Toward a Phenomenology of Experience

Abstract

This paper does not aim at a comprehensive phenomenology of experience. Its main purpose is to show how the phenomenological approach can add to a fuller understanding of a phenomenon whose prestige stands almost in inverse proportion to its lucidity. “Experience” is easily the most eulogized title of contemporary philosophy. Hence it has become its most overextended and diluted concept. Any attempt to clarify the nature of the phenomenon in depth and to examine the rights of experience must therefore begin with a demarcation of its field.

This article, published before in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 1, no. 4, October 1964, is a development of a paper which read in a symposium on “Experience” before the Metaphysical Society of America at Notre Dame University in March 1960.