In contrast with such experience, we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. We put our hands to the plough and turn back we start and then we stop, not because the experience has reached the end for the sake of which it was initiated but because of extraneous interruptions or of inner lethargy. There is distraction and dispersion what we observe and what we think, what we desire and what we get, are at odds with each other. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. ![]() ![]() Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. A consummation “is anticipated throughout and is recurrently savored with special intensity,” and when finally undergone or “had,” it points the way to a new gathering of possibilities and anticipations.ĭeeply indebted to the relational metaphysics of William James, this selection evokes the doing and undergoing, the rhythm of everyday experience and, however inadvertently, casts light on countless contemporary movements in the arts and social psychology.Įxperience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. Dewey creates a delicate relationship between the myriad interactions that make up an ongoing experience and the realizations or consummations that emerge when anticipations are realized and we “have an experience.” But such consummations are not final or fixed ends, for they shed meaning fore and aft. It is not used in the sense of “having” as possessing. The word “having” is used by Dewey as in “having” a friend or “having” a good time. It is also striking that at an age when most people are retrospective and nostalgic, Dewey writes a piece bristling with the future, with anticipation of the future, the cardinal motif. Yet, it can be said that the attitude and perspective articulated therein, especially the distinction between experience as inchoate and as an experience, lay behind almost everything that Dewey had written previously. ![]() “Having an Experience” was published in 1934, when Dewey was seventy-five years of age. 554-573.įirst Published: in John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York, Capricorn Books, 1939, pp. Source: The Philosophy of John Dewey, Two Volumes in One.
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