BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE EMBODIED MIND
things in themselves, we also have no reason for believing that their
communion is a problem.
Another way of stating Kant’s point is that by critically examining
our sensibility we understand that the classical ontological mind-body
problem is based on a misinterpretation of the representations of
sensibility. Without noting, we translate cognitive categories (time and
space qua forms of sensibility) into ontological categories pertaining to
things in themselves. Once we give up this misinterpretation, the
traditional problem dissolves. Instead it reappears in another form, Kant
tells us. The problem is now to explain how the representations of the
inner and outer sense, in spite of their heterogeneity, are co-coordinated
so that they constitute one experience.
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Now the question is no longer about the community of the soul with
other known but different substances outside us, but merely about the
conjunction of representations [Verknüpfung der Vorstellungen] in
inner sense with the modifications of our outer sensibility, and how
these may be conjoined with one another according to constant laws,
so that they are connected into one experience. (A 385-386)
In this passage, the body and its community with the mind is not
explicitly mentioned. However, along with the general problem of the coordination
of outer and inner sense, comes the more specific problem of
how to co-ordinate the two modes of self observation corresponding to
the outer and inner sense. When I observe myself through the outer sense
I perceive what I have learned to call ‘my body’. When I observe myself
through the inner sense I perceive what I have learned to call ‘my mind’.
What is the relation between what I here call my body and my mind?
From the context of the Critique we understand that this question cannot
be answered by means of traditional ontology. It cannot be so answered,
because this would require a knowledge of body and mind as things in
themselves that we can never have. So if it can be solved at all, it has to
be solved at another level, by considering how I co-ordinate the two
modes of self observation corresponding to my outer and inner sense. Let
us call this formulation of the mind-body problem ‘the critical version of
the mind-body problem’. Does Kant solve this specific problem? I cannot
see that he explicitly deals with it anywhere in the Critique. However, he
may have thought that it was solved as part of his general theory of the
unity of experience through transcendental apperception.
I have paid a lot of attention to the paralogism chapter of the Aedition
of the Critique here because I think it represents the position
towards which Kant was heading when he formulated his new theory of