Workshop with Andreja Novakovic
Experience as Transformation in Post-Kantian Philosophy
The notion of experience comes in two varieties. On the one hand, experience refers to a source of knowledge about contingent aspects of the world. On the other hand, experience can also refer to a source of transformation that affects our understanding of the world (and of ourselves) at a deeper level, not just adding to it, but altering for example what we consider to be a possible object of knowledge.
When someone has an experience in the second sense, their understanding is transformed in ways that do not merely advance familiar forms of thinking, but rather challenge them and maybe even compel the person with the experience in question to recognize as valid forms of thinking that they previously considered "unthinkable." While the first sense of experience is the subject primarily of epistemology, the second sense of experience appears most notably in social philosophy, in philosophy of religion, and in aesthetics, where references to experience’s transformational potential are more frequent. For example, experience in this second sense is sometimes credited with being the driver of social change, of ‘conversions’ from one worldview to another, or of overhauls of one’s taste, sensibility, or capacity for appreciation.
But the two senses of experience are also not irrelevant to one another. Experience in the second sense could also be a matter of learning something about the way the world is constituted, making it a source of knowledge. When approached from this perspective, experience as transformation would raise the question of how such learning is possible in light of our previous cognitive limitations. Moreover, experience as transformation is also potentially relevant to moral philosophy if it is approached in connection with the question of how moral change is possible and how we come to be moral beings in the first place. In this workshop we want to bring together both aspects of experience and ask how experience must be constituted in order to play this transformational role widely construed. Our focus will be on philosophical conceptions of experience and the idea of transformation that belongs to the tradition of post Kantian philosophy where this question was widely acknowledged in one form or another by figures such as Fichte, Hegel, Adorno, Beauvoir, Gadamer, Cavell, McDowell, among others. We welcome papers that will highlight experience as transformation from any of the aforementioned points of view.