EAIM: The Character of Experience

Like many a good philosophical meditation, Experience and Its Modes begins with the definition of a key term: experience. Since experience is all-encompassing, it is important to note that whatever the definition, it is merely useful for a given purpose, and after my brief summary, I'll give my two cents as to what that is.

Oakeshott defines experience in an odd way. He says that all experience is coterminous with judgement. It is an initially shocking definition because we normally think of judgement as that which aids in formal deduction. We know we don't encounter the world in this way all the time. But further, it is strange in that judgement seems to be beyond experience: it is that force which moves us from mental state to mental state. Oakeshott's clarification is helpful and it broadens our outlook beyond these limited ideas.

Definition: Experience = judgement, which is a recognition of 'this,' not 'that.' It is a reflective modification of experience

In the likeness of a mathematical proof, this definition is demonstrated in the following way: he shows that experience cannot be either more than or less than judgment. Once this is shown we may conclude that experience and judgement are one and the same.

What is said to be less than judgement, is sensation; what is more, intuition. To be full, his argument must cover all of its bases: what is said to be more, and what is said to be less, must fall on the same spectrum, the same axis; and all that is experience must be imagined to fall on this axis. And the axis is said to be that of recognition of 'this' not that. In sensation, supposedly, we see a bare 'this.' It is not related to a background of 'not that.' In intuition, the 'this' not 'that' melts into complete union. There is no this or that, everything is seen as a mere oneness.

First, I'll give a justification of this spectrum as representative of all we could plausibly experience. In experience there are always things to experience; that is, there are always "this"s; and it appears, we have different "this"s which find themselves related within a world. These relations could go so far as identification, for even in two different "this"s, the relations of one to the other may be exhaustive: one completely defines the other. And these thoughts seem to exhaust what we mean by experience.

Now Oakeshott proceeds to say that the extreme ends of our spectrum are not actually experiences; at best, they are limiting concepts conceived by their likeness to certain features of judgement, but not actually concepts which can count as experience apart from all the features of judgement.

Sensation = Judgement. In imagining what we mean by pure sensation, we realize that we never in fact have this so-called experience. For in recognizing a "this," we in fact recognize the "this," that is, it appears identifiably within the field of our current experience. It is found somewhere within a whole in such a way that when it appears, it already bears relation to all within it.

Judgement = Intuition. [Here, I depart a bit from Oakeshott's train of thought. I don't understand it well enough.] In imagining what we mean by pure intuition, we realize, again, that we are dealing with an abstraction and not an experience (i.e. being confused).  Under this idea of intuitive experience, 'knowledge of' and 'knowledge about' are utterly distinct. So then, because judgement never gets at the reality, it is superfluous. So then "sensation" is superfluous. But this leaves only the process of identification for recognizing reality. We no longer have recognition. And it all seems to fall apart here. For all data is always given, nothing is added or removed. And reality is not in our experience static.

Why This Definition

Since it encompasses everything that we know, "experience" seems to thereby be the broadest term possible. Thus, there would seem to be an infinite ways of defining it or getting it across. In a sense, since intuition, judgement, and sensation are distinctions without differences, we could have defined reality as any of these.  So then we may ask why "judgement?" It primes the mind to understanding what we mean by truth; and truth is a domain in which judgement has a natural home: criticism has been the way of the west since Descartes.