Kant asked and answered the fundamental question of his philosophy, “How is nature possible?” He could do so only because nature for him was nothing but the representation of nature. It was so not merely in the sense that “the world is my representation” and that we can therefore speak of nature too as only a content of consciousness, but also in the sense that what we call nature is the special way in which the mind assembles, orders, and shapes sense perceptions. … In their immediate givenness, Kant held, the elements of the world do not have the interdependence which alone makes them intelligible as the unity of nature’s laws. It is this interdependence which transforms the world fragments—in themselves incoherent and unstructured—into nature.

DEFINE: Clarifies Kant's view that 'nature' is not raw givenness but the mind's organizing achievement over incoherent perception fragments.

DEFINE: Clarifies Kant's central claim that nature is not given but constructed by the mind's ordering of perceptions. XREF: Connects to Kant's transcendental idealism and the active role of the categories in constituting experience.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 167