2.7 Different Kinds of Experience
To make what has been said so far even clearer, a widespread misunderstanding must be cleared up. Many people take “experience” to mean only what they perceive with their senses: what I see, hear, touch, smell, taste — that is experience. Everything else, they say, is speculation.
But that is too narrow a conception. In fact there are fundamentally different kinds of experience, and it is important to distinguish them carefully.
2.7.1 a) Sensory Experience
This is the experience that comes about through our outer senses. We see that the sky is blue. We hear that a bird is singing. We taste that the coffee is bitter.
Sensory experience refers to individual things and events present here and now. It tells us: this is how it is right now, in this place, at this time. But it does not tell us whether it must be so. That the sky is blue is a fact. But it could just as well be gray. It is a contingent fact, not a necessary truth.
From sensory experience alone we cannot gain strictly universal and necessary truths. We can observe regularities, we can derive probabilities, but not necessities. That is not a weakness of sensory experience — it is simply not its task. If someone has observed a thousand white swans, he cannot conclude from this with certainty that all swans are white. There could still be a black swan. Sensory experience supplies individual facts, not universal truths of essence.
2.7.2 b) Intellectual Experience — the Knowing of Essences
But there is an entirely different kind of experience: the experience of the mind. It is what we do when we grasp the essence of a thing.
When you understand that a color cannot exist without extension, you have not seen something with your eyes. You have seen something with the mind. You have grasped an essence — namely, the essential belonging-together of color and extension.
This grasping of essences is a kind of experience in its own right. It is no less real than sensory experience. It is even, in a certain sense, more certain: for what the senses show us could always be otherwise. But what we see to be essentially necessary cannot be otherwise.
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889—1977) put this difference as follows: “There are thus two completely different concepts of experience. The one refers to the observation of individual real entities and to induction. The other means that concrete disclosure of a so-being.”1 The first kind supplies us with facts; the second discloses essences to us.
This is neither speculation nor mere theorizing. It is an immediate contact of the mind with the essence of a thing. Conrad-Martius described it this way: “The world, in all its real and ideal contents, is full of meaning. To pursue the investigation of essences means to break open every entity — everything there is — toward its immanent essence and meaning.”2
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Fußnoten
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von Hildebrand, Was ist Philosophie? (What Is Philosophy?, 1976), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, Regensburg: Habbel, 1976, p. 84. German original: „Es gibt also zwei völlig verschiedene Begriffe von Erfahrung. Der eine bezieht sich auf die Beobachtung einzelner realer Seiender und auf Induktion. Der andere meint jene konkrete Erschließung eines Soseins.” ↩
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Conrad-Martius, Das Sein (Being, 1957), Munich: Kösel, 1957, p. 86. German original: „Die Welt in all ihren realen und idealen Beständen ist voller Sinn. Wesensforschung treiben heißt jedes Seiende — alles was es gibt — nach seinem ihm immanenten Wesen und Sinn aufbrechen.” ↩