BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

40
to communicate, his theory seems to be not that the mind is an
independent monad but rather that a human being must be thought of as
a single substance of which mind and body are nothing but different
aspects or dimensions. It is not obvious that this theory is affected by the
problems that, for instance, Laywine claims Kant was facing.
According to Schönfeld, Kant also struggled with the problem of
combining on the one hand the idea that the mind was part of the
physical universe and on the other the idea that it was immortal. Kant
was committed to the idea that the mind or the soul continued to exist
after it left its mortal body, Schönfeld maintains, and he wanted his
general theory of the world to have room in it for this idea of
immortality. I think there is little reason to doubt that Kant believed in
the afterlife of the soul. However, I do not see it as obvious that he
perceived this idea as a problem in need of a philosophical solution. If he
did, he would surely have raised it and discussed it more explicitly.
However, the immortality of the soul almost never surfaces in Kant’s
explicit discourse, and when it does, for instance in Universal natural
history, it is combined with an explicit agnosticism. Despite what our
senses and consciousness tell us, Kant argues, we do not really know what
a human being is, and we know even less about the afterlife. 75 It may also
be worth noting that he does not seem to find this agnosticism
problematic. On the contrary, he seems to be entirely happy to move the
question of the immortality of the soul out of the realm of philosophical
discourse and into the field of belief. In his critical phase, the idea that
the soul is immortal was explicitly classified as an ‘idea of faith’. Kant’s
explicit agnosticism in Universal natural history may be read as a sign
that this perspective may have been present as early as 1755. If so, the
idea of immortality would hardly have had the force to provoke a
philosophical crisis.
Finally, if Dreams of a spirit-seer is the product of a crisis following
Kant’s previous ontological commitments, one would have expected him
to now abstain from any further excursions into this dubious field of
human enquiry. However, as we have seen, in Dreams of a spirit-seer
Kant does not reject ontology in an absolute sense. The idea that the
mind is present in the body qua activity does not have to be regarded as
an ontological thesis. However, by claiming that this idea is compatible
with the idea that the mind as such is single and without extension, he is
obviously thinking against the background of classical ontology. He even
seems to adopt the above-mentioned idea as his own position within this
75 Ak I: 366.
THE EMBODIED MIND