BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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universe. The human being that Kant discusses within the context of the
three disciplines mentioned is man as we know him, man as a living,
biological being; in short, the embodied self.
It may be that the young Kant also held more substantial beliefs in
the field of ontology, such as when in Dreams of a spirit-seer and even in
the Inaugural dissertation 122
he echoes the rational psychology of his time
in suggesting that the mind as such is without extension and may have an
existence independent of the body. However, it is difficult to decide upon
this question due to the fact that he says so little about it. As also Laywine
remarks:
Kant was not especially interested in the nature of the soul as such –
so little interested that his rational psychology was very impoverished
indeed. 123
What remains beyond doubt, however, is that regardless of what
ontological ideas he may or may not have been committed to,
throughout his life Kant took it as a basic fact that man as we know him
is a unity of mind and body. Also, as we have seen and will see again, in
his cognitive theory this is one of the basic premises that he begins with,
such as when in Universal natural history he maintains as a fact that the
mind receives all its representations and concepts from the impressions
that the universe produces in it through the body. 124 In part two of this
work, my aim will be to demonstrate that the idea of the embodied mind
is also a basic premise of the Critique. Before that, however, come two
chapters that explore in greater detail how Kant saw our experience and
thinking to be conditioned by the constitution and functioning of the
human body.
122
Ak II: 419.
123
Laywine (1993), 7.
124
Ak I: 355.
THE EMBODIED MIND