BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL 227
we exist in this world as embodied beings, and that our immediate
awareness includes our own bodies only, then the rest of what was said
above follows.
There is one sense in which this reflection is strange, however. It is
strange in the sense that it is a reflection in which we do not ordinarily
engage. We are not used to reflecting upon the fact that we are
embodied, and that our immediate awareness is confined within the
space that we inhabit as embodied beings. This, however, is what Kant
does as part of his transcendental reflection, I believe. It should also be
emphasized that this is a reflection and when we are talking about the
embodied states of which we are immediately aware, this immediate
awareness should not be identified with our normal state of
consciousness. Our normal state of consciousness is the one implied by
Kant’s notion of empirical realism, a state of consciousness in which we
experience ourselves in space along with other spatio-temporal objects; in
a world of houses, trees and other everyday things. The fact that our
immediate awareness is confined within the space that we inhabit as
embodied beings is an idea, therefore, that we would probably not have
come upon had it not been for this reflection.
It may be objected against this analysis that even if we accept it as
part of a theoretical reflection, it is wrong, for instance because I assume
that the embodied acts accompanying our perceptions are something of
which we are aware. It may be claimed that this is not so. When I
perceive a tree, I am not normally aware of the movements of my pupils
as they focus on the tree. Within the context of Kantian philosophy,
however, this is not a problem. As we have seen earlier, Kant argues that
embodied acts, even if we are not explicitly aware of peforming them,
may still be conscious at a deeper level. In a sense we are aware of them,
but this awareness is too weak to reach the level of explicit attention.
Let us now return to the idea that, when we physically interact with
objects outside us, our immediate awareness never includes these objects
as such, but only the changes occurring in our internal, embodied states
in the perceptive act. And let us now proceed a step further. From what
has just been said it follows that everything we experience as being
outside our bodies is known only indirectly through our awareness of
these embodied states. To use a metaphor, we could say that the world of
our experience, the world in which we find ourselves living, the world of
physical objects like tables, houses and trees, is some kind of construction
made on the basis of our awareness of these states, elaborated by
whatever capacities our embodied minds may have. Being familiar with
this construction since early childhood, we do not doubt its objectivity.
Nevertheless, it is a construction.