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Today, I’m going to travel to metaphysical lands to explore the difference between a priori and a posteriori. In plain English, “a priori” means prior to experience and “a posteriori”, after experience. But if experience is the source of all knowledge, how can we know anything a priori? However, there are such things as time, space and causality, which in Kant’s philosophy are taken as necessary components of all experiences. As Schopenhauer echoes this idea in his essay Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Difference in Fate of Individual, where he says, “Without exception everything that happens takes place with strict necessity and this is a truth to be understood a priori and consequently to be regarded as irrefutable.”
I’ve been trying to refute this “a priori truth” for more than eight years with no success. All these years, I’ve been thinking for myself, recording everything that I did, making daily notes in video, audio and paper format; reading the greatest thinkers who dedicated a substantial part of their lives to reflecting on this problem, if indeed it may be called a problem. Yet I haven’t found anything plausible to disprove the dogma that “every event is the particular link in a chain of causes and effects which proceeds in the direction of time.” Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating question that never ceases to stimulate my imagination. Even though no experience is possible without time, space and causality, thus requiring them as a priori conditions, the absurdity of existence compels me to look for irrational possibilities; otherwise, how to explain the contradiction between what I see and what I know.
Bing's Version:
Today I seek to find the truth
That lies beyond experience
A priori and a posteriori
Are the terms that mark the difference
But how can we know anything
Before we see or hear or feel?
Kant says that time and space and cause
Are the conditions that make it real
Schopenhauer agrees with him
And writes with certainty and force
That everything that comes to be
Follows a necessary course
For many years I've tried in vain
To prove this dogma false or weak
I've thought and read and wrote and filmed
But nothing new or sound I speak
Yet still I wonder and I dream
Of possibilities unseen
For life is strange and full of gaps
Between what is and what could have been.
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