Experience

Seeing Emily Dickinson's poem prompted me to try to pull together some ideas on what constitutes "experience." Certainly it is much more profound than we usually consider it to be. Ultimately it is about truth, which is religious, our finiteness knocked off-balance by the infinite.





Levinas:

Truth implies experience. . . . For experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature. Genuine experience must even lead us beyond the Nature that surrounds us, which is not jealous of the marvelous secrets it harbors, and, in complicity with men, submits to their reason and inventions; in it men also feel themselves to be at home. Truth would thus designate the outcome of a movement that leaves a world that is intimate and familiar . . . and goes toward another region, toward a beyond, as Plato puts it. . . . Truth, the daughter of experience, has very lofty pretensions; it opens upon the very dimension of the ideal. In this way, philosophy means metaphysics, and metaphysics inquires about the divine.
"Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite," from To The Other, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, at pp. 88-90.

[In Totality and Infinity, Levinas prefers to call "the beyond" the infinite. Id. at fn.9]

Gadamer:

"[E]xperience . . . inevitably involves many disappointments of one's expectations and only thus is experience acquired. . . . Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation.

[Aeschylus found in experience "learning through suffering" (pathei mathos).] "What man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight -- the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude. The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. . . . In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then -- as of all desire to know -- is to know what is. But "what is," here, is not this or that thing, but 'what cannot be destroyed.' (Ranke)." Truth or Method, pp. 356-57.


Guissani:

If it is human nature to indomitably search for an answer, if the structure of a human being is, then, this irrepressible and inexhaustable question, plea - then one suppresses the question if one does not admit to the existence of an answer. But this answer cannot be anything but unfathomable. Only the existence of the mystery suits the structure of the human person, which is mendacity, insatiable begging, and what corresponds to him is neither himself nor something he gives to himself, measures, or possesses." The Religious Sense, p. 57.


Emily Dickinson:

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch --
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.