§62. Absolute Experience
While the Continental positivists were, as we shall see, evacuating experience of significance for science, the metaphysicians of British idealism were elevating it to the Absolute.
For example, F. H. Bradley, in his work Appearance and Reality (1893). “Everything is experience”; “Reality is sentient experience.” That was a conclusion rather than an assumption. “The universe is one” he wrote—and this has more the character of an assumption; “Its differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing. Hence the Absolute is, so far, an individual and a system” Yet there has to be more than system and unity, for harmony presupposes matter, differentiated elements; one uninterrupted tone is not a harmony. So, a harmony of what? “We can reply in one word, that this matter is experience” The Absolute is “a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord”105Another view of unconditional experience is in the work of the now forgotten Shadworth Hodgson. An unaffiliated English philosopher and founder of the Aristotelian Society, he is little read these days, though William James described him as “the most robust of English philosophic writers,” and named him alone among contemporaries as a forerunner of pragmatism. The Metaphysic of Pure Experience was Hodgson's magnum opus in four volumes from 1898. He explains experience as perception, but perception is more than sensation. Perceived sensation combines quality and duration. The ultimate empirical data are not instantaneous sensations but enduring qualities. That is what we remember, if we do, or forget if we do not, and that memory is our experience. Time and feeling, duration and quality, extension and intensity are its constant factors. Hodgson's work is the first clear expression of the idea that the experienced present extends over some duration.
“Each moment of consciousness contains, besides its own content, a retrospective perception of one or more prior moments.” All perception “is in fact retrospective, and the perceiving... looks back upon the simple perception of which it is the continuation, and sees it presented in retrospect in order of knowledge.” We perceive “in retrospect, or as we may express it, from end to beginning, that is, as having been” Our “whole experience lies in retrospect only.” Experience is duration and memory, and could no more be instantaneous than music could be.106William James liked Hodgson's idea of experience so much that in his Principles of Psychology (1890) he takes five pages of small print in a long footnote to explain it. Twenty years later, in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), he remains impressed. “Hodgson showed long ago that there is literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal postulate of abstract thought.” The temporality Hodgson lodges in experience is essential to James's idea of the stream of consciousness. “Our consciousness never shrinks to the dimensions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.” These “lingerings of old objects” and “incomings of new” are, he says, “the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to consciousness without which it could not be called a stream.”107
The last great work of British idealism is Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes (1933). Oakeshott acknowledges a debt to Bradley. For both of them, experience is reality; it is all we know and all there is, the Absolute. This experience takes the form of ideas and judgments—even sensations are ideas and judgments. Experience at its fullest, which is reality at its most concrete, is an entire world of ideas, coherent and systematic. A world of experience is not a world of mere mental events.
“So soon as ideas are recognized as belonging to a world they have ceased to be mere psychical states.” “My” experience is an abstraction. To be mine is to be coherent, and to be coherent is to be more than merely my psychical state. If you say it is not a chair but a psychical state that I sit on, that is incoherent. To say reality is a world of ideas is not to say that it is a world of mere ideas and nothing more. Mere ideas, ideas never asserted, representations without reality, are abstractions and not experience. All experience is somebody’s experience but no experience is merely mine. It is mine because I accept it, and I accept it because it appears coherent.108What is given in experience is a whole world, yet never a completely satisfactory world. The attitude of experience toward the given (meaning the ideas one feels obliged to take seriously) is critical, seeking a satisfaction that is intimated but withheld. We judge true (fallible truth, Oakeshott insists) what is satisfactory in experience. To accept or reject an idea is always a question of the result to a whole world of ideas. Experience moves from a given world of ideas to one that is more of a world, a profounder unity. Unity means coherence. “In experience the given is simultaneously given and transformed, and the principle everywhere is coherence.” He would not abide James’s “pluralistic universe.” Plurality, the assertion of ultimate diversity, merely indicates a world insufficiently known. With better knowledge we would understand that difference and multiplicity are abstractions. All things are one.109
On Bradley’s account, experience is shot through with illusive appearances, requiring almost anything we think we experience to be discounted as unreal. For Oakeshott experience is not a veil of appearances, though it is beset by modalization, a kind of compulsive abstraction, when concepts arrest and falsify experience. Oakeshott selects three modes for analysis, without implying that they are the only ones, namely, history, science, and practical life.
Large philosophical claims have been made for each, the claim to be the most substantial, the foundation of all the rest. Historicism and hermeneutics made that claim for history, positivism made it for science, and utilitarianism and pragmatism made it for practice. Considered at their own game, history, science, and practice have no need for anything philosophy says of them or their knowledge. But running these modes together—asking whether history is a science, or soliciting practical wisdom from historical learning—defeats our thinking with a fallacy of irrelevance (ignoratio elenchi), because what is true under one mode is irrelevant to another. Nothing in history, science, or practice is more than a mode, an abstract facet of a totality we may indifferently designate as experience or reality.Oakeshott makes the point that Hodgson and Bradley made, that experience is judgment and thought. Sensations are so woven with the fabric of ideas and judgments that we cannot categorically separate them, as if they were the output of isolated modules, as they were for Aristotle and Kant. British idealists return to the position of Democritus and Protagoras, that sensation is a grade of thought and every thought to a degree sensuous. A sensation uncontaminated by thought would be a bare this, immediate, unique, without name or character. To characterize it requires a concept and an act of recognition. Yet such a bare incomprehensible this is not what sensation is like. No sensation is without consciousness, which means some duration, some recognition, some inference or judgment, bringing present awareness into some degree of harmony with a larger totality of experience. Even brute pain, pain as actually felt, is related mnemically to previous experience and recognized proprioceptively as similar or different.
Oakeshott's conclusion is that no simple, immediate experience exists, experience being so thoroughly mediated that the very distinction between mediate and immediate should be abolished as “vicious and misleading.” Experience is a given totality, an entire world, or nothing at all. Sensation is thought and judgment if it is experience at all. The given is not the sense datum, it is no less than the world. “To be a world is the form of every experience.”110