Philosophical experience. A response to Andrea Sangiacomo

Sometimes I begin a seminar or lecture by just standing or sitting in front of the course and saying nothing. I wait, sometimes for two to five minutes. That’s a long, long time. I sense that the students expect me to say something. Sometimes a student breaks the silence by asking me what’s going on or by inviting me to speak; sometimes I break the silence when I feel that the discomfort is growing. – In any case, I can be sure that in these two minutes there is at least the onset of a shared experience. The students expect me to speak and are either amused or irritated when this expectation is not met. Referring to this experience, I can then talk about the deeply ingrained expectations, roles, norms and what have you. Moreover, I can be fairly sure that the students will connect the experience to what is said. Often they will participate more actively in the seminar. Depending on how such experience is conceptualised, it gains the status of evidence, illustration or even of the content of discussion. I think that such experiences can crucially enrich philosophical activity. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that we should integrate such experiences more systematically into philosophical work.*

Let’s begin by looking at some kinds of experiences that figure in philosophical exchange. When you say or write something, you (hopefully) get a response: nine times out of ten that response will take the form of an objection to what you say. If this is correct, the typical experience in current philosophical discourse is the exchange of claims and objections. While this practice gets us some of the way, it strikes me as a very limited use of the resources we actually have. To be sure, we use a few more things to stimulate our imagination: we draw on thought experiments, examples, analogies, formal methods and such like. But except for formal methods, we pay fairly little attention to the way these ‘tools’ work. What do I mean by this? – Well, if you reconstruct an argument by rendering it in a formal code, you engage in a sort of translation: in writing “if p, then q” you turn a sequence of sentences into sequence of symbols. This is a practice that has to be learned. Once you are familiar with it, it widens your resources of thinking. It enables a shift of focus (for instance on truth-values), a number of decisions (what sort of conditional is this?), and it stimulates your imagination, since you literally have to play around with the sequence. Depending on your goals, some translations will be more adequate or helpful than others. This practice is enormously helpful in various ways and has developed into a clear component of philosophical education. The same is true of the growing education in statistical reasoning. Arguably, such conventions afford us certain ways of making (highly cultivated) philosophical experiences. Once established, they turn into resources of handling ideas and arguments that enable us to move around and redirect our focus. (As I pointed out earlier, this thrives on forms of alienation.)

However, far less, if any, attention is given to other forms of thinking and cultivating attention. We spend far less time analysing or applying examples, analogies, translations into other languages, the use of pictures and drawings, forms of literature, film, theatre, music and other arts. I think this is an enormous loss. If we look at the history of sciences such as biology, it is clear that forms of representation, not least artistic representation, provided enormous boosts. Painting things larger than life, as it were, turned our attention to unregarded details. Why should that not be true of philosophy? The idea, for instance, that our moral reasonings could have developed independently of inventions by novelists strikes me as absurd. But if this is even remotely correct, then why don’t we pay more attention to the interaction between literary experience and philosophical intuitions? Why should we assume that Iris Murdoch’s Black Prince does not afford us with philosophically relevant experiences? We don’t necessarily have to become novelists ourselves, but the transformation of such experience into other forms of thought and vice versa strikes me as both vital and wholly underestimated. How, then, can such resources figure in our philosophical experience?

Perhaps you have already asked yourself now and then why at least the first chapters of Descartes’ Meditations are such a widely and persistently appreciated text. Why does it speak even to first-year students in such a direct way that other works never will? Let me give you a hint: it’s not the structure of the arguments; neither is its philosophical content. It is because it is a meditation. In a series of posts, Andrea Sangiacomo recently reminded us of this fact and also of the fact that we never really pay attention to the form. The point is that Descartes directly appeals to our experience and guides us, by example, through an experiential journey in which we focus on certain modes of perception and on blocking them. You can read the text as a series of arguments, but you can also do what Descartes insinuates: experience what he suggests. Arguably, it is this latter feature that speaks to people directly in that they don’t need anything but their means of perceiving and thinking to play along.

You might object that the appeal to experience is somehow “not philosophy”. At least, it is this estimation that often blocks the inclusion of other approaches and indeed of whole traditions. According to Kristie Dotson, our philosophising is driven by a “culture of justification” that excludes appeals to other forms of philosophy, relying on other practices or lived experiences. But in fact we don’t even need to leave the so-called western tradition to encounter such appeals. Wishing to introduce a concept, we often help ourselves to examples. If you want to talk about illusions, for instance, there is a number of stock examples ready. Most of us are familiar with optical illusions, such as the stick appearing bent in the water or the Müller-Lyer illusion. Such examples are often invoked in discussions of perception and can help demonstrate various aspects. Sometimes they are invoked as a mere illustration, sometimes as evidence for a claim, sometimes they are a topic in their own right, for instance, when we ask how and under what conditions they arise. What is rarely noted, however, is that exposure to such and other examples might constitute a philosophical experience. Presented with an example, we step out of the verbal exchange and consider an image or a scene. Even if this experience is guided by concepts and explanations, it is not wholly determined by them. It gives rise to sensations that are deeply linked with other experiences. It connects with all sorts of things, sensations, intuitions, feelings etc. and might trigger way more or other sensations and associations than expected. Arguably, it is the exposure to the experience of the illusion that triggers new lines of arguments.

Likewise, if we pay attention to certain strands especially in the analytic tradition, the use and handling of examples and thought experiments is a guiding feature. Just re-read some classics: Frege, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Davidson, Millikan, to name a few. For once, don’t pay attention to their arguments but to the wonderfully crafted examples and imaginations that inform their writings. You will soon find that much of the convictions they leave us with depend on the strength of these examples. Far more than mere illustrations, they often carry the burden of argument. But they function so well because our imagination does a large part of the work. This is why they often form the outset of whole traditions of exchanges.

In the light of such traditions, it strikes me as an enormous impoverishment if the experiential reflexes we train others to respond with reduce to disagreement. Arguably, it is not disagreement but wonder that keeps philosophy going.

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* In her latest post, Helen De Cruz kindly picked up on the idea: “I’m inclined to an expansive conception of philosophy where images, aphorisms, music, poetry, can all be part of philosophical conversation. … I do wonder whether there would be room for a journal that explicitly makes room for more wondrous philosophy–philosophy that is high in innovative content but low(er) in rigor, a journal of cool, exciting half-baked ideas of sorts. I don’t think there is such a journal yet.”