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Dewey - Having An Experience - 1980

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24 views23 pages

Dewey - Having An Experience - 1980

Uploaded by

Twilightjune
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CHAPTER III

HAYING AN EXPERIENCE

EXPERIENCE occurs continuously, because the interaction of


live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very
process of living. Under conditions of resistance and conflict,
aspects and elements of the self and the world that are impli
cated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and
ideas so that conscious intent emerges. Oftentimes, however, the
experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in
such a way that they are composed into an experience. There is
distraction and dispersion; what we observe and what we think,
what we desire and what we get, are at odds with each other. We
put our hands to the plow and turn back; we start and then
we stop, not because the experience has reached the end for the
sake of which it was initiated but because of extraneous inter
ruptions or of inner lethargy.
In contrast with such experience, we have an experience
when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then
and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the gen
eral stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work
is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its
solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of
eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversa
tion, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so
rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation.
Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own indi
vidualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.
Philosophers, even empirical philosophers, have spoken for
the most part of experience at large. Idiomatic speech, however,
refers to experiences each of which is singular, having its own
beginning and end. For life is no uniform uninterrupted march
or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own
inception and movement toward its close, each having its own
35
36 ART AS EXPERIENCE

particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated


quality pervading it throughout. A flight of stairs, mechanical as
it is, proceeds by individualized steps, not by undifferentiated
progression, and an inclined plane is at least marked off from
other things by abrupt discreteness.
Experience in this vital sense is defined by those situations
and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being "real ex
periences"; those things of which we say in recalling them, "that
was an experience." It may have been something of tremendous
importance—a quarrel with one who was once an intimate, a
catastrophe finally averted by a hair's breadth. Or it may have
been something that in comparison was slight—and which per
haps because of its very slightness illustrates all the better what
is to be an experience. There is that meal in a Paris restaurant
of which one says "that was an experience." It stands out as an
enduring memorial of what food may be. Then there is that storm
one went through in crossing the Atlantic—the storm that seemed
in its fury, as it was experienced, to sum up in itself all that a
storm can be, complete in itself, standing out because marked out
from what went before and what came after.
In such experiences, every successive part flows freely,
without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At
the sametime thereis no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts.
A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a defi-
nitenessand interest to its successive portions greater than exist in
the homogenous portions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from
something to something. As one part leads into another and as
one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in
itself.The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that
are emphases of its varied colors.
Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, me
chanical junctions, and dead centers when we haveanexperience.
There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define
the quality of movement. They sum up what has been under
gone and prevent its dissipation and idle evaporation. Continued
acceleration is breathless and prevents parts from gaining dis
tinction. In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences
melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their
own character as they do so—just as in a genial conversation

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