Chapter 1 | Experience from Aristotle to Hegel

The way philosophical traditions evaluate experience marks the specific differences between philosophical systems in Western thought and the generic difference between Western thought and the philosophies of the East and Global South. The generality of this statement should be enough to deter any attempt at reconstructing, let alone intervening in, this history. Yet if this is a rich history, it is not a particularly contentious one, as it largely follows the shifting valuation of experience within broader intellectual developments and commitments in philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. The starkest division lies between Western metaphysics and Eastern and Southern systems of thought, which evolved on vastly different timelines and only recognized each other as interlocutors after millennia. The following reconstruction leads up to the point where these asynchronous streams meet and offer a shared “radical” perspective on experience—announced in the mūla (Sanskrit: root) of Nāgārjuna’s MMK, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s late vision of an immanent, “eternal” world, and in William James’s “Essays in Radical Empiricism.”

The term “Western Metaphysics” gains specificity when understood as a system of thought that heeds the ancient imperative to “save the phenomena.” From its roots in pre-Socratic wisdom and astronomy to its culmination in German and Anglo-American idealism, this task revolved around defining phenomena and ensuring their “salvation” through explication. The urgency of this mission originates in the practice of ancient astronomy, survey, and navigation, where identifying celestial bodies as recurring phenomena—as planets and moons—required the distinction between the moving celestial body—the ontic blob of matter—and its predicted path, its ontological horizon. To identify Mars as the planet Mars, astronomers had to identify it by its relative position to the fixed stars and they had to determine whether it followed its orbit, the path composed of innumerable previous observations. Without this identification, without the conjunction of the moving object and its path, the sky would be perceived as chaotic, full of unpredictable comets and useless for any calendric and navigational function.

This commitment to impose predictive order on observed phenomena—essential for the maritime and colonial success of ancient Greek poleis—rests on an implicit, unobservable assumption: that the world be a cosmos, an ordered structure rather than a chaos of unrelated events. A planet is a planet only when it reappears on its cosmic path, and it can do so only if we suppose that this path is part of an order that we can ascertain and predict. These cosmic suppositions are necessary; they are not derived from observation—rather, they make observation meaningful in the first place. There must be an order for any explanation to have a chance of success, and there must be a last principle upon which explanations can come to rest. We will encounter this “must” again in Immanuel Kant’s transcendental deduction and will ask where this imperative originates.

As a consequence of supposing a cosmic order that grounds and sustains the cognition of any object or event, cognition turns into re-cognition. To explain, to understand something means to allocate it, to put it back, as it were, in its right place in the cosmos. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy connects this mode of explanation to the question of theodicy and gives the most comprehensive account of this relationship between cognition and recognition.

As Jacques Derrida famously observed, any process of recognition must rely on technologies of retention and protention—writing, first and foremost—that transcend the limitations of individual or generational experience. Ancient Greek colonial expansion and the ability to navigate beyond sight of land depended on star maps, instruments, and mechanical devices that replicated the motions of the heavens. Similarly, as both Hegel and Nietzsche realized, ancient Greek tragedy functioned as a cultural technology that dramatized the interplay of cognition as recognition both onstage (Oedipus) and among the audience.

Thus, “Western Metaphysics” can be understood as a collective name for those systems of thought aimed at elucidating the background assumptions that make the “again” in re-cognition plausible. Aristotle stripped the problem down to its barest elements and investigated it as the problem of locomotion, for him the most abstract form of change. In his Physics, he explored the tension between identity (of the moving body) and difference (of the path traversed); in books 7 and 8, he concluded that motion and change are meaningful concepts only against an unchanging backdrop. For the sublunar world, this constant is the rotary motion of the supralunar realm, where stillness (movement in place) and motion coincide. For the cosmos, it is the nous, the unmoved mover, who imparts motion without being himself moved. Since physics deals with “natural,” terrestrial motion, and natural rotational motion does not exist on earth, metaphysics has to explain the stability of the cosmic order.

This genealogy of metaphysics, rooted in the problem of motion, has three important implications for the arguments that follow. First, it shows that the disregard for experience—particularly its novelty—is inherent in the salvational project of first philosophy, since its principles must transcend the limitation of human experience. Second, it opens the dialogue with Nāgārjuna, who, in the second chapter of the MMK, offers a trenchant critique of the distinctions between path, moving body, beginning, and end of motion, exposing the metaphysical assumption embedded in these concepts. Third, it highlights how the fusion of Greek and Christian metaphysics, wherein Aristotle’s nous evolved into the creator God, resolved the inherent contradiction of an unmoved mover literally by fiat: by endowing God with unlimited creative power. This solution, however, raises a much more pressing question: Why, if God created it ex nihilo and therefore had unlimited options, is this world full of suffering?

