BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
eyes. It still follows that we have no immediate awareness of these objects
with which we interact. We may believe that we have and when I touch
an object with my hand I may think that I have an immediate awareness
of it. However my immediate awareness includes only the changes
occurring in my hand (the way my hand is affected) as it touches the
object, and its movements as I grasp it. The same applies to any other act
of perception. When, for instance, I see a tree in front of me, my
immediate awareness includes the changes occurring in my eye as they
are affected by the rays of light reflected from the tree, and the
movements of my pupils as they focus on the tree. It does not include the
three as such. In all acts of perception, my immediate awareness never
includes the object of perception, but only the changes occurring in my
embodied states. We are here close to a point expressed by Kant in the
A-edition:
For one cannot have sensation outside oneself, but only in oneself,
and the whole of self-consciousness therefore provides nothing other
than merely our own determinations. (A 378)
This idea is also restated in the B-edition. Kant here maintains that it is a
reasonable and well founded philosophical claim that we have no
immediate experience [unmittelbahre Erfahrung] outside ourselves (B
275).
The fact that I refer to these passages in order to illustrate my points
is of course no coincidence. On the contrary, I think the reflection we are
now involved in is more or less the same as the one leading to Kant’s
transcendental idealism. It starts by stating that we are embodied beings,
and thus have a limited existence in time and space, 14 and proceeds by
asking what philosophical consequences may be drawn from this. The
idea that, in all acts of perception, my immediate awareness never
includes the object of perception but only the changes occurring in my
internal, embodied states in the perceptive act, may seem strange if not
outrageous. However, I do not think there is anything wrong with it. On
the contrary, it follows directly from assumptions that were not only
supported by Kant (if I am right) but are also taken as obvious by most
people today. If we accept that the world is like how we take it to be, that
14 The idea that we, as human beings, are limited [endliche Wesen] is explicitly
stated at B 72. In line with the general abstract style of the Critique, Kant does
not say that a human being is finite because it is embodied. However, I think we
may well assume that this is the argument.