Natural Knowledge: Knowing and Being Known
摘要
The question of the possibility of knowledge in nature is taken up in this chapter. It takes twin tracks, on the one hand, examining the role of beauty in knowledge, paying particular attention to how the poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins show nature disclosing itself even as hidden, while at the same time discussing a number of critiques of the Newtonian and Kantian account of nature as machine. The chapter discusses how beauty is not simply a function of aesthetic appreciation, but is what motivates (in a Husserlian sense) knowledge, specifically natural knowledge. Knowledge in such an understanding is fundamentally the coming into contact with another. To know is not to possess something but rather to find oneself possessed in a web, which encompasses not alone the knower and the entity known, but both within a wider interrelation. This account dovetails with the second theme, where Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is shown to facilitate a thinking of nature as subject, as having itself agency, such that all experienced and all experiencing are modes of this natural activity. Building upon this, philosophical interpretations of Quantum Physics are discussed with particular emphasis on how human observers and agents are incorporated into nature such that the scientific approach to nature becomes itself an instantiation of natural agency through the action of measuring and experimenting.