BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

240
THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
A-version of the paralogism chapter and the B-edition Refutation of
idealism that we have no immediate experience [Erfahrung] outside
ourselves is to conceive of the cognitive agent referred to in the argument
as an embodied self. This would ensure that Kant’s position is different
from Descartes’, and moreover, it takes us into a reflection remarkably
similar in structure to the reflection that has formed the core of the last
part of this chapter.
According to Kant, the reason why my experience of the empirical
world is not threatened by the skepticism of such as Descartes is that it is
established as a fact beyond doubt, that I am a body in the minimal sense
defined above, i.e., a being endowed with consciousness, extended in
space and with the capacity to act and be acted upon. This is established
by the intuitive and immediate awareness that I have of being such a
body. The same intuitive immediacy applies also to my intuitions of
objects of my empirical world, such as when I hold a ball in my hands.
Even if I do not have any immediate awareness of the ball as such (due to
the fact that I have no immediate awareness outside my body), I have an
immediate awareness of how the ball affects my hands (or the something
that corresponds to this affection affects me), as well as my movements as
I hold and grasp it, which is its spatial form within the transcendental
perspective. Thus, everything the ball is to me, of this I have an
immediate, intuitive awareness. And if immediate awareness testifies to
reality, as Kant obviously think it does, then the ball, as I experience it, is
real as it can be to me. And the same is true of every object of my
experience. This is why Kant can conclude, as he does (A 371), that ‘I am
no more necessitated to draw inferences in respect of the reality of
external objects than I am in regard to the reality of the objects of my
inner sense (my thoughts), for in both cases they are nothing but
representations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at
the same time a sufficient proof of their reality.’ The fact that there is an
aspect of the ball that I do not and cannot know, as Kant contends there
is, is within this context no problem. This unknown something never has
and never will be part of my experience. As for my experience, however,
and everything contained in it, it has now been secured from the
skepticism of Hume and Descartes and any similar skepticism.
7.8 More about the Kantian notion of a representation
Before I end this chapter I want to add some brief remarks concerning
the Kantian notion of a representation. I have suggested that, according
to my interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, there is a sense in
which a representation may be seen as corresponding to a state within an