BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

88
RATIONALITY AND EMBODIED PRACTICE
To try to explain this in physiological terms is futile; we are free to use
some principle that will always remain a hypothesis (which is itself,
again, a construction), such as Descartes’ so-called material ideas in
the brain. But in any case, no explanation of this kind is pragmatic:
that is, we cannot use it in practicing the art of association, because
we have no knowledge of the brain and of the places in it where the
traces of impressions made by ideas might enter into sympathetic
harmony with one another, insofar as they touch one another (at least
mediately), so to speak. 18
The impotence of the physiological sciences is here contrasted with the
art of association. Kant does not specify what is here meant by ‘art’, but I
think we may safely assume that this art is somehow connected to what
he elsewhere defines as practice. 19
Another part of the internal logic leading Kant to form a new
conception of rationality may be found by focusing on the idea that the
mind is virtually present in the body, combined with the widespread idea,
shared by most philosophers at the time, that human rationality is a skill
or capacity that may be ascribed to a certain part of the mind. In Kant’s
own terminology, human rationality is associated with the three higher
cognitive faculties; reason, power of judgment and understanding.
Typically, these faculties are perceived to be inner, mental faculties, for
instance of a Cartesian mind, hidden and not subject to external
18 Ak VII: 176.
19 According to Sturm (2001), 175ff., Kant’s emphasis on practice, i.e. behavior,
in his Anthropology may be seen as constituting a third way between the
physiological approach of some natural philosophers, and the introspectionist
approach of empirical psychology. In the second part of the eighteenth century,
he says, the empirical psychology of Wolff and Baumgarten was challenged by
scholars like Charles Bonnet, David Hartley and Ernst Platner, all promoting the
idea that the human mind should be explored by investigating the human brain.
This physiological approach, however, soon came under attack, resulting in a
strengthened position of introspectionist psychology, represented by, among
others, Johann Nicolas Tetens, whose work Kant knew well. Against both of
these trends, Kant promoted a behavior-oriented approach arguing that the state
of a person’s mind may be explored through attention to their externally
observable activity. He advised Johann Caspar Lavater that if his aim was to
know his own soul or state of mind, he ought to look at what he was doing rather
than observe his inner states. According to Kant, so Sturm’s argument goes, our