BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL 231
example may be used to illuminate this relation in a Kantian sense. First,
it illuminates what I take to be a central Kantian point, that moving from
an empirical to a transcendental perspective does not mean that we
suddenly become different people or that we deal with another world
with other kinds of objects. The move involves a change in perspective
only, focusing on our way of attaining experience of objects rather than
the objects of this knowledge. This point, I think, is clearly expressed in
the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter:
The difference between the transcendental and the empirical
therefore belongs only to the critique of cognitions [Erkenntnisse] and
does not concern their relation to their object. (A 57/B 81)
The example also illustrates how our experience or knowledge of the
ball, as we take it to exist within the empirical perspective, is grounded in
our immediate awareness of our embodied states. It is not a free-floating
image in a disembodied mind. Notice also how these states are of two
sorts. First we have the awareness of our palms and fingers as they are
affected by the texture of the ball. Then we have the awareness of our
hands and perhaps the rest of the body as we actively grasp the ball and
let our hands move along its surface. What within the empirical
perspective we refer to as the texture of the ball corresponds to or is
grounded in the first sort of awareness, while what within this perspective
we refer to as its shape, corresponds to or is grounded in the second sort
of awareness.
Below I shall argue that the reflection presently entertained also
entails the idea that space is transcendentally ideal, or at least that space
may be described in the same terms as we find in the Kantian doctrine of
the transcendental ideality of space. Before we reach that point, however,
we need to return for a moment to the example of the ball. Imagine
yourself again holding it in your hands with closed eyes. Imagine how
you move your hands along its surface. When you consider the ball with
the everyday confidence that characterizes what we have called the
empirical perspective, the ball is simply there, in space, with a certain
fixed shape, independently of whether you observe it or not. Thus its
spatiality, i.e. shape, is what Kant calls empirically real. If, however, you
direct your attention to that of which you are immediately aware only,
the shape of the ball is not simply there anymore. What is there, is your
awareness of that which in the perspective now established corresponds
to the empirical shape of the ball. As we have seen above, and as is
obvious from the example, this is the movement you are making with
your hands as you move them along the surface of the ball.