Activating Experience
The following is an excerpt from Joshua’s doctoral dissertation, Enlightenment Phenomenology. Download a PDF of the entire dissertation here.
The Enraged Musician (1741) by William Hogarth
In the history of British literatures, the English word experience appears as an epistemological category essential to the constitution of knowledge, but, in its earliest uses, it does not designate an individual’s active and ongoing engagement with the world. Experience is, for medieval and early modern writers, first and foremost, the foundation for obtaining practical knowledge of the world. It is intimately connected with the word experiment; indeed, experience and experiment were synonymous terms for testing an idea, or trying one’s hand at a skill.[1] While this might refer to a singular event of experimentation, experience in its oldest sense most familiarly stands for the practical knowledge culled from a series of trials or experiments. This cumulative understanding of experience is especially emphasized in Samuel Johnson’s definitions of the word; Johnson defines experience as “Practice; frequent trial” and also as the “Knowledge gained by trial and practice.”[2] However, whether singular or cumulative in nature, experience comes into being in this epistemological schema as an antonym to theory or hypothesis, or as the rigorous practices which lead to the acquisition of positive skills or wisdom predictive of future outcomes. Because of the emphasis on obtaining practical knowledge, the lived event of the experience or trial itself is consequently de-emphasized.[3] Significantly, as a result, there is little sense that, at any and every given moment, a subject continues to experience. Thus experience in its oldest sense functions reliably within the past, as the cultural memory for practical experimentations with the world.
In modern usage, experience still retains this relation to practical knowledge, yet the word has also come to signify something far more expansive. When we speak of experience, we just as often use this word to refer to our ever-continuing engagements with the world, no matter their relation to skills or practical knowledge—or, as The Century Dictionary puts it in 1909, “the totality of the cognitions given by perception, taken in their connection.”[4] The referent of experience is in this way brought into the present moment as an active and ongoing process nearly synonymous with the noun perception and the verb perceive. Indeed, as I hope this project will demonstrate, it is only through a close attention to perception that this understanding of experience is activated at all. This is because localized perceptions provide seemingly limitless information about one’s immediate world from moment to successive moment. It is in this sense that we can ask, “What are you experiencing right now?” without any sense that the experiencer will be putting a hypothetical idea to trial. We are merely inquiring, as it were, into the contents of that individual’s present perceptions.
It is this perceptually active sense of experience to which Edmund Husserl refers in the second volume of his Ideas, when he explains that “the perception I am presently undergoing ... stands there as an experience of this experiencing person, as this person’s state, as its act.”[5] For Husserl, the experience in question is unambiguously situated in the present moment of perception (“presently”), and the phrase “this experiencing person” suggests how experience becomes active through an individual’s ongoing perceptual engagements. Indeed, perception itself is understood not only as an individual’s state but their act. And it is precisely this active and individualized understanding of experience that serves as the starting point for phenomenological inquiry, and grounds its methodology of descriptive analysis. Husserl characterizes this object of study as “What experience first discloses to us here as a stream, with no beginning or end, of ‘lived experiences.’”[6] This limitless stream or flux of experience is likewise evoked in the work of Merleau-Ponty, who chastises empiricist philosophers for not examining perception as it unfolds “in the process of perceiving.”[7] Although designated by many terms and phrases, for the sake of clarity I shall hereafter use the term immediate experience to refer to this new understanding of experience, although direct experience is often used interchangeably with this term in other works.