Suffering is a human experience; Nāgārjuna goes so far as to say it is human experience. For the Greeks—as well as later for Nietzsche—it belonged to the tragic constitution of the cosmos. Christian apologists attributed suffering to humanity’s desire for divine being—the snake had promised Eve that she would be like God. Her attempt cast humans into the hostility of God’s world, into the frailty of their mortal bodies, into the instability and temporality of human experience. Experience, consequently, was disqualified not only as epistemologically unreliable but as tainted by sin. Throughout the history of Christianity, ardent believers tried to wash away this stain and claim direct experiences of God; the churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, did their utmost to invalidate and suppress these claims as presumptuous and heretical. Only in Eve’s antitype Mary will the desire for God’s being finally be fulfilled, initiated, as we will see, in a scene of reading.

It is worth noting here that Buddhism also begins with the “noble truth” that there is suffering, dukkha. However, this suffering—if “suffering” is even the right translation—is neither embedded in a cosmic structure nor punishment for a primordial fault. It arises, as we will see in greater detail, from the misunderstanding of phenomena as stable and substantive. Unlike the Christian narrative of mortal sin, this misunderstanding is remediable. In Buddhism, no phenomena require salvation, and no God need be justified in the process of relinquishing suffering.

The Scientific Revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries necessitated a recalibration of the status of experience. On the one hand, scientists insisted that speculative, observational, and experimental insights must remain compatible with human experience—even those that contradicted immediate perception, such as the heliocentric universe with its stable sun and spinning earth. The target of this insistence was the popular belief in miracles and, in the scientific community, the lingering reliance on final causes. On the other hand, the laws of motion—to cite the culmination of this process of experimenting and reasoning in the work of Isaac Newton—could not themselves be directly experienced. Their claim to absolute certainty exceeded the finitude of human experience both in its intellectual and in its physical dimension. Kant repurposed the scholastic term “transcendental” for this new way of adjusting the finite capacities of human thought to the infinity of the homogenous universe.

One of the pivotal transformations ushered in by Newton’s mechanics was the unification of the physical sciences. Newton not only demonstrated that geometry and mechanics were compatible discourses but also eliminated the qualitative difference between celestial and terrestrial motions. As an astronomer and especially as a theologian, Newton remained committed to saving the phenomena and justifying God and His creation. In the dispute between his delegate, Samuel Clarke, and his German antagonist, G. W. Leibniz, he refused to allow that the world could have all the resources of its being within itself; God had to be free to intervene in his creation at any time. This theistic reservation, so characteristic of Newton, faded rapidly in the fervent reception of his work, especially in France. The universality of Newton’s laws inspired materialist thinkers to envision a self-sustaining world that required no further explanation and justification. In such a world, experience would simply be another process that follows laws and is animated by forces—attraction and repulsion—that can be quantified and compared.

David Hume drew different philosophical implications from Newton’s mechanics when he speculated that human beings orient themselves in the world through relations akin to Newtonian attraction. He proposed that the mind passively experiences syntheses between ideas and impressions and that we are subject to these processes more than we “have” or even “make” them, as Kant later insisted. In his inquiries, Hume abandoned key tenets of earlier metaphysics: the givenness of the world and its need for justification, the identity and unity of the reasoning subject, and, most daringly, the central role of God in whom our ideas converge and who guarantees the cosmic order. In this constellation, experience rises above a priori reasoning and innate ideas; it is recognized, in all its temporality and incompleteness, as the sole foundation for making reasonable statements. Notably, Hume emphasized the social dimension of human experience, anticipating Hegel’s argument about cognition as social recognition.

Yet in contrast to the optimistic visions of experience that we will encounter in Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and James, there is a sense of resignation and limitation in Hume’s philosophy. This surely stems from its proximity to Newton’s project, the overwhelming success of which relied on claims—notably on the universality of the laws of motion—that no empiricist philosophy could ever substantiate. Newton simply refused to speculate about the nature of his laws and of the forces they described; when pressed, he attributed them to the inscrutable power of God. This recourse was unavailable to the atheist Hume. Though he defended his views on empirical grounds, his concept of experience seems haunted by the absence of transcendental guarantees. His philosophy, for all its emphasis on experience, remains a dualism—one in which the invalidated realm of transcendental guarantees lingers like the “ghosts of departed quantities,” to borrow the memorable phrase of his contemporary George Berkeley.

