Experience: A History

Just what is experience, exactly? The question has rarely been asked. The number of thinkers who have raised it directly is surprisingly small. It almost seems as if experience depended on our taking its availability for granted. We reflect on what we have experienced but not on that we have experienced it. We think about experience the least when we value it the most. What happens when we do the opposite? When we see the phenomenon of experience as something remarkable, even something improbable, full of surprises and mysteries?

Most of us living today, I think, have had memorable experiences that shaped or changed who we are. But how long has that been possible? Why and when did it become possible? Possible for whom? And how can we tell the difference between experiences we can trust and those we can’t? Experience: A History surveys the often unexpected answers to these questions. One of the book’s discoveries is the simple realization that experience has a history at all. It is not an inherent feature of human life; it has not always been possible; it has undergone many changes over time.

The book looks for the answers to its questions in literature, art, and music to see how experience has been imagined and expressed in the Western world, and to philosophy to see how it has been conceived. It is no coincidence that these sources of understanding are the things on which my own sense of experience relies the most. The book evolves from a wide-ranging history to a concluding memoir. Evolves, because the personal is present from the start and the historical never releases its grip. But the explicit turn to the personal makes it possible to address yet another question not asked often enough: How do the experiences that matter to me as a unique individual reflect, repeat, and revise the experiences of others?

Ongoing thread. More from Lawrence Kramer to follow.