BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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QUANTITY
such an intuition. The process in which this takes place is referred to as
‘successive addition’.
Let us stop for a moment to consider this term ‘successive addition’ as
it used here. Another word for successive addition is counting. Counting,
I think, may be described, without any great controversy, as a practice,
and moreover as a practice that often involves the body. Kant has given
us several examples of counting qua embodied practice, such as when we
count on our fingers (B 15). Other examples of counting involving the
body are easily found. One such example is when we count a series of
external objects by manipulation, for example when we pick up ten
apples in the supermarket and place them in our shopping basket. Even
when we count a series of objects without touching them, as when we
count the number of books standing in a bookshelf, our body is involved
as we move our eyes, focusing on one book after the other.
9.3 The production of time
Now, let us return to our discussion of time. The passage suggests that, in
some way or another, the transcendental determination of time may
involve acts or practices like the ones just suggested. What is more, time
itself, Kant tells us, may be seen as produced by such acts. What does this
mean? Despite Kant’s rather abstract and/or obscure way of making his
point, I think his idea is quite simple. In all acts of counting (one..., two...,
three...) the act of counting constitutes a primitive time flow. As we
count, through our counting as such, time comes into being for us.
Before saying more about this, however, let us now take a look at the
last part of the passage again:
Thus number is nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the
manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, because I generate
[erzeuge] time itself in the apprehension of the intuition. (A142/ B
182)
A connection is established between the theory of time production just
suggested, and the concept of apprehension. What is this connection? In
what way is counting (successive addition) involved in apprehension? Let
me suggest the following answer, and let me use the apprehension of an
empirical object as my example. According to Kant, the apprehension of
an empirical object takes place as a process in which new parts of the
object are constantly perceived and added to the parts previously
perceived. The fact that parts just perceived are added to previous ones
means that apprehension always involves addition or counting. For
instance, imagine yourself standing close to a very large building, so large