so I asked earlier, how do we understand experience? and does experience
give us meaning/purpose?
so, I gave the example of a table… and I offered up an experience
of that table… but to give an true understanding of a table, beyond
just a physical explanation of a table, I said, we need to understand
that table in context…so what is context?
it is just an understanding by more experience…
in other words, to give something context, we are just using more experience
I can explain the table as being something we which we use to eat on or to place
things on… as I am using our table to place the computer on and I am writing on
said table… to put that into context means we must use experience to
understand it…
we forget how much of experience we have and how much was taught us…
I see my daughter going near the stove and I yell out, “be careful… the stove is hot”
now at 33… she understands what a stove is and what hot is… but at age
two… she didn’t… she had no experience of a stove… in fact, she didn’t even
know what hot was… we have to be taught every single thing we know today…
what is a table for? she had to learn that we put food on a table and then we
eat off of the table…so putting things into context means bringing in further
experience to make sense of something…
now we might by imagination, be able to create without experiencing something
an understanding of something… but that act of creation is different then the
actual event… try to create an act of experience in your mind…
say, visiting mars or being on stage being hamlet… those experiences
in your mind is vastly different in real life… because the experience
takes in the senses like sight, touch, taste, smell and sound… whereas
the imagination cannot take those into account… my wife and I the other day,
commented on how Hawaii smells so different then any other place we have ever been…
you can take me blindfolded, drop me off in Hawaii and by smell alone, I can tell you
where I was… I can’t do that anywhere else…imagine Hawaii and would your imagination
be able to create the smell? no… putting Hawaii into context requires experience…
so when someone says, let us put that into context… they are really saying,
let us find another experience that will make sense of this…
and we are left with the question… can we find meaning/purpose from experience?
does the description of a stove tell us the meaning/purpose of the stove?
if we turn the stove on and let it heat up and we can see that from the heat,
we can cook food… but that is simply more experience explaining experience…
you can’t get to meaning/purpose without using experience…
we forget that human beings have a million years of experience
and because of that, much of what we take for granted was gained
from those millions of years of experience…my life is vastly
different from a stone age person and yet, we have experiences
in common… we were once children and we grew up and
we experienced “nature” the tree’s and land and sky and
animals and birds… we might experience them differently
because I don’t have to see them as potential food as the stone age man
did… he did things in regard to how did they help him survive…
he experienced things in regards to survival… how does that thing
help me survive? whereas I don’t have to think like that…
why? because our experiences are different… I don’t have to think
whether I am going to eat today or not, I will and so I can think about
different things…my experience isn’t tied up into survival as the stone age
man was…context=experience is different for both us…
my looking at a stove and knowing what it is for is so ingrained in me,
one might think I was born with the knowledge of what a stove is for…
and thus lies much of our thinking… we have thoughts so ingrained in us,
that we think those thoughts were born with us, and not as they were,
taught to us… we learned by experiencing them over time and that
experience has become so natural, so much a part of us, we think we were
born with that knowledge…context has become so much a part of our lives
that we often don’t see it anymore…
and now we bring back another example, I spoke of earlier…
that of becoming aware… experiences have become so much
a part of us, sometimes we forget that we had to learn everything
we know…we must become aware of who we are and how we got here…
and part of that awareness is rediscovering that we are a lifetime
of experiences and those experiences have become so much a part of us…
that we have forgotten that…
which leads us to our final question…
can we from, experience alone, discover the meaning/purpose of life?
Kropotkin