BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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CAUSALITY AND COMMON SENSE PHYSICS
the question of how we may describe or understand the embodied
practice of apprehension. 24
Kant’s theory of the categories of modality concerns how a certain
aspect of our world is present in time (A 145/B 184). The most
significant aspect of this theory, I think, is the distinction between
necessity and contingency. As necessity is an essential mark of a priori
knowledge and contingency is a mark of the empirical content of
knowledge, the distinction plays a very significant role in Kant’s
transcendental philosophy. In defining yet another major task of the
Critique, one might say that Kant’s transcendental philosophy,
considered as a whole, aims at making clear exactly how this distinction
relates to our knowledge of the world. More specifically, it aims at
answering the question of how it is possible to have knowledge about the
world that is necessarily true and universal. As this question underlies
Kant’s transcendental philosophy as a whole, however, it is unlikely that
it can be answered by identifying the categories of modality with a
certain group of practices, embodied or not. What may be argued,
however, as I have done, is that knowledge about the world that is
necessarily true and universal can be seen as originating in embodied
practices. Going further into Kant’s theory of the categories of modality
at this point, would not, I think, add much to what has already been said.
11.9 Summary
The aim of this and the previous chapters was to explore whether it was
possible to interpret the relational categories, as they are described in the
Critique, as embodied practices. I conclude that it is. Let me remind the
reader, however, that in making this claim, I have followed a path of
investigation that I think was probably not of much interest to Kant in
the Critique. However, as I have said, my investigation has not been
motivated by Kant’s main interest in the Critique but by a desire to look
beyond or behind the abstract theory of this text to see what may have
been omitted from it either accidentally or deliberately.
24 It may at most be seen as a sort of supplement to what was said above, when I
claimed that the cognitive subject in an act of empirical apprehension is always
affected and that this affection produces a sensation. In his theory of the category
of quality, Kant says that we can know a priori that this sensation has an intensity
lying somewhere between something and zero.