It is remarkable that Kant, reflecting on his encounter with Hume’s empiricism, said it had “awoken” him from his dogmatic slumber—a choice of words that uses, quite literally, the language of Buddhism (Sanskrit: budh, “to awaken”). The notion of awakening to a truth, which also appears in Nietzsche, suggests that such insight is not the result of inference or derivation. While we can trace its proximate causes—in Kant’s case: reading Hume—the resulting thought emerges with a clarity and novelty that defies all deduction. In its suddenness and simplicity, awakening resembles the Christian experience of conversion, albeit with a key distinction: we awake from previous beliefs but convert to new ones.

Other aspects of Kant’s project also align with Buddhist principles—unwittingly, since Buddhism played no role in his thinking. None is more important than the Transcendental Dialectics, which occupies the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason and discusses problems that frustrate any intellectual effort to solve them. Kant carefully shows why such questions cannot be decided and what the attempts to solve them reveal of those who try; the Buddha, listing fourteen questions nearly identical to Kant’s, is much less patient and declares that he will remain silent when they come up. None of these questions—for example, does the world have a beginning? Is matter infinitely divisible?—can ever be answered with reference to human experience. Both thinkers share the same goal: to liberate individuals from fruitless speculation and instead equip them with the wisdom to navigate their world.

Despite these parallels, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd. (B ed.) 1787) avowedly remains a project committed to saving the phenomena. Unlike earlier efforts that remained focused on the phenomena of change and motion, however, Kant shifts his attention to the subjective conditions necessary for phenomena to appear to us at all. Newton asserted the absolute generality of his laws of motion; Hume exposed the epistemological limitations of human experience. Kant’s critical inquiry seeks to answer a more fundamental question: How can human beings attain certainty about phenomena in the first place?

Kant’s response turns on a novel definition of knowledge: we can know—know with the universality Newton demanded—only what we can actually or potentially experience. Although we may not encounter every instance of motion, we can, in principle, experience a body moving in time through space. By contrast, angels, being incorporeal and beyond spatiality, are outside the realm of possible human experience and, consequently, cannot become objects of knowledge.

There is, for Kant, no such thing as “pure” experience—an encounter with reality unmediated and unthought by the categories of the understanding. Knowledge arises from bringing the experience of phenomena “in” time and space “under” the categories with which we think. These categories—this is Kant’s “overcoming” of Hume—are neither innate nor acquired through experience; they are transcendental: necessary preconditions that make experience and thought possible in the first place. The ancient astronomers, for example, could not have made their observations without transcendental assumptions about the homogeneity of space, the continuity of time, and the relation between cause and effect.

All of these assumptions converge in a proposition that stands at the apex of Kant’s pyramid of cognition: “The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or at least would be nothing for me” (B ed., 132). This endlessly parsed sentence gives us the most abstract formula for the conditions under which we can save—have firm knowledge of—phenomena: we must be continuously aware that the thought we are thinking is our thought and that it is our thought. Note that the formula with its strange “must”—whence would such an imperative originate if the proposition is the “highest point”?—still conserves the ancient injunction to save the phenomena. Like the ancient astronomers, Kant accepts something as given that already evinces an order (the universality of Newton’s mechanics) and then reasons backwards toward the ultimate conditions that must obtain for this given to be possible.

Kant’s system gives experience a necessary but undeniably subservient role. True, there is no usable knowledge outside of experience; but it is also true that, for Kant, experience itself cannot think. This ancient dichotomy between thinking and experiencing remains at the center of Kant’s thought—even though he himself admitted that his thinking had been decisively shaped by the experience of being “awoken” by Hume’s ideas. The motivation behind these constraints on experience is both noble and pragmatic: Kant sought to disqualify claims based on the supposed truth of subjective experience, whether they originated from religious fanatics asserting divine guidance or from the early Romantics who insisted on experiencing truth in love and nature. Though in later works, especially in his reflections on the role of aesthetics, Kant relented and accepted nature and the fine arts as ways of experiencing, and enjoying, the interplay of our mental faculties, even in this admission he maintained and reaffirmed the dualism of knowledge and experience.

