Question

Hello,
I’m wondering what the source is of the concepts we use in everyday life. Do all concepts originate only in categorization based on memory and the abstraction abilities of the imaginative faculty, following the wide range of events all of humanity has encountered? Or is there some external source for basic concepts (God having implanted them in us, Platonic ideas, and the like)?
For example, when we come to examine a basic concept like area or volume—concepts that no doubt even our ancestors used intuitively—we still won’t really succeed in defining them, aside from saying that if we define a square of 1 cm × 1 cm = 1 cm², then area is the number of times we can fit that into the given space before us, using approximations as needed.
So it doesn’t seem that the claim that concepts came from outside gives us better explanatory power in examples like these.
On the other hand, when speaking about more abstract concepts like beauty and morality, it seems to become harder and harder to ground them in practical cases from everyday life. But then again, they are much less well-defined and subject to more disagreements, which makes them more subjective.
So I wanted to ask what the Rabbi thinks: where do concepts come from? Did we create them, or were they given to us? Also, does the Rabbi think enough time has passed since the beginning of humanity for us to have created all concepts ourselves from scratch? Because it’s hard to understand how one could think at all without classifying the life around us under different concepts; that seems like a very different kind of thinking from what we know today.