72 theory
as the issue of what it means to be “human” in our age, or in any age). In this
essay, it is the question of how we should understand “experience” that I shall
address.
Both in life and in philosophical reflection, experience is sometimes seen
as intrinsically shallow, as mere surface, and sometimes as deep. I want par-
ticularly to investigate the origins of our Western notion of experience in Car-
tesian and post-Cartesian philosophy and explore with you the relevance of the
long-standing philosophical disputes about experience to our broad themes of
“science, religion, and the human experience.”
The Depths and Shallows
When I speak of “religious experience” in what follows, I will not mean ex-
perience that purports to be of supernatural beings or of “revelation” conceived
of on the model of having words dictated to one by a divine being. (One can
find a very different model—the model of revelation as the ongoing connection
between the individual and God—in the writing of Franz Rosenzweig.)^1 Rather,
I will have in mind the way in which a religious person may, at any time,
experience something or some event—whether it be an obviously significant
one, say the birth of a child or the sort of deep crisis in one’s life that William
James describes inThe Varieties of Religious Experience,or whether it be a su-
perficially ordinary one—as full of religious significance. Speaking for myself,
I cannot imagine being religious in any sense, theistic or not theistic, unless
one has had and cherished moments of religious experience in this latter sense.
Yet the concept of experience that we have operated with, from Descartes and
Hume to today’s cognitive scientists, has a troubled history, and it will repay
us, I believe, to reflect on that history.
What I shall be talking about for the most part will not be what I just called
“religious experience.” Rather, I am going to spend a few minutes trying to
explain why so many people have (and from where they got) a concept of
experience that leaves literally no room fordepth,a conception of experience
as, so to speak, all psychologicalsurface, one traditionally summed up in the
conception of experiences as sensations, and after that I shall try to explain
why that conception is wrong, drawing especially on Kant’s profound analysis
of experience.
We all know that the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies are classified by the standard texts as “empiricists” and “rationalists.”
While the classification is in many ways a procrustean bed, it certainly captures
a broad divide between, say, the British philosophers Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume, and the continental philosophers Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and
while the pattern of disagreements is by no means as tidy as the labels “em-
piricism” and “rationalism” suggest, it is certainly true that we find very dif-