Experience, World and Time. Philosophical Perspectives in the Horizon of the 21st Century

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT; DANIEL BRAUER

Atenas

Conferencia; 23rd Word Congress of Philosophy; 2013

International Federation of Philosophical Societies

The ideas of experience, world and time are interrelated. If the modern and enlightened notion of experience refers to objectivity and to the scientific dimension of knowledge, this is not the original meaning of the word experience, which both in its Greek and Latin sources is associated with the ideas of meaningful adventure, risk, attempt, essay, test and so forth. Indeed the Latin word Experientia belongs to the same family as Periculum (danger), also related with the term Peritus (expert), and it refers to the latin root per (Cassin, 2004: 436) which is associated with the acts of going forward, penetrate a territory and so on. As a matter of fact, the Greek word Empeiría is related to the Greek roots Peira and Peras, which means entrance, portal, limit. This dimension of the word experience is indeed critical in the German equivalent for experience which is the word Erfahrung, in which we recognize the root Fahr, leading to the derivative fahren (driving, riding, travelling) and Gefahr : danger and threat! So the term Experience, under all these sources, refers to the idea of a decisive and critical break through the world which is constitutively related to the dramatic and critical transformation of subjectivity and selfhood. Indeed this meaning of Experience was clearly retained by the Romantics. As a matter of fact, the faustic and goethien issue of the whole adventure of knowledge becomes essentially the metamorphosis and meaningful change of the self. This dimension is reflected by the Hegelian idea of Erfahrung through the expression Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins, that Hegel gave as alternative title to his Phänomenologie des Geistes. The idea of experience is therefore related to the idea of meaningful change, both on a personal and historical dimension. However, as Walter Benjamin observed (1936), this idea of experience fell drastically after First World War, since there was no more epical meaning or worthy event to share, nothing that humanity could feel proudly. This dimension of crisis of experience did not cease worsening ever since, with traumatic events of twenty century as many philosophers underlined (Agamben, 1978; Huyssen, 1990; Hartog, 2003; Jay, 2005). In this Round Table (or Invited Session) we intend to focus on this dimension of crisis of experience both on a historical and on a personal basis relating it with the crisis of meaning and the feeling of saturation, closing and estrangement of the world with both the process of globalization and intensive acceleration of social modernization and acculturation. One point in focus here is the idea of historical experience in the horizon of 21st century, considering the crucial metahistorical concepts of Reinhart Koselleck, i.e. Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungshorizon (horizon of expectative). Another point under discussion is the idea of presentism developed by François Hartog (2003) to draw attention to the lack of a common future and a common past, so that the use of past and future in benefit of the present seems to dominate our cultural signification of time, in detriment of other cultural meanings of historical time. Finally, the point provocatively outlined by Guy Desbord (1967) and by Jean Baudrillard (1981) of the loss of reality under the virtualization of the world and the parody of the société du spectacle is one we intend to dress here in the light of the discussions on the current lack of critical judgment and critical meaning. These items are to be developed following different philosophical approaches: metahistorical, aesthetic, ontological and epistemic.