without intending
to go deeply into this subject, I think that, in the Critique, the embodied
agent is Kant’s basic metaphor in a Blumenbergian sense. An embodied
61
Cf. e.g. my discussion of the synthesis of apprehension.
62
Blumenberg (1960).
63
Cf. also Black (1962).