Even John Dewey shared some of Benjamin's pessimism about the prospects for aesthetic experience in the modern world. In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey tried to restore the balance between art as objective artifact and art as subjective perception. Arguing (as Ruskin and Morris had) for an aesthetics of everyday life, he nevertheless acknowledged the difficulty of having an aesthetic experience in modern society, where "No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily. What is called experience is so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name."

The statement that experience has been impoverished by modernity sounds out of character for Dewey, who was probably more enthusiastic about the promise of modern life than anyone else in Jay's book. Yet as an American pragmatist, Dewey shared James's sense that the wholeness of experience had been concealed by conventional ways of understanding the world. Beyond this common assumption, the two pragmatists diverged. James was fascinated by the "blooming buzzing confusion" of "pure experience." He was convinced that we had somehow lost contact with this primal vitality, and he spent much of his career trying to construct a "mosaic philosophy" that would recapture the multiplicity of a "pluralistic universe." But James knew that it was difficult if not impossible to translate pure experience into language--as difficult as it was to describe a mystical religious experience. So he was thrilled when he read Henri Bergson's vitalist manifesto, Creative Evolution (1907), and summarized its accomplishments to a correspondent: "All our positions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and the beast intellectualism killed absolutely dead!"

Dewey was never as viscerally engaged as James was with the recovery of Erlebnis. He was committed to Erfahrung--a progressive, human-centered process of growth through problem-solving engagement with the world. Yet his humanism was less capacious than Montaigne's (or James's). Despite Dewey's own experience of loss--two of his children died very young--he never tried to mix what James called "life's more bitter flavors" into his philosophy, never openly contemplated the ultimate experience of death. His account of experience remained humane, flexible and democratic, but curiously incomplete.

Deweyan pragmatism posed some key questions for devotees of experience. Given the commitment to endless experimentation and growth, what was the status of past experience, of history, in the pragmatic world picture? Could it be understood on its own terms, in all its strangeness and singularity, or would it be merely a jumping-off place for the present and future? Dilthey and other historians, as Jay deftly shows, were determined to assert the "pastness" of the past and the value of understanding historical experience for its own sake, but also as a path to self-knowledge. Dilthey aimed to recapture past Erlebnis, which he understood as "experience in its concrete reality...made coherent by the category of meaning." Generations later, social and cultural historians in the 1970s picked up the thread of "lived experience." Most had never heard of Dilthey and would have had no interest in his hermeneutics. But they did want to recover the everyday life experiences of ordinary people, and what they found was often strikingly at odds with progressive conventional wisdom. Past experience, understood on its own terms, posed a challenge to "the enormous condescension of posterity."

The historian who most effectively assaulted the condescension of posterity (and who coined that phrase) was E.P. Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class (1963) revealed the profoundly serious critique of capitalism developed by Luddites and other local radicals who had been dismissed as loonies by liberal historians. The historical scholarship of Thompson, combined with the literary scholarship and criticism of his contemporary Raymond Williams, was a bold effort to reclaim the politics of experience for the democratic left--and specifically for their own culturalist version of Marxism. The political meaning of experience had historically been the property of what might loosely be called the right, whether nationalists like Jünger, for whom Erlebnis implied the sublime sacrifice of self for nation; or organicists like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, for whom experience implied the unreflective wisdom of custom and tradition. Was it possible for the left, with its utopian rationalism and disrespect for the past, to construct a politics of experience? Dewey tried but ended up in milk-and-water meliorism. His Erfahrung, like Kant's, needed a dose of Erlebnis--a dimension more grounded in the concrete actualities of everyday life. That is what Thompson and Williams supplied. Like Burkean conservatism, their Marxist politics of experience was intended to be a critique of the left's utopian rationalism (reincarnated most recently in the work of Louis Althusser). It was also an effort to explore the radicalism of tradition, to show how the most ferocious challenges to British capitalism were not inspired by progressive ideology but grounded in local attachments, customs and practices--all of which came together in a common culture, or (in Williams's signature phrase) "a whole way of life."

Culturalist Marxism, it turned out, had a limited shelf life. During the last thirty years, as Jay confirms, the postmodern turn in the humanities has challenged the very notion of "lived experience" as a meaningful concept--as well as the assumption of an autonomous, coherent self who does the experiencing. Yet among the thinkers who might be characterized as postmodern in Jay's book, only Rorty dismissed experience altogether. He insisted that everything was mediated by language, even such apparently straightforward sensations as the taste of an onion, and he dismissed any notion of a nonlinguistic realm as a regression to Kantian mystification.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.