BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

CONCLUSION
Man can only become man by education. He is
merely what education makes of him. It is
noticeable that man is only educated by man –
that is, by men who have themselves been
educated.
From Kant’s On pedagogy 1
When you enter this world as a newborn baby, you are a body endowed
with consciousness. Gradually, in and through your body, you start to
explore the world, but in the beginning only with great difficulty.
Holding and grasping an object, and other similar acts, are performed
clumsily and without any hint of elegance. Only gradually do you
become a master of your environment. It takes a long time until one day
you are able to hold a glass of milk without spilling its contents, eat with a
knife and fork, bring together objects that belong together, such as
replacing the lid of a jar, or running to catch a ball in a ballgame. Just as
gradually, however, you start to forget your original difficulties. In
performing your daily activities, you pay them less and less attention,
until one day you perform them almost unconsciously. They have
become what Polanyi calls ‘tacit knowledge’. 2 Along with this we also
start to forget how significant these skills are in our daily lives. 3
1
Ak IX: 443, a.t.
2
Cf. e.g. Polanyi (1978).
3
Meeting a person with a somewhat unusual biography, however, may remind us
of this. Oliver Sacks in his interesting book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)
tells the story of the 50-year-old man Virgil who after an operation regained sight
after having been blind for almost all his life. While immediately after the
operation he was able to see colors and movements, he had great difficulties
interpreting what he saw, that is, recognizing the colours and movements as the
objects that he had previously known only through touch. He also had great
difficulties in judging the distance between himself and a perceived object.
Sometimes he jumped away in order not to be hit by an approaching bird in the
sky, even if the bird was far away. During his blind years he had learned to
recognize distance by walking. He knew, for instance, how many steps it took to
cross his porch, and this was his notion of its size. Now, he had to learn, little by