Kant - Transcendental Idealism

  Kant held that knowledge of objects as such, "things in themselves" or noumena, is impossible since we can only know our ordered sense-impressions or phenomena that are made available to us through the constraints, frameworks and categories to which the Human Mind is subject.

The world of our experience is as constructed through our own frameworks and categories.
Thus the concept of knowledge becomes that of a process in which the subject/knower and the object/known are interwoven, as the various aspects of the human knower (frameworks of time and space, the categories of understanding including causality, the ideas of reason) work to actively shape, filter, and organize the scatter of sense-data (grounded in an external reality) into a coherent experience (= knowledge of the phenomenal world - the world as it thus appears to us).

To the extent that knowledge depends on the structure of the mind and not on the world, knowledge may well not even be a true representation of the world as it is.

It is possible top suggest that Human Beings are biologically invested with frameworks and categories that will enable them to perceive, interpret, and interact with the world in Human ways. Human ways which have been established as such over the course of Human Evolution.  

The age-of-the-sage Web site is very much about the Wisdom of the Poets, Mystics, and Philosophers and their Wisdom seems to be that the Human Mind is "Tripartite" that is to say that an innate Human Spirituality is relative to similarly innate storms of Desire and of Wrath.

Our Slide Shows summarise D-E-E-P Wisdoms about Human Existence
gleaned from World Faith teachings and other sources.

This slide show suggests that Human Nature has three main aspects:-     Materialistic, Spiritual, and Ethnic. Human Nature

These slides develop this view of Human Nature to consider wider questions:-     about God, about Man, and about Society. God, Man, and Society

Our web site is quite extensive so we have prepared an introductory page that features these slide shows and then, bearing in mind Emerson's assertion that:-

man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world.

will direct you towards finding interesting material about the Tripartite Soul, about the Unfolding of History and about Comparative Religion.

Introductory Page - Emerson's notion of a "Knot of Roots"