Experience
Related: the inner experience - the 'limit experience' - the film experience - knowledge - phenomenology - sensation
The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (1962) - Robert Warshow
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] [...]This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. --Louis Menand
Definition
Experience is knowledge of and skill in something gained through being involved in it or exposed to it over a period of time. It generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge. Knowledge based on experience is also known as empirical knowledge or a posteriori knowledge. A person with considerable experience in a certain field is called an expert.
If someone is recounting an event they witnessed or took part off they are said to have had a "First hand experience".
Experience points is a number used in almost all Role Playing Games to formulate how long ones character has progressed in the game. It is usually abbrevated to "exp" or "xp" in such games. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience
Art as Experience (1934) - John Dewey
Art as Experience (1934) - John Dewey
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Many of my own assumptions about the nature of art and literature (and thus the guiding assumptions behind many of the posts on this blog) are rooted in my reading of the philosopher John Dewey, most particularly his book Art as Experience. Here are the first two paragraphs of that book:
By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.
When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is build around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.
Note that Dewey acknowledges art as "refined and intensified forms of experience." It will be his task to "restore continuity" between art as a singular kind of human achievement and "the materials and aims of every other form of human effort." He will neither reduce art to the "materials and aims" of "everyday. . .doings"--as did the Marxist critics of that time (1934)--nor accept the metaphysical exaltation of art to "a separate realm" where the designation "classic" removes all responsibility from works of art (and from their critical champions) to provoke "fresh insight." Art has to live in the present or it doesn't live. --The reading experience [Oct 2006]
The Necessity of Experience (1996) - Edward S. Reed
The Necessity of Experience (1996) - Edward S. Reed [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Reed (Encountering the World, Oxford Univ., 1996) indicts much of modern thought for ignoring everyday experience. Contrary to what Descartes and his many successors have argued, we are not trapped within our own minds. Quite the contrary, we interact directly with the real world, a vital truth that the pragmatists William James and John Dewey emphasized. In developing his case, Reed makes effective use of the ecological view of perception championed by psychologist James Gibson. For the author, the direct nature of perception is not an arcane issue of epistemology. The position he champions has social implications. In particular, Reed thinks the division of labor cuts workers off from adequate contact with the world. Surprisingly, he does not make use of Dewey's Art as Experience. Nevertheless, this excellent book is highly recommended. --David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio via Amazon.com
In this controversial book, Edward S. Reed warns that first-hand experience as a way of understanding the world and ourselves is endangered, because our culture favors indirect, second-hand knowledge that is selected, modified, packaged, and presented to us by others. Reed offers a spirited defense of unmediated experience against both modernist and postmodernist critics and outlines how to foster this vision of meaningful learning. --Book Description via amazon.com
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