The Experientialists

I got hold of a colleague's iPhone today, and played around with it for a while. The thing appeals in interesting ways. It looks trendy, has got a good feel, and lets one control it completely with amusing ease. These features can be be seen in many successful 'toys' available these days. These things appeal to us, entice us, make us desire them, mainly by appealing to our senses, and we follow them, almost with hypnotic devotion.

I feel that knowingly or otherwise, many of us are experientialists, believing and valuing what we see and sense (through the five senses) and only believing and valuing what we see or sense. The problem with being an experientialist has less to do with the former than with the latter. Suppose we, for once, start trusting our senses entirely. Now, this in itself doesn’t mean that we believe and value only what we get through our senses. This is like being a child who believes and values what his father says, but nothing else. In spite of the limitations and vulnerabilities of believing in his father, he may innocently believe in what his father says. This may be acceptable, with a hope that he would understand the limitations of his father with time. But it is not the same if the child believes and value only what his father says, because that way he would never be able to find the truth, the truth about the limitations of his father.

If we believe only in our senses, and nothing else, we become what are senses make us. Our eyes and ears may never pick up the real truth, beyond the obviously sensed immediate truth. So we essentially bump from one wall to the other, and regard such contact as the only real contact possible in the world; thus missing certain important aspects of life. This is something that probably lies at the root of the consumerist, materialistic pursuits that prominently characterise contemporary motivations. This is some kind of a self-victimization.

I think it helps to acknowledge the limitations of our senses and the limited value of sensory experiences in our life in general and in the pursuit of meaning in particular. There is a significant space that lies within, waiting for us to acknowledge its existence, reflect on ourselves and the way we are and could be. Thinking, feeling, being are as important, if not more important, than catering to our senses and their essentially repetitive pursuits.

Another way of looking at this is the Kantian perspectice. Examining the problem of being an 'experientialist' from the perspective of critiquing the empiricist dominance, Kant puts forth the idea of a priori (prior to our experience). He writes that some of the concepts which we apply to our present experiences come from our past experiences, but some of the most important other concepts precede experience. What we experience is systematized and organized with our programmed intuitions and categories which make sense of it all, even if we come across them for the first time. This, in itself, is not a case against the validity of the senses, but it does bring into light something that is beyond or prior to the sensual perceptions, something a pure experientialist probably doesn’t appreciate much. Probably some roots of our moral judgments reside here, and we could understand them better if we reach deep inside ourselves, to the self that gets continuosly neglected when we are busy playing to the desires of our senses.