Keeping It Real (Page 3)

Militarism, male fantasy and the rhetoric of regenerative violence do not appear often in Jay's Songs of Experience. Occasionally one hears the sounds of far-off battle, but the war of ideas is what matters here. Many thinkers used experience as a stand-in for the God they had ceased to believe in, but no more than rival theologians did they agree on the precise features of their deity. Experience, Jay writes, has not been simply a "foundational term" signifying "incorruptible immediacy" but more broadly "the site of a productive struggle" among contentious claims about existence.

At the outset Jay makes a crucial distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Erlebnis suggests "lived experience," whether in the primal unity of organic community or the vital rupture of individual liberation. It is immediate, pre-reflective and personal--and associated with the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, with William James, with Martin Heidegger. It is the sort of notion that, from the liberal view, can start one down the slippery slope to soil worship. That is why Erfahrung constitutes an appealing alternative. It refers to experience based on sense impressions (Locke) combined with cognitive judgments (Kant), which can become part of a learning process, characterized in the form of a narrative or adventure. It is at the heart of the Bildungsroman, or novel of self-development (The Red and the Black, David Copperfield), and while it resists simple linear notions of human progress, Erfahrung can be assimilated to a dialectical, crabwise version of advance. One can see why it appealed to meliorists like Locke, Kant and Dewey--and why the most ambitious philosophers of experience (Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin) sought a synthesis of Erlebnis and Erfahrung, ecstatic immediacy and mature reflection.

Jay implicitly acknowledges that the philosophical pursuit of experience is a product of early modernity. After a nod to the Greeks and Augustine, he warms to his subject when he discusses the humanist Michel de Montaigne, whose self-examination through recollection made him the first true philosopher of experience. Montaigne's essay "Of Experience" (1587-88) refused fixed categories and definitions, pondered the frailties of the human condition (including his own), remained attuned to the pleasures of body and mind, and concluded that philosophy was nothing other than preparation for death--which, unlike other challenges, was impossible to learn about through actual experience.

But almost as soon as Montaigne had finished contemplating mortal man in all his fullness, Bacon, Descartes and their followers began to call his worldview into question. The attempt to grasp experience as a whole was futile, they claimed: Memory was far too slippery and imprecise to promote understanding of the self or of the world. For these thinkers, experience became an object outside the self, to be studied with methods of unprecedented precision. Numbers became the sign of scientifically verifiable experience. The wholeness sought by Montaigne was fragmented into specialized forms of knowledge. The process of rationalization was under way.

Yet after Descartes, rationalist certainties lost ground to probabilities. Through the eighteenth century, Hume and other empiricists questioned the reliability of procedures and instruments that had possessed an almost fetishlike charge for an earlier generation of scientists and philosophers. With the emergence of probabilistic thinking, statistical procedures displaced older notions of quantitative certainty. Locke's medical training encouraged him to reassert the value of everyday observation. Hume went further, undermining the rational self as a source of knowledge, insisting that personal identity itself was a mere verbal artifact and that causality was a convenient fiction. It was left to Kant to complete the Copernican revolution of subject and object, redeeming human cognition in the process. For him, the pursuit of truth involved the creation of coherence, as the mind sorted through the jumble of sense impressions. This was experience as Erfahrung, a journey toward greater understanding. Still, knowledge was not entirely a human construction; Kant preserved the possibility of the absolute by postulating a noumenal realm of timeless truths beyond the phenomenal world of everyday life.

These epistemological gymnastics were a mere prelude to the real songs of experience. As the German historian Wilhelm Dilthey later observed, "There is no real blood flowing in the veins of...Locke, Hume, and Kant, but only the diluted juice of reason as mere intellectual activity." When Jay turns to religious and aesthetic experience, the blood begins to flow. Both these categories emerged from the shadow of cognitivist philosophy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; both emphasized the embodiment of experience in fleshly, mortal humanity.

The key figure in the modern revaluation of religion was Schleiermacher, a liberal Protestant theologian who wanted to free religious experience from the brittle formulations of Kantian morality. The backdrop to his work, as Jay observes, was the ferment of popular piety on both sides of the Atlantic. The evangelical exaltation of emotional intensity revived the fears of anarchic anti-intellectualism among the "cultured despisers" of religion, whom Schleiermacher claimed as his audience. He aimed to create a version of piety that would be acceptable to elite sensibility by incorporating both aesthetic and spiritual experience into Leben (life). Rejecting rationalism and legalism, he celebrated religion as Erlebnis, a primal feeling prior to any doctrine or institution. The essential religious feeling, he thought, was one of "absolute dependence," the sense of being overwhelmed by a power beyond our control or even understanding.

Stirring and psychologically acute, Schleiermacher's hymn to Erlebnis nevertheless proved troubling. It could be appropriated for sinister purposes, as it was by German nationalists in World War I. And by focusing on human psychology, it could lose sight of God altogether. The same problem affected William James, one of Schleiermacher's legitimate heirs, whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) concentrated exclusively on "individual men in their solitude" and asserted that "the real core of the religious problem" was summed up in the phrase "Help! Help!" Such theologians as Karl Barth and Rudolf Otto aimed to rescue religious experience from mere functional efficacy by redirecting attention from the believer to the object of his belief--the God who was "wholly Other." In The Idea of the Holy (1917), Otto insisted that the awe-struck experience of "the numinous" involved knowledge as well as feeling, but that it was impossible to convey this experience through language or concept alone. Contrary to Freud, Durkheim, Malinowski and all the other great reductionists of twentieth-century social science, Otto and Barth insisted that religion was irreducible to anything else.

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