Experience

For Kant, experience is epistemological, whereas ontological experience (Gadamer) is in the first instance poetic and Romantic (Schiller, Goethe). In contradistinction to Kantian Erfahrung, it is most often called Erlebniß. We note further that Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. Dilthey and Husserl understand experience pertaining to knowledge through Erlebnis. In epistemological or classificatory knowledge the parts add up to the whole. Ontological knowledge instead is holistic in which the whole is present in each of the parts. In ontological knowledge we can know things themselves. Ontological experience is particularly important for global knowledge. This is because knowing another culture is not reducible to a culture's qualities or predicates. Culture as a way or form of life is a thingitself. A third type of experience is informational experience. This collapses the epistemological into the ontological and is also increasingly present today. This sort of experience of non-linear information theory can account for the experience of societies, of individual humans, of digital media, of neuronal networks, of phenotypes, urban forms, of cellular organisms, or of inorganic matter. © 2006, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.