BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL 239
representational does not jeopardize their epistemic status. Quite the
opposite, it frees them from the doubt directed at them by skeptical
idealism, and so transcendental idealism necessary leads to what Kant
calls empirical realism.
At first sight Kant’s story here seems to be rather different from the
one I have told above. Nothing is said about an embodied mind. Instead,
he seems to be giving us an account of a mind almost indistinguishable
from the mind as it is according to Hume and Descartes, a disembodied
mind aware only of its own inner states. This mind, Kant emphasizes, is
the only thing of which we have immediate and secure knowledge.
Moreover, what we take to be objects existing independently in space
are, transcendentally considered, nothing but representations in this
mind. However, we also know that Kant vigorously resisted the idealism
of Descartes and Hume. Consequently, whatever the message of the
above argument is, it should not be confused with the position of these
philosophers.
Kant may himself have become aware that this way of stating his
point might lead readers to confuse his transcendental idealism with the
more dubious forms of idealism of Descartes and Hume. No wonder,
then, that he rewrote the paralogism chapter for the B-edition and also
added a newly written Refutation of idealism. However, the fact that he
rewrote the A-version of the paralogism chapter does not mean that he
took its argument to be false. More probably he feared that it would be
misread, or that more was needed to get his point across than what was
said in the A-edition. Actually, in the Refutation of idealism of the Bedition,
Kant repeats what we have just seen him claim in the A-edition
version of the paralogism chapter. He discusses a position called
problematical idealism which is an idealism of a Cartesian sort, in which
the existence of external objects is not denied, but claimed to be dubious.
This idealism is based on the assumption that we have no immediate
experience [unmittelbahre Erfahrung] outside ourselves. This is a
reasonable and well founded philosophical claim, he maintains (B 275). 23
But does not this make Kant a Cartesian? Does not this make his
position just what he wants to avoid? In the B-edition he still attacks
Cartesian idealism, so in what way is his position different? One way of
seeing it as different and giving sense to the argument found both in the
23
However, he now also adds another argument to prove the existence of
external objects. Our experience of time, which belongs to the inner sense, and
thus to the domain which even the sceptic accepts as certain, is possible only if
outer objects exist. This argument will be further explored in a later chapter.