Hey all,
I bet everyone of you at some point in your lives asked yourself this:
What is the difference between something natural or artificial?
If man is a product of nature, isn't everything we produce still a product of nature? When I take a shit, is it not a artificial piece of stool I just created. When I construct it in a lab, under some scientific pretence, it just might be.
The philosophical distinction between the natural and the artificial has always been unclear to me. It seems only a difference in degree, not in kind. If so, there is no meaningfull difference at all, in my opinion.
At the center of this conceptual vortex stands, ofcourse, man, half natural and half artifical. Humans evolved naturally, are a product of nature. Yet at the same time we have created everything that we could say about ourselves, by ourselves. All knowledge is 'human' knowledge, it is artificial, in this sense.
Kant famously stated that we could never know a 'ding an sich' , which roughly means you cannot know something as it is on its own. This means that knowledge of an object can only be expressed through its relation to some other object.
And yet what is nature but everything that is not man or made by man? We are nature and yet again we are not, we are aware of our own consciousness, we feel one with ourselves. Not with anything or anyone else. Through this separated experience we see ourselves as individuals. As an "I" in opposition to everything else which is "Other". This conceptual dualism could have originated in many ways. Paradoxically, it could be natural for us to feel Other than nature. Imagine your emergence into being as an infant, awakening into consciousness, being aware yet not knowing what you are aware of. You have yet to give symbolic meaning to the external world. We attach wordless meaning as feelings or sensations to objects, situations and people. We separate the significant from the unsignificant. At some point, I imagine that prehistoric man (as also infants still do through seeming random utterances or "babbling") started to vocalize these feelings and sensations to share their significance with others. I believe this is where we started to create conciousness and separated ourselves from the natural and at that point, from our own nature. By externalising the sensation of significance through vocalization, we created the impression of a external reality.
Get in on this yo!