In phenomenology, experience is not a merely empirical concept (in the sense of the natural sciences), but every immediate access to the given — to that which shows itself to the person itself. It is the foundation of all knowledge of essences (cf. Hildebrand, What Is Philosophy?; Husserl, Logical Investigations II) and the presupposition without which no personal ontology would be possible.
Kinds of experience
The phenomenological tradition distinguishes several kinds of experience that are not reducible to one another:
Sensory experience (German): perception of the outer world through the five senses. Here colors, sounds, smells, tactile qualities, tastes show themselves — aisthesis in the classical sense. This experience is always already perspectival, bodily constituted, and related to a world.
Spiritual experience: immediate access to non-sensory objects — essential structures, values, truths, mathematical relations, moral demands. Hildebrand speaks here of the intuition of essences as the spiritual grasp of what a thing is.
Moral-ethical experience: the immediate experience of the moral value of a person, an act, a situation. Wojtyła, in The Acting Person, has shown how the moral act is not inferred but lived — the person experiences itself in the moral act as actualizing itself.
Personal experience: the experience of another someone in the encounter. It is immediate (not inferred from outward signs) and constitutive of every personal ontology. Cf. empathy (Edith Stein).
Religious experience: the experience of the holy, of transcendence, of the encounter with the absolute Thou. Otto, Stein, and Balthasar have described it phenomenologically.
Methodological significance
The phenomenological method proceeds from experience, not from theories or preconceived concepts. Edmund Husserl’s maxim “To the things themselves!” demands: before any theory-formation stands the immediate access to the given, the seeing-of-what-is-there.
From this follows an important difference from the empiricist tradition: empiricism (Locke, Hume) reduces experience to sensory impressions and constructs everything higher out of composition. Phenomenology, by contrast, acknowledges several irreducible kinds of experience, each of which has its own access to its own domain of objects.
Relation to the lifeworld
Edmund Husserl, in the Crisis (1936), worked out the significance of pre-scientific experience for every science: the lifeworld, with its qualitative, meaningful, bodily constituted experience, is the foundation from which the sciences derive their abstractions. Scientism forgets this lifeworld and leads to that oblivion of the person which the ontology advanced here seeks to overcome.
Ontological classification
Superordinate concept: cognition (in the broad sense)
Subclasses:
- sensory experience (German)
- Spiritual experience
- Moral experience
- Personal experience
Related concepts:
Chapter assignment: Chapter 2: Phenomenological Method (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Husserl, Edmund (1900/1901): Logical Investigations, II. Transl. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
- Husserl, Edmund (1936): The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Transl. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1960): What Is Philosophy?. Milwaukee: Bruce.
- Stein, Edith (1917): On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. Waltraut Stein. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964.
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn (English: The Acting Person, 1979). Dordrecht: Reidel.
See also
Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.