Experience Ceded and Negated
Rent from DeepDyve- Experience Ceded and Negated
The pragmatist reconstruction of experience was first undertaken and must today be renewed in the name of experience, but not mainly that of experience more adequately conceived or more fully theorized. Rather, this task was originally inaugurated and must now be renewed in the name of experience more vibrantly lived and, quite simply, more fully had. This means wresting our understanding of experience from intellectualist preoccupations. Of far greater importance, it practically means refusing to cede our experience and its interpretation s to any authority, including the most invisible form (that of our own habitual selves in their ingenious capacity to make sense out of our experience primarily in terms of entrenched dispositions of interpretation and evaluation). Such a refusal entails opening ourselves to the transformations, transfigurations, disruptions, and thus upheavals of our transactions, as they are actually taking place in the present. The suspension of the demand for meaning might be requisite for such a refusal effectively to open ourselves to having and bearing the transfigurative energies of our ongoing experience. The issue at bottom concerns the having of experience. For an understanding of what is at stake here, we must turn to a simple yet profound distinction drawn by John Dewey in Experience and Nature and, indeed, elsewhere (see, e.g., 1977).
Having Versus Knowing
In reference to experience, John Dewey draws a crucial distinction between knowing and having.1 In opposition to "intellectualism" ("the theory that all experience is a mode of knowing"), Dewey insists: This doctrine "goes contrary to the facts of what is primarily experienced. For things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized" (LW 1, 28).2 Having an experience is more primordial than knowing: the encounter with the other in which the identities of all parties implicated in the transaction are put at risk—at the very least, put into question—is not primarily a cognitive (or epistemic) affair. The point is not only that experience is distorted if it is conceived primarily in [End Page 118] cognitive or epistemic terms; it extends to the distortions resulting from defining the significance of our experience exclusively in terms of any one of its functions, especially its epistemic one (its function in aiding us in our attempts to extend our knowledge). In brief, then, experience is neither inherently nor primarily cognitive. The impoverishment resulting from the intellectualist approach to human experience is, at bottom, experiential. That is, the loss is not so much theoretical or conceptual but truly experiential (hence, in a single stroke, personal and cultural). For it is a loss of possibilities of experience and, thus, nothing less than the loss of experience, in its more vibrant, fulfilling, and sustaining forms.
The pragmatist reconstruction of experience is intended as a practical recovery of experience. It aims to make possibilities of experience attractive and available, most of all, those that have been denied to certain individuals and classes or those that have in their own right been denied as legitimate or worthwhile. Like the spirit animating the work of Michel Foucault, that animating the efforts of the pragmatists, especially James and Dewey, is missed if the accent falling on creation rather than justification, the imaginative expansion of the field of human possibilities rather than the strictly procedural legitimation of morally permissible conduct, is not heard. The distinction between knowing and having is critical because it rescues human experience from the tyrannical tendency to reduce it to nothing but its cognitive function or an epistemic affair. Beyond this, however, it is vital, since the value of this distinction goes beyond rescuing experience from such reduction (thus, such disfigurement and impoverishment): its value extends to expanding the cultural field of experiential possibilities, to enhancing the intellectual, aesthetic, and political dimensions of our ongoing transactions (to name but three of the more salient dimensions of these transactions).
In terms of the practical recovery of experience (and this practically means the creative expansion of possibilities), the distinction between having and knowing is critical and vital. It is itself a tool...
