BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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of objects without touching them, as when I count the number of books
standing in a bookshelf by moving my eyes.
Kant’s idea may be perceived to be that a similar process is involved
in all apprehension. In chapter 6 I argued, following Kant, that
apprehension could be described as a kind of drawing in which our
bodies are involved. In visual perception, for instance, I move my eyes,
making a movement similar to the one I would have made in order to
produce a drawing of the shape of the object perceived. I think that the
theory of apprehension implied by the passages just examined may be
interpreted as referring to the same embodied acts as those identified
there. That is, all apprehension presupposes and implies embodied
movement. What is new, however, is that these acts are now also
described as instances of addition or counting.
If my interpretation is correct, this idea is used in the Critique in two
ways. First, it is used to account for the fact that all empirical objects
apprehended have spatial size. They have size because the act in which
they are apprehended is an act in which part is added to part, and this is
how spatial size is constituted for us. Another way of stating this point is
by saying that empirical apprehension always involves a sort of primitive
measuring of the apprehended object, a measuring in which we use our
body, or parts of our body, as a primitive measuring rod. This is most
obvious when apprehension takes place by touch. When I place my hand
directly on the surface of the object to be apprehended, in the very same
act I also measure its size relative to the size of my hand. Perhaps I also
have to move it in order to really get a hold on what kind of object it is.
Along with this, and as part of the very same act, measuring takes place
again. How many times do I move my hand a ‘hand-sized’ distance in
order to get from one side of the object to another? The fact that I am
perhaps unaware of making such a measurement does not prevent it
from taking place. Kant might have said that I am aware of it on an
obscure level of consciousness. Most important, however, and what I take
to be the basic Kantian point, is that we cannot apprehend an object
without at the same time measuring it. And typically, in most everyday
situations, the ‘measuring rod’ we use to perform the measuring is our
bodies or parts of our bodies, such as when people in primitive cultures
measure by means of their feet, thumbs or other body parts. 5
5
In Émile Rousseau advances similar thoughts when he writes: ‘Since man’s first
natural movements are, therefore, to measure himself against everything
surrounding him and to experience in each object he perceives all the qualities
which can be sensed and relate to him, his first study is a sort of experimental