BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

CONCLUSION 309
but it is clearly present in Dreams of a spirit-seer from 1766. This text
represents a radical defense of what I have called an embodied
empiricism, involving e.g. the idea that our immediate awareness of
being in a body has an epistemic superiority that no skepticism can
undermine. As I have argued, the Critique may be interpreted as a work
that draws the philosophical implications of all this.
I therefore find it highly ironic when Kant is constantly accused of
having ignored the body and our embodied existence. Even those who
argue that his transcendental theory could easily be interpreted as a
theory of embodied practice typically complain that he failed to see this
himself, and certainly did not intend his theory to be interpreted in this
way. For example, Brook points to the fact that Kant’s transcendental
theory can be read as a theory of human behavior:
Suppose we reconceive Kant’s work and substitute ‘behavior’ and
‘dispositions’ for his ‘representations’, ‘experience’, ‘awareness’, and
so on. Then suppose we think of Kant as offering a contingent theory
of behavior, especially linguistic behavior, not an a priori ‘analytic’ of
a hidden mental realm. This theory would explain behavior by
postulating a certain unity and certain synthesizing powers. All
Kant’s insights into unity and synthesis could easily survive even so
radical a recasting. 5
But Brook also maintains, as if it were beyond doubt, that Kant himself
did not intend us to read his theory in this way: Kant himself understood
his theory to refer to mental activities and states of a Cartesian mind,
hidden and unobservable, something very different from behavior. 6
Brook does not contend that an interpretation focusing on behavior is
better than the one he takes Kant to be intending, but John McDowell
does in his highly interesting book Mind and World. 7 McDowell purports
to prove that Kant still has much to offer contemporary philosophy.
There are, however, several problems with Kant’s philosophy, he
complains. One such problem is his habit of conceiving of human
rationality in total abstraction from the actual lives we live as human
beings, i.e. as embodied animals endowed with rational capacities. So
Kant ends up with a quasi-Platonic conception of rationality, according
to which the categories are viewed as part of an eternal, timeless
structure beyond the empirical world.
5
Brook (1994), 19.
6
Op. cit.
7
McDowell (1994).