On Philosophy

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam, part 2:

1.         In his key piece, Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant posits the idea that all human knowledge falls into two categories: a priori, meaning 'from before', and a posteriori, meaning 'from later'. A priori knowledge is gained independently from experience, is obvious, and requires no real effort to discern. A posteriori knowledge, on the contrary, is gained by experience or empirical evidence. Kant then categorizes our ability to know into two categories: noumena, which are things that can be perceived empirically, and phenomena, which can be discerned only through intuition. 'Real' things, or noumena, are merely representations of unknowns, or phenomena, which are interpreted through our a priori or a posteriori knowledge to reach an understanding, inasmuch as we can understand the universe.

Trinity

In the early 1800’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France and found himself entranced by what he saw there. Where his fellow patrons observed nature, Emerson perceived Nature. Where we notice only a majuscule letter, Emerson glimpsed God. This visit inspired his seminal essay Nature, in which Emerson expresses his thoughts on the relationship between Nature, Mankind, and God. Within this essay, Emerson famously pronounced, “The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (17). In this, you can see Emerson beginning to define Nature in relation to Man, as an expansion to the standard definition. The standard definition of Nature, as viewed by both the common man and the Oxford English Dictionary, was anything in the physical world, including the “landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations” (Murray). That distinction, Nature as opposed to Man, is the essence of Emerson’s thoughts on Nature.