While we have thus far identified the philosophical theorization of immediate experience with the historical advent of phenomenology, this advent is itself part of a larger cultural shift and thus not limited to only those thinkers who self-identify as phenomenologists. In this study, I will use the term phenomenology to refer more broadly to the philosophical study of immediate experience, or the world as it appears phenomenally. Thus, unconcerned with phenomenology proper, cultural historian Jonathan Crary, in his book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, situates the cultural shift toward theorizing immediate experience somewhat earlier than Husserl, within the nineteenth century, when:
The problem of consciousness becomes inseparable from the question of physiological temporality and process. Beginning with Schopenhauer and continuing into the early twentieth century in Bergson and Whitehead, there are a diverse range of attempts to articulate epistemological positions that take account of the shifting processual nature of a physiological subject who effectively coincides with the ceaseless pulsings and animations of the body.[8]
For Crary, this shift toward the processual embodiment of immediate experience is premised upon the “collapse of classical models of vision and of the stable, punctual subject those models presuppose” as well as “the untenability of a priori solutions to epistemological problems” which had presupposed “permanent or unconditional guarantees of mental unity and synthesis.”[9] The result is a newfound philosophical interest in the faculty of perceptual attention, a faculty which, according to Crary, is only meaningfully interrogated by philosophers in the nineteenth century. In this project I will examine how narratives of the eighteenth century, as well as some exceptional philosophies, are also necessarily concerned with the faculty of perceptual attention in rendering the immediate experience of a given character.
Interestingly, according to Crary, the emergence of attention as the central faculty of immediate experience can be understood as “a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality.”[10] As Crary’s claim indicates, although “immediate experience” emerges in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies as an object of study, its implications for knowledge and the moral subject are decidedly vexed. While experience might be understood as the accumulated cultural wisdom gleaned from innumerable and unnamed practitioners, it is not so easy to render immediate experience as collective or even cumulative in the same way. What becomes of cultural memory if experience is rendered as constitutionally active? Immediate experience is necessarily limited to individual perceivers, and so it cannot easily stand for a collective accumulation of knowledge. What’s more, it cannot easily stand as an accumulation of knowledge at all. While one’s immediate experiences might refer to past experiences through recognition and memory, the term immediate experience designates not a coherent accumulation, but, in Husserl’s words, the “stream” of experience, or the ongoing flux of incoming and indeterminate information. By emphasizing perceptual process over epistemological output, the concept of immediate experience distinguishes individual experiences from collective and historical efforts of knowledge-making.
Quite apart from the experience that is “[k]nowledge gained by trial and practice,” as recorded by Johnson, the emphasis on experiential process also distorts experience’s relation to the empirical categories of experiment or trial. Indeed, if these terms are made applicable to the expanse designated by immediate experience, then every conscious observation, every passing thought, and every practical interaction experienced by an individual might be understood as an experiment, or a foundation for practical knowledge. The poet William Blake foregrounds this transition from experiment to active experience in his 1794 illuminated manuscript All Religions Are One, in which he observes that, “As the true method of knowledge is experiment[,] the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences,” suggestively playing on the final word’s evolving relation to both discrete experimentation and ongoing perception. Blake makes clear that it is “This faculty I treat of” rather than the knowledge that results.[11] This shift in the understanding of experience ushers in a reevaluation of what constitutes knowledge, wherein, in the works of later philosophers, as well as Blake, tested knowledge of the world is sidelined for the perceptual act of attending or knowing.[12] Although Francis Bacon’s new system was intended “to ground our beliefs upon Practice, and well ordered experience,”[13] experiences might never be fully or intelligibly ordered when remaining immediate. Concentration on the active process of knowing leads to a corresponding focus on the relative indeterminacy of incoming information. Thus, Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing the influx of new information made available through perception, forges a mythical drama out of everyday experience that sounds vaguely Blakean: “The miracle of consciousness consists in bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it.”[14] In such a radical view, experience remains the means of discovering knowledge about the world, but as an individual’s ever-ongoing, ever-incomplete, ever-incoherent flux of processing and continued engagement.
John Bender and Michael Marrinan, in their fantastic study The Culture of Diagram, examine eighteenth-century texts that foreground open-ended engagement in order to trace a history of process—as opposed to determinate product—in Western thought and culture.[15] In a similar way, one can look to eighteenth-century texts to consider how, formally and theoretically, experience itself came to be activated as an ongoing process of perceptual engagement. Bender and Marrinan’s book celebrates the emergence of probabilistic and technological methods that, in their words, move investigations of the world “beyond the human sensorium.”[16] However, it is important to examine precisely what Bender and Marrinan are eager to move beyond: the experiential realm of the human sensorium, as well as its emergence as an object of inquiry in Western thought, an emergence that coincides, perhaps, if one heeds the moral of Bender and Marrinan’s thesis, with its increasing obsolescence in the natural sciences.
