So here I am, one night away from my last day of classes as an under­grad­u­ate, with piles of work to fin­ish up…but I really really want to share one thing…before the end of of an era: A beau­ti­ful pas­sage on expe­ri­ence and the human condition.

The truth of expe­ri­ence always con­tains an ori­en­ta­tion towards new expe­ri­ence. That is why a per­son who is called ‘expe­ri­enced’ has become such not only through expe­ri­ences, but is also open to new expe­ri­ences. The per­fec­tion of his expe­ri­ence, the per­fect form of what we call ‘expe­ri­enced’, does not con­sist in the fact that some­one already knows every­thing and knows bet­ter than any­one else. Rather, the expe­ri­enced per­son proves to be, on the con­trary, some­one who is rad­i­cally undog­matic; who, because of the many expe­ri­ences he has had and the knowl­edge he has drawn from them is par­tic­u­larly well equipped to have new expe­ri­ences and to learn from them.

The dialec­tic of expe­ri­ence has its own ful­fill­ment not in defin­i­tive knowl­edge, but in that open­ness to expe­ri­ence that is encour­aged by expe­ri­ence itself. But then this gives the con­cept of expe­ri­ence that we are con­cerned with here a qual­i­ta­tively new ele­ment. It refers not only to expe­ri­ence in the sense of the infor­ma­tion that this or that thing gives us. It is that expe­ri­ence which must con­stantly be acquired and from which none can be exempt. Expe­ri­ence here is some­thing that is part of the his­tor­i­cal nature of man. Although in bring­ing up chil­dren, for exam­ple, par­ents may try to spare them cer­tain expe­ri­ences, expe­ri­ence as a whole is not a thing that any­one can be spared. Rather, expe­ri­ence in this sense involves inevitably many dis­ap­point­ments of one’s expec­ta­tions and only thus is expe­ri­ence acquired. That expe­ri­ence refers chiefly to painful and dis­agree­able expe­ri­ences does not mean that we are being espe­cially pes­simistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through neg­a­tive instances do we acquire new expe­ri­ences, as Bacon saw.

Every expe­ri­ence wor­thy of the name runs counter to our expec­ta­tion. Thus the his­tor­i­cal nature of man con­tains as an essen­tial ele­ment a fun­da­men­tal neg­a­tiv­ity that emerges in the rela­tion between expe­ri­ence and insight. Insight is more than the knowl­edge of this or that sit­u­a­tion. It always involves an escape from some­thing that had deceived us and held us cap­tive. Thus insight always involves an ele­ment of self-knowledge and con­sti­tutes a nec­es­sary side of what we call expe­ri­ence in the proper sense. Insight is some­thing to which we come. It too is ulti­mately part of the nature of a man, ie to be dis­cern­ing and insightful.

- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Chap­ter: Analy­sis of effective-historical con­scious­ness, ‘The Con­cept of Expe­ri­ence and the Essence of Hermeneu­ti­cal Experience’)

Com­plex. Intrigu­ing. Rad­i­cally undog­matic. Expe­ri­ence with purpose.

Here’s to — not the end — but the con­tin­u­a­tion of some­thing purposeful.