BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

76
From what has been seen so far, Kant did not emphasize such
embodied acts or movements very clearly. An exception is found in the
last part of Orientation. Here the capacity to determine a priori spatial
locations is said to presuppose the capacity to move the hands, and to be
aware of the direction of this movement. The movements of the hands
and the awareness we have of them are also emphasized in the
Anthropology:
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. 35
Without the capacity to grasp and feel an object, Kant argues, we would
never arrive at the concept of the shape of an object. Here, like
Rousseau, Condillac and others, he believes the sense of touch has an
essential function in the formation of the concept of spatial form.
The significance of the sense of touch is also testified elsewhere in the
Anthropology. Kant discusses how a person without sight can
compensate for this loss by using other senses. He could for instance use
the tactile sense, and explore the shape of an object with his hands:
If a man is born without one of the senses (sight, for example), he
cultivates another sense, as far as possible, to serve as a substitute for
it, and uses his productive imagination to a great extent. So he tries to
make the shapes of external bodies apprehensible by touch, and when
touch fails because the body is too large (a house), he tries to grasp
extension by still another sense – perhaps by listening to the echo of
voices in a room. 36
The passage just quoted also contains an interesting remark about the
sense of hearing. When an object is too large to be explored by holding
and grasping it, a blind person may explore its shape by listening to the
echo produced by his own or another persons voice.
35 Ak VIII: 155.
36 Ak VII: 172-3.
BODY AND SPACE