kant for kids

One thing I miss as a travel nurse is all my books.

I miss my copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and God knows why, because it's all falling apart, and everytime I start to read it, I feel like stuffing and then burning an effigy of Kant full of its pages.

But, I love Kant.

And one of the reasons I love Kant is that when I was a kid, I had this phenomena/noumena theory about stuff.

No, seriously. I did.

(No one is saying I was a normal child, okay? I'm just saying I had a Kantian connection as a kid).

I remember thinking that there was the physical "stuff" of life... but what if the "stuff" we saw in everyday life was really something else, and we weren't seeing it properly for what it really was? And who knew what the "stuff" really was? I used to be very interested in the question of "essence" and when I learned about atomic theory in grade school, I thought about it a lot in a philosophical sense, even though I didn't know that was what I was doing at the time.

I didn't have any theological underpinnings to this theory, and I certainly had no idea at nine years old that my intellectual heritage was deeply imbued with the ideas of Plato's Cave and Cartesian duality.

But, it makes you wonder, doesn't it?