Making Sense of Experience

It should have become clear that the notion of knowledge that can be extracted from the earlier writings of Lewes and Eliot is deeply entwined with the practical ‘steps’ that mediate between perceiving and conceiving as well as being and thinking. As a result, their studies do not have the form of a theoretical system or a completed structure of ideas. They ought rather to be viewed as activities that remain subject to being affected and redirected by experiences, or events, that cannot (yet) qualify as knowledge. As I hope to show in this chapter, one may therefore say that the work of Eliot and especially Lewes exemplifies or foreshadows an experimentalist or pragmatist understanding of knowledge that is centred on what Richard Sennett has called the ‘idea of experience as a craft’.

While this active meaning of ‘experience’ as a mode of being engaged in and by productive work may seem uncommon today, it is worth noting that ‘in one main sense’, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, experience was for a long time ‘interchangeable with experiment’. To experience anything was to make sense of it by some kind of tentative operation. Around the end of the eighteenth century, this view of experience as an activity began to separate itself from the insights produced by it. As a result, ‘experience’ came to refer mainly to the wisdom derived from personal observation and practical exercise while ‘experiment’ was increasingly confined to the more specific meaning of controlled intervention and examination that became particularly salient in an increasingly professionalised context of laboratory science. In a related development, moreover, ‘experience’ was, by the end of the eighteenth century, also often used to denote an intense and open state of consciousness, a condition of heightened aesthetic sensibility and awareness that, unlike the other meanings of both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’, was sometimes seen as decidedly opposed to justified knowledge and logical thought.

Summing this up, one can isolate at least two senses of experience from the history of the term, namely ‘practical wisdom’ and ‘intense awareness’, each of which came to be associated with a specific temporality or tense.