BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE EMBODIED MIND
field. Does this mean that despite the explicit agnosticism of Dreams of a
spirit-seer, Kant here still puts forward an ontological position? Again,
we must be careful to see what he is actually doing. He does not claim
that it is possible to prove that the mind as such is single and without
extension. All he says is that this idea is compatible with the idea that the
mind is present in the body as activity. Whether the first of these ideas is
true or not, however, he leaves open. Thus, the basic outlook here too is
agnostic. Whether this outlook was new in 1766 is another question. As
already suggested, the explicit agnosticism of Universal natural history
may suggest that it was present as early as 1755. If so, this also
undermines the claim that Dreams of a spirit-seer is somehow the
product of a crisis developing in the years immediately preceding its
publication.
1.10 An embodied empiricism
If Dreams of a spirit-seer is not the product of a crisis in Kant’s
intellectual development, what is it? How does it fit into this
development, especially where his theory of the mind is concerned?
Rather than representing a crisis, I think that Dreams of a spirit-seer may
be read as a text where he sorts out and re-emphasizes perspectives and
ideas that have already been part of his thinking for some time. Let me
elaborate on this point.
I take the basic perspective of Dreams of a spirit-seer to be agnostic
and empirical. Its basic message is that agnosticism is required in all that
cannot be immediately experienced. Nothing in this is new. Empiricism
is present in Kant’s association with empirical psychology in the
appendix to Universal natural history in 1755, and his detailed discussion
of the embodied aspects of cognition in this text, as also in Maladies of
the mind, may be seen as taking place within the context of this
discipline, or even the new discipline of anthropology emerging from it.
Agnosticism is, as we have seen, also present in Universal natural history.
If not new, however, these empirical and agnostic tendencies appear
in Dreams of a spirit-seer in a dramatically more radical form. For
instance, Kant directs his agnosticism now not only at the afterlife of the
soul, but also at any purported explanation of how it is possible for mind
and body to communicate. Actually, even the possibility of explaining the
impenetrability of matter is now claimed to belong to the domain where
decisive comprehension must be given up. Instead the mind-body
communion, along with the impenetrability of matter, are now
maintained as facts immediately experienced. Immediate experience,
moreover, is claimed to represent a knowledge superior to all theoretical
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