BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY
8.9 Logic
261
Kant starts his Transcendental logic by dividing logic into two main
areas. The first he calls general or elementary logic. This is the logic
corresponding to the general employment of the understanding. It
contains the necessary rules of thinking without which no use of the
understanding would take place. The second is called ‘the logic of the
particular use of the understanding’, and contains the rules on how we
are to think properly about a certain kind of objects. There exists more
than one such logic, one for each existing science.
The logic corresponding to a particular science, that is, the rules of
how to understand a certain sort of objects according to this science, is
described by Kant as a sort of propaedeutic to this science, that is,
something a person has to know before he can become a proper student
of it. However when we reflect upon the development of reason (and
here he probably has the development of a specific science in mind), the
rules of this logic are formulated at a relatively late point, that is, after the
science has been established in its final form.
The former can be called elementary logic, the latter, however, the
organon of this or that science. In the schools the latter is often stuck
before the sciences as their propaedeutic, though in the course of
human reason they are certainly the latest to be reached, once the
science is already long complete, and requires only the final touch for
its improvement and perfection. For one must already know the
objects rather well if one will offer the rules for how a science of them
is to be brought about. (A 52/B 76-77)
Only when the science has been firmly established may we specify the
rules of the logic on which the science is founded.
This passage is very interesting because we may clearly see here the
ideas underlying Kant’s pragmatic theory of embodied rationality. In a
previous chapter, discussing an example illuminating this theory, we saw
Kant claim that the rules or concepts of grammar are present in the
linguistic practice of a person, even if they cannot make these rules
explicit. This passage seems to express a similar point, saying that to
every science there corresponds a logic; i.e. a set of concepts and/or
rules. Before they can be made explicit [angeben], however, the science
must be established. If we accept that it needs to be established as a
practice, and that this practice is embodied, then we have found an
argument with a similar structure to Kant’s grammar example. The
abstract logic of the science, i.e. its rules and/or concepts, is abstracted
from the embodied practice.