I can say, I see a tree outside of my window, I do in fact see a tree outside of my
window… now you don’t have to go look outside of your window to know what
I am talking about because you have a lifetime of experiences with trees and
you don’t need to look outside to understand my point… you get it…
now let us take another example… Einstein’s “theory of relativity”
it was once said, that only 10 people on planet earth understood it
and 9 of those were Germans… and yet today, we have millions who
understand it…what happened? what happened was simple…
the idea of relativity was not understood by the general conception
of experiences that we have… by experiences, we have learned
what the theory of relativity is and what it means… but we cannot have
an innate understanding of the theory of relativity, because there are no
experiences prior to relativity that would have allowed us to understand it…
now recall that experiences are also the act of teachings and of experiencing
the world and explanations of the world by others… we experience things via
being taught, son, that is a tree… by running into tree’s… without these
explanations, we cannot know or understand such concepts like relativity…
so, what if we to encounter something completely new, say, a
alien species came to earth and told us about their philosophy…
we couldn’t understand that philosophy because we have no prior
experiences with that philosophy… it would take human beings time to
understand an alien philosophy because it takes time for us to process and
and experience that philosophy…we couldn’t understand that philosophy
at first because we have no experience with it…
let us say, you have no prior experience…like Hume or Locke would
think…can you deduce what a piece of matter is without any prior knowledge of
that matter?
I hand you a piece of matter… what is it? as I give you clues to this
piece of matter, you may or may not be able to understand this piece of matter…
it fits into your hand… it can be moved by your hands… it is colored…
but you don’t know what color is, so you wouldn’t be able to understand that
it has a shape, but you don’t know shapes and what they mean…
you can describe it but you don’t know shapes, so how would you
describe round or square or a triangle if you don’t know shapes…
to describe something takes a lifetime of experiences to make such an
description… you have to have experiences to be able to describe something…
I could say, you are holding a wrench, but it would take prior experiences
to make sense of what a wrench is and what it does…its shape and color…
you cannot make sense of a wrench unless you have some experiences of
a wrench or some other tool to fix things…you cannot know what a wrench
is before experiences… it is not innate… and idea’s fall into this category
we cannot understand idea’s before experiences…
we experience then we understand…
Kropotkin