BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

26
communion of mind and body, Kant claims that this may be explained
as a special case of a general principle governing all interactions between
substances. In all such interactions both the outer and the inner aspects
of the substance are involved, he argues. This suggests that he took the
mind to be the inner aspect of the ‘substance man’. If so, this explains
why he thought that the communion of mind and body could be
understood by reference to this general theory of interaction. Kant’s idea
was not that the mind interacts with other substances qua independent
substance, but that it does so in virtue of being the inner aspect of the
substance man.
Regardless of whether this interpretation is correct or not, we may
regard it as established that in his very first publication Kant states as an
obvious fact that mind and body are intimately united. And as we will
see, this is an idea that will stay with him for the rest of his life. In Living
forces we also find signs of another idea that will stay with him, namely
that cognition has both a passive and an active aspect. Cognition is a
passive process to the extent that our representational state is changed
following externally caused impacts on the mind. It is active to the extent
that the mind modifies its representational state through its own activity.
In Living forces the idea is not yet explicitly expressed in this way, but it
is clearly present in a primitive form. Most interesting, perhaps, is the fact
that in his very first published writing Kant is already explaining the
three-dimensionality of space by reference to human activity. The fact
that we represent the world as having three dimensions, and that we
cannot represent it in any other way, he says, is due not just to the
specific way in which substances in our world interact in general, but also
to the fact that we are ourselves part of this interaction. This means not
only that we are affected according to the rules of the world, but also we
also act outside ourselves according to these same rules. 38
As I will argue,
Kant will later claim, for instance in Directions in space and also in his
Anthropology, that our representation of space is constituted by
embodied acts. Even if the present text is too brief and too abstract to
allow us to come to a firm conclusion, the above passage may
nevertheless be read as a precursor to this theory. If so, we have here
found yet another idea that is to stay with Kant for the rest of his life.
Shell goes a step further and argues that Kant’s theory of the
constitution of space through embodied activity in Living forces
anticipates by almost forty years his critical treatment of space and time
38
Ak I: 24.
THE EMBODIED MIND