Embodied Cognition in Berkeley and Kant: The Body’s Own Space

Summary

This essay argues that both Berkeley and Kant, despite their philosophical disagreements, relied on embodied cognition—knowledge gained through the body's motion and touch—in their theories of spatial perception. Berkeley's account of space reveals that spatial distance and size are known through bodily movement and touch. Kant's treatment of incongruent counterparts similarly depends on proprioceptive cognition. The author contends that contemporary appeals to embodiment in perception and cognition are not novel but have historical philosophical precedents.

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Abstract

Berkeley and Kant are known for having developed philosophical critiques of materialism, critiques which lead them to propose instead an epistemology based on the coherence of our mental representations. For all that the two had in common, however, Kant was adamant in distinguishing his own ‘transcendental idealism’ from the immaterialist consequences entailed by Berkeley’s account. In this essay I return to their respective theories of spatial intuition, since it is by paying attention to Berkeley’s account of space that we discover a surprising account of embodied cognition, of spatial distance and size that can only be known by way of the body’s motion and touch. More striking than this, is the manner in which Kant’s approach to the problem of incongruent counterparts also relies on a proprioceptive cognition. Thus while cognition theorists today have recognized that certain challenges faced by perception and cognition can only be resolved by way of an appeal to the facts of embodiment, my aim in this essay is to show that such recourse is not new.