BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

230
THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
it is conceived here, these images, i.e. representations, are always firmly
grounded in the immediate experience of the embodied states of the
embodied agent interacting with the physical objects, which are also the
objects of its experience. In this way Kant’s representationalism has more
in common with the embodied representationalism of Condillac and
Rousseau, than the representationalism of Descartes or Hume.
The immediate awareness of embodied states on which our
representations are grounded may be classified under two categories; the
awareness of embodied affection and the awareness of embodied acts. I
shall elaborate this point by means of an example through which I also
want to illuminate further what I take to be the relation between the
empirical and the transcendental in Kant’s critical philosophy. Finally I
shall discuss how Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space
may be interpreted within the context now established.
Imagine yourself with closed eyes holding a large ball in your hands.
Imagine that you feel its surface with your fingers. In order to get an idea
of its shape, you move your hands along its surface. Imagine that you do
this with the kind of everyday familiarity with which we normally
confront the world. That is, imagine that the ball is there with a fixed
shape and a fixed texture in the way that we normally take objects to
exist in this world. Imagine this. Then, within this context, go on to focus
only on that of which you have immediate awareness. What is it? First it
includes the movements you are making with your hands. Secondly, it
includes the feeling in your palms and fingers as they move. Notice that
in drawing this conclusion you have not moved from one world to
another. You have not become a different person. You are the same
person all along, and the event you have been involved in, the moving
and touching, is the same as well. What has happened, however, is that
you have now established another perspective on this event. According to
the first perspective, the ball is simply there, in space, with a fixed shape,
independently of whether you observe it or not. The ball is what Kant
calls ‘empirically real’ and so are its texture and its spatial features, i.e. its
shape. So we may call this perspective ‘empirical’. According to the other
perspective, however, the ball is not simply there. What is there is your
awareness of your body, that is, your awareness of the movements you
are making with your hands, and the feeling in your palms and fingers as
they move. The focus here is not on the empirical object as such, but an
aspect of your way of attaining experience of it. Thus, according to my
definition in chapter 4, this perspective may be called transcendental in a
general sense.
Even if Kant himself does not explicitly describe the relation between
the empirical and the transcendental in exactly this way, I think this