When framed in this way, however, it also becomes possible to see how phenomenology, or an interest in the experiential realm of the human sensorium, might be understood to come into being well before it emerges as an explicit philosophical methodology. One can even see phenomenological premises as emerging amid the epistemological skepticism that, in Britain and the Continent, attended the growing interest in natural philosophy, especially empiricism. It might seem strange to make such a claim, since the philosophical project of epistemology most often operates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a skeptical critique of the reliability of human experiences, and most often as a critique of sensuous perception. According to Bacon, “the greatest obstacle and distortion of human understanding comes from the dullness, limitations, and deceptions of the senses.”[17] However, the senses remain potentially most “dangerous” for an empiricist like Bacon only because he considers the constitution of knowledge as coming into being through individual perceivers. Bacon’s empiricist epistemology begins with the assumption that individuals come to know the features and qualities of the world through perception, repeated interactions, and controlled experiments, and so it is his preoccupation with individual perceivers that comes weighted with the ancient mistrust of the senses. By focusing attention on the operations of perception and the fine mechanics of the senses even despite this ancient distrust, empirical and epistemological projects can be seen to have inaugurated a long and pivotal turn toward a new ground: immediate experience.
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[1]“experience, n. and v.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition.1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 27 January 2011 <http://www.dictionary.oed.com/>.
[2]“experience, n.” A Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edition. Ed. Samuel Johnson. 1755-56.
[3]This remains true even of Thomas Hobbes’ definition of the term, which downplays the practical relation of experience to experimentation but maintains its cumulative nature, which places it in the past as memory: “much memory, or memory of many things, is called experience.” See Leviathan: or, The matter, forme & power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall. ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1904) 4.
[4]“experience, n.” The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (New York: The Century Co., 1909).
[5]Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Phenomenological Investigations of Constitution. Trans. Edmund Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) 33.
[6]Husserl’s tautology here reflects a difficulty of phenomenological analysis, moving conceptually between levels of perception and apperception, a difficulty discussed later in the introduction.
[7]Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002) 62.
[8]Jonathan Crary. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2001) 56.
[9]Ibid 19-20.
[10]Ibid 45.
[11]William Blake. All Religions Are One, The Complete Illuminated Books. ed. David Bindman (New York: Thomas & Hudson, 2000) 20.
[12]This concept of perceptual knowing arises indirectly and directly in the work of all phenomenologists. For Husserl, this perceptual knowing begins with the self-given immanence of perception: “This givenness, which excludes any meaningful doubt, consists of an immediate act of seeing and apprehending the meant objectivity itself as it is. It constitutes the precise concept of evidence, understood as immediate evidence.” See The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999) 28. Heidegger makes an explicit distinction between knowledge and knowing, the latter of which is privileged as “a mode of being of Da-sein as being-in-the-world, and has its ontic foundation in this constitution of being.” See Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 57.
[13]The Novum Organum of Sir Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans Epitomiz’d: for a clearer understanding of his Natural History. Trans. M.D.B.D. (London: Thomas Lee, 1676) “Preface to the Reader.”
[14]Phenomenology of Perception 35.
[15]The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
[16]Early in the book the authors highlight “user” processes of inquiry, exploration, engagement and imaginative correlation as practices whose experiential qualities point to the insufficiency of more determinate representations. However, Bender and Marrinan’s epistemological concerns ultimately take precedence, with experience being cast largely in its traditional role as obstacle to reliable knowledge of the world: “Eventually, the abstract precision of mathematical terms and the implacability of instruments displaced the coarse-grained, fatigue-prone senses of the human body as the cornerstone of knowledge.” Ibid 198-99.
[17]The New Organon. Eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 45.
[18]Perhaps most paradigmatically with Hume, when he enters “most intimately into what I call myself,” Treatise of Human Nature. Eds. L.A. Selby-Biggs and P.H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford UP, 1978) 252.
