BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

232
THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
What is the relation between what within the first perspective is seen
as the shape of the ball, and this awareness of movement? As long as you
actually stand there examining the ball, I think there is a sense in which
the two are the same. When you say to yourself that the ball is round,
thereby making a statement belonging to the empirical perspective, there
is a sense in which the term ‘round ball’ refers to your awareness of your
movement. Now, please notice the implication of this: the spatial features
of the ball, i.e. its shape, which inside the first perspective is seen as
empirically real, and according to Kant legitimately so, must in a
transcendental perspective be acknowledged as your awareness of your
own movement. Transcendentally considered space not only presupposes
embodied activity, space is such activity, or better, embodied, selfdetermined
movement of which we are immediately aware.
I have focused on an example in which the tactile sense is central not
just because I think it is illuminating, but also because, as I have argued
earlier, I take embodied acts such as the one explored in this example to
be prototypical in Kant’s cognitive theory. In all perception there is an
essential aspect of embodied movement. In visual perception, for
instance, I typically move my pupils as their focus slides along the
external contours of the object perceived. Consequently, I think the
results just arrived at may be generalized to include all kinds of
perception. Stated generally, and transcendentally considered, space is
awareness of embodied movement, or better, it is embodied, selfdetermined
movement of which we are immediately aware. 16
We have now arrived at a position that is consistent with all the
central ideas defining Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideality of
space. In the Critique he contends that, transcendentally considered,
space is subjective. 17 According to the present interpretation it is so
because the notion of space, transcendentally considered, refers to the
awareness of the embodied movements of the cognitive agent. It is also
16
I am here close to Kaulbach’s interpretation, cf. e.g. Kaulbach (1965), 104.
Here he writes: ‘Die Lehre Kants von Raum und Zeit in der transzendentalen
Ästhetik konnte den Begriff der Bewegung nicht voll entfalten, weil die beiden
‘Formen’ der Anschauung hier noch isoliert von der Synthesis mit dem
Verstande behandelt werden. Im weiteren Verlauf der Vernunftkritik zeigt sich
jedoch immer deutlicher das Hervortreten des Bewegungsprinzips. Es wird dabei
deutlich, daß Raum und Zeit nichts für sich sind, sondern Momente an dem
Wesen der Bewegung: Beide müssen daher von ihr her philosophisch analysiert
werden.’ I am also close to Melnick’s position (1989), 6 when he ascribes to Kant
the view that space ‘is fundamentally our behavior or something we do’.
17
Cf. e.g. A 26/B 42. Cf. also A 99, A 103 and B 162.