Kant’s radical framework had another far-reaching consequence: since the soul could never be an object of true knowledge, introspection as a means of articulating experiences lost its philosophical legitimacy. The long tradition of essayistic writing—where authors observed themselves and drew philosophical consequences—lost its standing as a valid method of knowing oneself. Introspection, once the hallmark of writers in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, found a refuge in the domain of fictional representations. Meanwhile, the psychology practiced in Western research universities, shaped by Kant’s definition of a priori knowledge, became largely quantitative and classificatory, focusing on reaction times, stimuli, and physiological measurements.

Nietzsche, deploring the sterility of clinical psychology, revived essayistic and introspective writing in German. Similarly, James defined his approach to psychology in opposition to the German tradition that he knew from his visits to Germany and from colleagues at Harvard.

Kant’s idealist critics recognized and lamented the limitations he imposed and defended but were not prepared, unlike the early Romantics, to abandon the ideal of certainty in knowledge either. If it was the distinction between experience and conceptual thinking that produced all these limitations, they argued, then philosophy had to delve deeper. It needed to reach the foundation where thought and being—to us the maximalist language of thinkers like Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Hegel—had not yet diverged. This effort to deepen and broaden the scope of philosophy, provocatively titled Wissenschaft (science), transformed the question of certainty that had preoccupied both the individual sciences and Kant’s epistemology into a grander task: determining and explaining an object’s or an event’s place in the knowable universe. Everything became a philosophical question: Why is the earth magnetic? Where does light come from? Is chemistry more advanced than mechanics? Posing these questions and identifying transitions from one domain of knowledge to the next meant that the harsh transcendental thresholds Kant had installed between concepts and experience could no longer persist; knowing meant searching for those moments on the continuum of knowability where human thought and natural phenomena intersected.

The concept that enabled these intersections and transitions between thought and nature emerged concurrently in philosophy, poetry, and in the natural sciences: the organic. Kant introduced it as a speculative tool in his late philosophy of art and nature; now it was turned against him. The organic became the mantra for overcoming the limits and limitations of Kant’s ancien régime of philosophy and soon spread to all areas of intellectual and social life, uniting poetry, philosophy, and the nascent life sciences.

Schelling’s combative Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (Presentation of My System of Philosophy) of 1801 is a prominent example of the many “systems” that were launched in rapid succession at the turn of the nineteenth century to kick away the Kantian ladder and redefine philosophy’s foundations and ambitions. In this work, Schelling demonstrates how an idealist investigation can uncover in seemingly inert facts—in geological formations, chemical reactions, or Newtonian forces—the latent presence of “spirit,” Geist, that would bloom into concepts, ideas, and, ultimately, into works of art.

An example of this approach is the idealist interpretation of light (Licht). Schelling invented a concept that would have a flamboyant career in the last quarter of the twentieth century, “Deconstruktion,” to describe how even the seeming identity of light is dependent on dark matter (which for Schelling, curiously, was iron). Light, in its constant struggle with its dark other, can serve as an organic intermediary between nature and spirit; it can be experienced and yet is utterly transcendent. The phonetic proximity of Licht and Ich (self) symbolized, for Schelling and his many followers, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, or Alexander von Humboldt, that the deconstructed, organic view of light could disprove Newton’s hated mechanistic approach.

No account of the organic emergence of meaning—from stone to poem—proved more influential in Europe and the United States of the late nineteenth century than Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Its original title, The Science of the Experience of Consciousness, conjoined the three terms that Kant had declared irreconcilable within a single philosophical framework. Hegel sought to reconfigure Kant’s rigid distinction between experience and knowledge not as a static divide but as a dynamic narrative of progressive overcoming. He traced how human consciousness ascends from its most rudimentary claims to certainty—such as pointing to something and declaring, “this is this”—to a fully articulated understanding of its own operations and its embeddedness in a meaningful cosmos.

For Hegel, experience is the name for a process of testing, failing, and revising one’s own presuppositions. It can become the subject of a science because in this process consciousness uncovers a logic—a logic in which the negation of what is initially present leads to the affirmation of this negation on a higher level of consciousness. For example, the inadequacy of pointing at an object as a means of achieving certainty becomes the impetus for reflecting on the modalities of perception itself. The contradictions and reversal consciousness encounters in the world are, in the final analysis, its own. The upward spiral of its path to self-consciousness and spirit is prescribed by this logic of recognition. Everywhere in the natural world, in history, art, religion, and society, this process of successively more “logical” recognitions takes place.

