BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

14
THE EMBODIED MIND
shall also take a brief look at some relevant passages from the Critique,
even if the main treatment of that text belongs in part two.
1.1 Seele, Gemüt and Geist
I will normally use ‘mind’ to translate three German terms; Seele, Gemüt
and Geist. By this I do not mean to imply that the three terms, when
used by eighteenth-century Germans, always meant the same thing, or
that they did to Kant. Nevertheless, they often did. According to
Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch all three terms were used in eighteenthcentury
Germany to refer to the mental or spiritual part of man in
general. In this usage the meanings of the terms included both the
contents of our consciousness and what made this consciousness possible.
Additionally, both Geist and Seele were sometimes used in an even more
general sense, denoting the life of an organism in general, or what gave it
life. These meanings also reappear in Kant’s use of the three terms.
Often he switches between Geist, Seele and Gemüt in a way that makes
it hard to see why he uses one term instead of another.
To the extent that he distinguishes between the three terms, there is a
tendency, at least in the more mature Kant, to use Gemüt in contexts
where cognitive issues are discussed, and Seele in more ontologically
oriented discussions. The distinction here suggested belongs, however, to
the mature years of his intellectual life. In his earlier writings it is not yet
established and there the term Seele is the dominant one, used both when
the context is metaphysics and when the discussion deals more explicitly
with cognitive issues. However, the terms Geist and Gemüt are sometimes
also used in a similar way. This is why I will normally translate all of
them as ‘mind’. When it seems more natural, however, I occasionally
render Seele as ‘soul’ and Geist as ‘spirit’. Where it seems necessary or
helpful to do so, I indicate the original German word being translated.
1.2 Empirical and rational psychology and anthropology
In eighteenth-century German philosophy there were two main contexts
in which the mind or the soul was discussed and these were rational and
empirical psychology. While the first aimed by means of logical proofs to
reach knowledge of the ontological nature and status of the soul, and thus
may be counted as a branch of metaphysics or ontology, the second
allowed empirical statements to be included in its body of knowledge. 4
4 A brief but good introduction to the empirical psychology of eighteenth-century
Germany is found in Klemme (1996), 15ff., cf. also Hatfield (1992).