BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

2. BODY AND SPACE
The sense of touch is located in the fingertips and
their nerve papillae, so that by touching the
surface of a solid body we can find out what
shape it has. Nature seems to have given this
organ only to man, so that by feeling all the sides
of a body he could form a concept of its shape.
[…]Touch is also the only sense in which our
external perception is immediate, and for this
reason it is the most important and the most
certain in what it teaches us.[…] Without this
sense organ we should be unable to form any
concept at all of the shape of a body.
From Kant’s Anthropology 1
In this passage from the Anthropology, Kant claims that the tactile sense
located in the tips of our fingers is essential for our capacity to explore the
spatial form of physical objects. Actually, he claims, without this sense we
would have no concept of such a form at all. The body, or, more
precisely, our capacity for embodied action together with the awareness
accompanying this action, is here given the status of an essential
condition without which our concept of the spatial form of an object
would not exist. The aim of this chapter is to explore this idea of the
body as a condition of spatial experience as it is found in some Kantian
texts.
As we have seen, this idea is suggested as early as 1747 in Living
forces. 2
Rather than staying with this early text, however, in this chapter I
shall explore three texts belonging to the more mature phase of Kant’s
intellectual development. They are Directions in space from 1768,
Orientation from 1786 and the Anthropology from 1798, the first
published thirteen years prior to the Critique, the second five years after
its first publication, while the third, as we have seen, is based on lectures
1
Ak VIII: 155.
2
Ak I: 22.