as I am going to jump the gun here and go to the end
of the enlightenment thinkers which is Kant…
As is well known, is that Kant tried to “save” philosophy
from Hume radical empiricism… Kant himself is an
empiricist, he does believe that we gain information
from experience but that the information gained
from experience is not grounded in experience but
grounded in something else… which he calls
in “a priori” a precondition to, or prior to experience…
for example, he creates categories, which he refers to them,
as “pure” categories because they are Pure, not given in experience,
before experience…one example is the category of Quantity,
in which he says has three parts, unity, plurality, totality…
he says, the category and the three parts are “a priori” a precondition
to or prior to experience…but Kant is WRONG…
in fact, unity and plurality and totality are part of experience…
take unity, one, we can experience one…children experience one
all the time, take one stick… unity…now children may not know
what a stick is and we adults patiently explain what a stick is,
one is a product of experience, not a idea of being a precondition,
we cannot know in advance or prior to experience, what one stick is…
take plurality, many sticks, I take one stick and put on the ground
and say to a child, one stick, I then take many sticks and put them on
the ground and say, many sticks…once again, prior to experience
a child cannot know what many sticks are… it is a product of
experience that allows a child to know what “many” sticks are…
now take totality, all, it is said we cannot know totality or infinite
number of sticks… but we can know from experience…
I can as experience has been shown to me, to count sticks,
one stick, two sticks, three sticks…1 + 1= 2 which is a short
hand method of one stick and one stick equals two sticks…
but infinity? how do we get to infinity by experience?
take this progression, 5, 10, 15, what would be the next number?
I count my toes to 5, I count my other toes to 10, I count my
left hand to 15, I count my right hand to…20… I can figure
out what is the next step in that progression without any recourse to
an “a prior” or any precondition steps…and what of infinity…
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10… after counting a while, I realize that
I will never reach the end of counting, my experience has shown
me that there is not an end to the numbers, I call that infinity, or in Kant’s
language, totality…I can reach the idea of infinity without recourse to
any thought of “a prior” or any precondition steps…
experience has shown me that I cannot reach the end of finite steps,
I create a word showing that idea of not being able to reach the end
of finite steps with the word, infinite…
Kant believes that space and time are not experienced, but
are “a prior” or a precondition to our experience, but we
exist within and part of time and space… we experience time
and space every single day of our lives and we are taught
what time and space means as an experience…
this is not “a prior” or an precondition, but essential
to our understanding of the universe…as an experience,
a child experiences time and space, but has to be taught
what that means, they don’t intuitively know or understand what
time and space mean, we learn from experience what time and space
means and from what people tell us about time and space…
the entire notion of their being categories that are “a prior”
to or a precondition to experience fails in the light of the fact,
that the categories themselves are only understandable in
terms of experiences…we can only know these categories
in light of experiences, not before the experiences or prior
to experiences… the categories that Kant listed are
categories of quantity, quality, modality and relation…
and each of these can only be understood in terms
of experiences and not as “a prior” or as a precondition
to experiences…
I shall have plenty to say as I experience, which is to say
be able to explain the Enlightenment…
Kropotkin