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.