Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

the depths and shallows of experience 73

ferent conceptions of experience in the two groups, and especially in Hume
and Leibniz. (What is not often remarked is that Hume, the empiricist who
makes experience—under the name “impressions and ideas”—the be-all and
end-all of his philosophy, and who prides himself on being a sort of Newton
of psychology,^2 is, in fact, far less subtle in his description of experience than
Leibniz.)^3 Be that as it may, the line that came to be recognized is between
conceptions of experience that go back to Hume, and conceptions that go back
to Kant (who hoped, of course, to sublate the categories “empiricism” and
“rationalism”).^4 I shall briefly sketch these two conceptions, because they epit-
omize the idea of experience as shallow, and the idea of experience as deep.

Hume and the Shallow Conception

For Hume, the very paradigm of an “impression” is a visual image; (the other
sort of experience—“ideas”—was defined by him as “faint copies” of impres-
sions. Similarly, Descartes and Berkeley both tried to read the nature of visual
impressions directly from the newly investigated nature of retinal images.^5 The
result of this approach was a tendency to think of all “impressions” on the
model ofpictures—not necessarily visual, of course—there were also tactile,
olfactory, and so on, representations; but like pictures, these, and the “ideas”
or faint copies that corresponded to them, were thought by Hume to refer only
to what theyresembled.^6 Content, on this resemblance-semantics, is a rather
primitive affair.^7 The very idea of a fact that cannot besensorily picturedwas
rejected by Hume. The only other sort of content arises from “association”—
especially the association of “passions” (feelings and emotions) with images.
Today there are very few, if any, old-fashioned empiricists in philosophy.
But what survives of the older view is the very influential idea that experience
(still identified by empiricists with sensory inputs) is nonconceptual. Quine’s
idea that, for philosophical purposes, experience-talk could simply be replaced
with talk of “surface irritations” (stimulation of the nerves on or near the sur-
face of the body) in many ways foreshadowed this influential idea.

Kant and the Deep Conception

In Kant’s writings one can find a response to the empiricist view of experience

as consisting of sensory images, a response so deep that even today few phi-

losophers who are not primarily Kant specialists have fully appreciated it

(Strawson, Sellars, and more recently John McDowell and James Conant being

among the happy exceptions). In the few minutes I can afford to devote to it

this evening, I cannot, of course, do justice to it, but I hope to point out at least

some of the leading ideas of the Kantian conception. It is important, however,