BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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CONCLUSION
I think it is a basic feature of Kant as a philosopher that he has not
forgotten the basic significance of our interactive skills relative to the
physical world. He acknowledges that they represent a sort of knowledgein-practice
essential to human life. And even more, he sees their deep
cognitive and epistemic significance. This is why he advises that children
should run, play ball, draw images etc. so that they learn, for instance, to
judge size, shape and distance properly, and why he claims that without
the capacity to hold and grasp an object we would have no concept of its
shape.
As I have argued in this work, there may be a number of reasons for
Kant’s emphasis on embodied practice and behavior. His reading of and
his admiration for Rousseau has already been mentioned, and so has his
general interest in pedagogy and anthropology. Another reason may
have been his tendency to self-observation (mentioned by his
contemporary biographers), including with regard to the minutest events
taking place in his body. 4 Also significant is his growing empiricism and
pragmatism, which I discussed in the first part. The behavioral domain is
open to empirical observation and can also easily be influenced and
modified by means of proper didactic measures, to the common benefit
of man and culture. Both are basic concerns for Kant, at least from the
late 1760s. However, long before that, actually from the very beginning,
he was deeply preoccupied with the radical embodiment of human
existence.
It is evident that Kant’s philosophical orientation toward human
embodiment was bound to have epistemic implications. If human
existence is radically embodied, then it follows that there is no other way
to explore the world other than in and through the body. All experience
and all knowledge therefore have a subjective origin, which may be
specified by reference to the specific constitution of our body, its position
within the world and its capacity for action. One conclusion to be drawn
from this is that the old theocentric model of knowledge has to be given
up. There is no way in which we can arrive at a detached, objective
perspective of the world from which we can see it as it really is,
independent of all perspective, as perhaps its Creator sees it. The
subjective origin of our experience forms an absolute limit we can never
transcend so Kant’s model of knowledge is radically and fundamentally
anthropocentric. Exactly when he reached this position, I do not know,
little, to make his new visual appearances fit in with his experience of the world as
he had known it through touching it and by moving around in it.
4 Cf. Gross (1993).