Thursday, August 29, 2019

Perception and Body

For Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, Experience is fundamentally Perception, so the Forms of Experience are those of Cognition.  In particular, Space and Time are the Forms of Intuition.  But, unclear in his system is the Spatiality of the body of perceiver, not as an object of perception, rather as lived, e. g. whether or not the hand that is feeling something is at the same location as the hand that the perceiver can see is to the side of their torso.  In contrast, there is not such unclarity insofar as Experience is conceived as fundamentally Action.  For, in that concept, the body of the Agent is the ground of Space--the Spatiality of the body is the basis of the Spatiality of potential objects of action, e. g. to the left, to the right, ahead, behind, above, below, etc.  Accordingly, Space is a Form of Action insofar as it is the Form of the Body of the Agent.  But, parts of the Body include the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin, and factors of Action include looking, listening, smelling, tasting, and touching.  Accordingly, insofar as Experience is Action, Space is an a priori Form of Intuition because it is first a Form of the Body.  From that perspective, the status of Perception in the Critique of Pure Reason is the same as it is in most of Modern Epistemology, especially as it is for Berkeley--disembodied.

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