BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

56
The Anthropology, which is Kant’s only published work in this field,
is characterized as a pragmatic anthropology. In the preface of this work,
Kant explains that anthropology can be either a physiological or a
pragmatic discipline. In the first case the focus is on what nature has
made of man. In the second case attention is given to what man,
considered as a free being, can and should make out of himself. Kant
uses memory as an illustration, and in doing this, also suggests why he
values the pragmatic version of anthropology above the physiological.
The task of a physiological anthropology is to explore how our memory
depends on and corresponds to processes in the brain. As these processes
are unknown to us, however, we can only speculate about them and this,
he complains, is a waste of time. In pragmatic anthropology, on the other
hand, the task is to observe what either promotes or impedes memory.
This knowledge is directly useful in making it possible to control and
perfect memory. 108
According to Brandt, Kant arrived at his notion of a pragmatic
anthropology at the end of a process of development that had several
phases. Like Klemme, 109 Brandt sees its starting point in the empirical
psychology of the eighteenth century which appeared as a topic in Kant’s
lectures on metaphysics in the winter of 1765/6. 110 In his Announcement
of 1765, Kant says that the lectures will begin with an introduction to
empirical psychology, which he calls ‘the metaphysical science of man
based on experience’ [metaphysische Erfahrungswissenschaft vom
Menschen]. 111 Later, a distinction is drawn between empirical
psychology, which according to Kant deals only with the representations
of inner sense, and an anthropology dealing with the human being as a
unity of mind and body. 112
At about the same time, the notion of an
anthropology distinct from such an empirical psychology appears in
Kant’s reflections. However, at this point it is still considered as only an
empirical science, and not as a pragmatic one as well. 113
The transformation of anthropology into a pragmatic science,
according to Brandt, took place in about 1773, after Kant’s first lectures
on the topic, and was then explicitly contrasted with the former
108
Ak VII: 119.
109
Klemme (1996), 14.
110
Brandt (1999), 10.
111
Ak II: 309.
112
Cf. Ak II: 397.
113
Brandt (1999), 49.
THE EMBODIED MIND