means and how it grants access to the unity of being as gift, a brief presentation of the cultural development of the semantics of the term will be helpful. As we shall see, because what is at stake in every experience is our relationship with the whole, the history of the concept of experience tends to overemphasize one or another particular aspect. Yet the neglect of other aspects results in confusion and hinders the growth in truth that is the desire of wisdom. Early Greek philosophy does not seem to attribute much importance to what one acquires through experience. For example, Aristotle considers experience to be that degree of knowledge between the simple sensible perception of finite beings and the proper sciences. “Experience knows the particular, whereas science (art) knows the universals.”8 Experience is an acquired skill, the synthesis of memories that prepares theoretical and practical knowledge.9 This sense of experience, according to which nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu, was adopted by Aquinas, although he also speaks of a knowledge by connaturality in which, through experience, one is attuned to the whole of being as, for example, the chaste knows what chastity is by experience and not by what he may have studied of this evangelical counsel.10 It is true that experience also has, at its first level, the connotation of searching for the truth and the acquisition of forms through sense knowledge. Nevertheless, the meaning of this search is more fully elucidated within the context outlined above.
Through the Middle Ages, “learning by trying” was still seen as part of a path that both presupposed and yielded recognition of an ultimate origin, a final cause. Physics, metaphysics, and theology formed a differentiated unity. The origin was seen as the ever-present, initiating, and guiding telos of one’s own inquiries. It was God who was sought in whatever one was learning. This, of course, did not mean that theology trumped science. Although, as many have shown, the perception of God guided scientific inquiry, the latter had its own integrity and methodology. This does not intend to say that the sciences were conceived independently from God, but that they represented a further exploration into the mystery of the whole. Independently of how it was used and accounted for, experience had to do with one’s own organic encounter with truth. It took into account both the whole person and the way in which knowing took place.
Modernity’s progressive rejection of fourfold causality, however, gradually began to account for beings as if God did not exist.11 Detached from their ultimate ground, concrete singulars became tools at the disposal of our technological endeavors and hence mirrors to serve the solipsistic perception of human existence. This epistemological strategy, as is well known, was the fruit of modernity’s attempt to ground reasonableness (and hence truth) in reason alone, that is, in the identification of the act of thinking with its content.12 This identification, with its undergirding separation of reason from experience, so it was hoped, was to yield absolute certainty. Modernity gradually separated the different elements that constitute human experience.
The Cartesian claim to ground truth in thought, without the presumed necessary reference to something other than the human mind (ultimately God), not only inaugurated the so-called transcendental turn to the subject and the methodical experience of empirical reality; it also introduced a separation between reason and its object that still haunts much of today’s thought. The Cartesian claim, however, revealed itself as unable to reconcile the pursued immediacy of the subject to itself with the inescapably mediated character of human subjectivity. While idealism claimed to overcome this separation between reason and its object, and to retrieve via dialectics (Hegel) the role of mediation for a truth that attempts to account for difference within itself (thus eliminating both the Enlightenment’s claim of immediacy without presuppositions, and the positivistic reading of being), it did not succeed in preserving the integrity of difference throughout the theoretical or practical process of the constitution of the absolute. Knowledge gained through experience aimed ever more decisively at the acquisition of power and at the manipulation of nature for the sake of a perennial progress. Phenomenology’s pursuit of the originary experience that precedes the opposition of subject and object comes to a halt (at least in Heidegger) because its reading of metaphysics as onto-theology finishes by hypostasizing the appearing of being in an event of reciprocal belonging that represents the end of being and of Da-sein.13
The modern perception of experience also affected the understanding of religious experience, that is to say, of man’s relation with God. Christian dogmas, for example, rather than the expression of the truth revealed through the person of Jesus Christ, are perceived as historical, relative truths. Although at first one could claim the need in faith to obey these truths, once they lose their intrinsic, universal value, any remaining moral force quickly disappears under the dominance of relativism. Religious experience, as seen in the different forms of Protestantism, is relegated to emotions whose validity is determined by their intensity since historical mediation is no longer acceptable. Schleiermacher’s emblematic account of religion in terms of a feeling of absolute dependence falls back into the attempt to eliminate conceptual and historical mediation and seeks to ground the perception of truth in an ineffable, incommunicable, interior experience that yields no volitional or cognitive content.14 In this regard experience is revelatory of a knowledge that is unable to transcend the subjective sphere of the person and so be communicated.
The philosophical and theological understanding of experience is both prompted by and responsible for the contemporary scientific concept of experience. As Robert Spaemann argues, for modern science, the acquisition of knowledge through experience is equivalent to “planned, homogenized experience, i.e., experiment.”15 The aspect of receiving in experience is interpreted as sheer passivity or simply set aside. Nowadays, to experience something is tantamount to verifying a hypothesis through an experiment that remains under the control of the scientist. An experience is a controlled experiment. To learn by trying has come to mean to experiment with things or, more crucially, with oneself—as biotechnology enables us to do in unprecedented ways. The encounter with truth offered by the scientific understanding of experience no longer leaves room for discovery as the unexpected fruit of a patient search that demands putting oneself at the disposal of what is given to be known. To understand experience as undergoing an event, circumstance, etc., which is deprived of intrinsic meaning, is yet another expression of this reduction of experience to experiment. It is left up to the human person to construct meaning by imposing a relative sense on a given event.
That experience seems to be trapped either by sheer subjectivism or by a technocratic interpretation of knowing is a revealing witness to the fact that when one sets aside God as the ultimate giver and telos of all that is, one is left with the illusion of a mastery over reality that can only fragment the human person out of existence, as the tragic events of the twentieth century and the servitude of man at the hands of the technical manipulation of his own life illustrate. Experience requires the whole of the human person as always already engaged with all of reality and with the common center of both, God.
3. A Distinct Understanding
While an empirical conception of experience emphasizes only the receptive side of experience, and the idealist and scientistic views hold up experience as the manifestation of the constructive capacity of the spirit, experience in the sense we are unfolding here is beyond the Enlightened separation of the receptive from the creative aspects.16 When dealing with experience we need to realize first that we are talking about a living whole, that is, the concrete historical existence of someone who is engaged, with all of his being, with the antecedent and ever-greater mystery as the mystery freely gives himself to be discovered in the human path towards wisdom. Second, contemporary entanglements with the term “experience,” as outlined in the previous section, emerge from
