§70. Experience and Experiment

With its roots and cognates in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Semitic lan­guages, the modern English word “experience” belongs to a semantic family connoting trial, proof, and experiment, including attesting, sampling, rehearsing, and practicing.

Aristotle defined experience as perception enhanced by memory, a mnemic synthesis. The explanation still seemed right when the sixteenth­century Paduan philosopher Nifo wrote, “By experience (experimentum) I mean materially the observation in memory of many singulars convening in one, but formally I mean their collation. Therefore, an experience is a certain collation of remembered singulars convening together,” that is, a mnemic synthesis. Philosophical usage sometimes equates experience with present awareness, although Nifo might explain that such awareness is ex­perience in its first actuality only: it can be experience. Present awareness becomes experience in second actuality (actually being experience) only when, having passed into the past, it supplements perception with memory and its experience.²

Experience is not occurrent, not a sensation, not present conscious aware­ness. It requires living through trials, a history of being surprised by percep­tion, and changed, having learned something. Without learning there is as yet no experience, which is a function of perception remembered, reflected, compared, analogized, and primitively categorized. As a mnemic synthesis, it takes time, and is itself a phenomenon of duration. Experience is not cur­rent, present perception; it is belated, retrospective, nachtraglich perception, to use Freud's word for mental events with a deferred effectiveness.³

Experience is a quality of the remembered past that was never a quality of a conscious present.

Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001. they pass,” says Emerson, writing of experience. A passing present is not ex­perience, which comes later, with memory. “The years teach much which the days never know.” That is the interest of experience: time adds something, something only time can add, and makes feeling keener for the experience.⁴

The value of experiments as instruments of inquiry presupposes that ex­perience is a source of knowledge distinct from reasoning. That was the med­ical idea Democritus and Epicurus drew into natural philosophy, and it was resisted by all who resisted empiricism, from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Leibniz. By the end of antiquity natural philosophy had been swamped by the schools and their “classics,” as learned commentary replaced empir­ical inquiry, obliging modern Europeans to rediscover it for themselves. When they did, empiricism became experimentalism, which it never was in antiquity.