BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

CAUSALITY AND COMMON SENSE PHYSICS 295
practices. It is embodied practices performed by the child that account
for the fact that it finds itself living in an ordered world.
Notice that the perspective established by Piaget contains more than
just an account of how the child develops cognitively from birth to
adolescence. It contains a philosophical theory of how embodied
practices may be considered a priori conditions of experience, that is,
experience in the strong Kantian sense. 14 Even if this idea is integral to
Piaget’s theory of development, that is, placed in a diachronic setting, it is
also possible to extract it from this setting, thereby establishing a
synchronic perspective. In this perspective, what is considered is no
longer the genesis of concepts. The focus is on how embodied practices
are a priori conditions of experience.
This is, I think, philosophically considered, the most interesting part
of Piaget’s theory. It is also the hardest part to grasp. How can embodied
practices, like the ones suggested above, make the world appear ordered
to us? Piaget’s answer is this: long before the child has a name for
substance and causality or anything similar to this, long before it has
started to form mental representations of the world, long before it has
started to reflect consciously at all, it has the capacity to act and respond
in a regular way relative to the complex network of sensual impressions
in which it is living. It is capable of acting so that certain desired ends are
produced and others are avoided. At this level, in the absence of other
structural techniques such as language or inner mental representations,
having and using these embodied practices is what it means for the agent
to live in an ordered world. Without them the world is chaotic and
meaningless. With them, the world is ordered and full of meaning.
This is a radical theory, radical in the sense that it breaks with a
number of well-established habits of thought. I assume that most of us
are not accustomed to thinking that behavior has the power to make the
world appear an ordered place to the agent. This, I assume, is also one of
the reasons why this theory is so hard to grasp. If I am right in my above
interpretation, however, this idea is not at all foreign to Kant. As we have
seen, in Kant’s works of anthropology and pedagogy, inspired by
Rousseau and others, he argues that we learn to know the world only
through embodied interaction. If my interpretation of Kant’s theory of
quantity is right, he also accepts that an embodied practice may function
as an a priori condition of experience.
If this is accepted, and if we are to continue the search for a level at
which the relational categories exist as embodied practices, then we may
14 This point is also made by Hoppe (1988), 116.