In Hegel’s philosophy, then, experience is no longer dismissed as a lower, less sophisticated, “blind” faculty of human engagement with the world. Instead, it animates a logically evolving choreography in which human consciousness apprehends its objects, tests its concepts, and corrects its prejudices. The Phenomenology of Spirit shows how consciousness learns to recognize in objects the meaningful, “subjective” elements and thereby recognize itself. This recognitive form of knowledge as self-knowledge—the ability to discern meaning as already inherent in the phenomena we encounter—is the most comprehensive manifestation of the Western impulse to save the phenomena and to justify the world.

To the fullest extent possible, then, Hegel sought to provide explanations of what it means for human beings to have experiences. Rather than encasing it in a static system that declares it to be inferior to intellectual insight, he gives a dynamic account of experience that highlights its participation in all facets and phases of cognition. But in this explanation lie its limitations as well. What experience discovers has always already been there; its outward movement into the unknown, the ex of experience, is always inflected backward, “home,” by the re of recognition. “Where are we really going? Always homeward,” the early Romantic poet Novalis wrote. For all the progressive energy invested in uncovering the world, the same Romantic nostalgia wafts through Hegel’s system.

The constraint at the other end of Hegel’s explanation is his firm conviction that experience is something humans make rather than something that makes them. Even though he seems to recount the emergence of consciousness in the process of experience, it becomes clear—at the latest in the chapter on self-consciousness—that consciousness was there from the very beginning, waiting to be uncovered and activated. There never is a moment when experience is wholly untethered from the project of gaining conceptual clarity, never a moment of genuine novelty.

Hegel’s philosophy was not only a triumph of idealist speculation; it also took firm roots in the social realities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pruned and flattened, it became the raison d’état of the Prussian state and its successors, shaping in particular its institutions of higher learning. The German research university, in turn, became a beacon for students worldwide and Germany’s most successful intellectual export. The university determined what would be taught as science and what was considered Bildung, the intellectual and social lubricant that established new distinctions in a society that had ostensibly moved beyond the rigidity of inherited class divisions. The admiring biographies and commentaries that appeared on the 250th anniversary of Hegel’s birth in Germany show that this tradition is alive and well at least in the country of his birth.

Hegel, of course, did not settle the debate about the status of experience, even if he liked to think so. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the mental and physiological consequences of industrial capitalism made the call for the liberation of experience even more urgent. In Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), we will encounter perhaps the most consequential of these voices in the German and European context. After Nietzsche’s death, it is the catastrophe of the Great War that shatters a whole generation’s access to their experience.

Interestingly, just as Kant’s awakening to the problem of experience was triggered by his reading of Hume, so was Nietzsche’s own awakening tied to his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), whom he discovered when he was only seventeen and who was the only writer whom he unreservedly admired throughout his life, including during the time when he wrote his Zarathustra. Emerson’s writings, particularly the famous essay “Experience,” became, in form and content, models for Nietzsche’s thought.

Emerson, in turn, was a family friend of the James family, and William James (1842–1910) reminisced, wrote, and spoke about him profusely and admiringly. No doubt his own thinking about experience, though it seems to arise from his empirical work in psychology, was deeply influenced by Emerson, thus establishing an intellectual bridge to his German contemporary, Nietzsche. Both thinkers, unaware of each other, developed a radical and radically novel understanding of experience.

To fully grasp the achievements of Nietzsche and James and the ways in which they challenge core tenets of the Western tradition of thinking experience, it is instructive to step outside that tradition. Thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida promised such a departure, but remained entangled in the tradition, expending most of their efforts on defining themselves against it. Contrary to Derrida’s assertion, there is an outside to Western metaphysics and its conceptualization of experience. Rationally formulated and argued, appearing contemporaneously with the sages in Asia Minor, mainland Greece, and Sicily, Buddhism rejected the demands of religion and belief in supranatural forces. Initially an oral tradition and only centuries later codified, it underwent its first reformation in the second and third century CE with the writings of Nāgārjuna. Often seeming to argue directly against the presuppositions of Western metaphysics, Nāgārjuna initiates and formulates the thinking of what is commonly translated as the Middle Way. This is the outside to which we now turn.