Abstract
In his broad and challenging book, Experience: New Foundations for the Human Sciences, Scott Lash seeks to trace out no less than the history and future of our understanding of human experience. His intellectual genealogy compares four types of experience: ancient, objective, subjective, and technological. Lash presents more than an exploration of a concept, however. He has his own view of how we ought best to understand experience. The book, as Lash puts it, is a plea for the centrality of the a posteriori, rather than the a priori, in the study of experience in the human sciences. In making this argument, he attempts to marshal a wide-ranging empiricist understanding of experience as a critique of neoliberal politics and the neoclassical economic view of human nature.
Experience can be seen as composed of two parts. After an introduction, the second through fifth chapters present Lash’s narrative of our evolving, and contested, understanding of experience from the Greeks to the present. More specifically, Lash describes the development from ancient experience to objective and subjective experience, two distinctly modern forms of experience. The following two chapters then present Lash’s view of how both technological change and the globalization of social thought (especially as it pertains to the global South) are reshaping experience in the contemporary world. Together, then, we are presented with both a rich theoretical history of experience and a speculative discussion about its future.
Lash begins with an examination of ancient experience, using Aristotle as a launching point. He argues that while experience is a characteristically modern phenomenon that depends on the emergence of free will, it is nonetheless best understood in relation to the ancient experience out of which it emerged. Central for Lash’s argument here and throughout the book is Aristotle’s distinction between techne, praxis, and episteme. Lash sees the seeds of our dual forms of modern objective and subjective experience in this typology. Techne and praxis are a posteriori and are concerned with the particular and contingent. Episteme, in contrast, is a priori and concerned with the universal. Technics is especially important for Lash as he sees it as a critical alternative to the instrumental reason associated with neoliberalism and neoclassical economics.
The discussion next turns from ancient to modern experience. For Lash, Weber’s “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy” serves as the best illustration of the tension between the two primary forms of modern experience, subjective and objective. In the same way that Lash uses Aristotle to begin his discussion of ancient experience, Chapter Three uses William James to explore subjective experience. The notion that experience can be subjective in the sense that it matters how a particular individual encounters things in the world first arose with the Romantics, but James and the pragmatists offer Lash a more empirical version, one that entails a phenomenology of stream-of-consciousness. For Lash, this pragmatic conceptualization of experience provides an a posteriori empiricist challenge to rationalism and positivism’s a priori thinking.
Chapter Four then moves to a discussion of the second form of modern experience—objective experience—especially as it pertains to formalistic thinking in economics. In contrast to the lived experience of the subjective, objective experience, coming to us through Kant, provides us with the transcendental subject. And so while subjective experience gives us consciousness, objective experience gives us subjects that encounter objects, assuming away individual empirical experience. It is this subject-object thinking that forms the basis of modern knowledge in the form of positivism. For Lash, an Aristotelian a posteriori is the antidote to the a priori assumption of utility maximization in the form of homo economicus that pervades the human sciences.
As one means of demonstrating the utility of such a focus on the a posteriori, Lash turns in Chapter Five to Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of praxis as a mode of political action starting from the particular. Lash compares Arendt’s a posteriori conceptualization of the public sphere to the a priori of Rawls and Habermas (though the a priori here are normative postulates rather than the mathematical relationships found in positivism). Lash argues that Arendt, like Dewey before, begins her theory of the public not from a priori but from political experience itself. As with the pragmatists, Arendt’s is a view built on a radical empiricism. The possibility of a politics of experience becomes important for Lash as he turns to the question of what kind of politics and experience is possible in our rapidly changing world.
The next two chapters provide Lash’s answers to this question. Chapter Six discusses the implications of technologically mediated or constituted experience for both the observer and the observed. Here, Lash takes a journey through the history of computer science and cybernetics, drawing fruitfully on Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” to posit the possibility of emerging technological forms of life. Lash asks provocative questions about the possibility of machine-mediated experience resulting in a new form of experience, technological experience. Chapter Seven then turns to the globalization of social theory, focusing specifically on how Chinese art and thought can potentially broaden our understanding of experience. Here a new form of experience seems to be introduced—aesthetic experience. Chinese art specifically, for Lash, presents the possibility of a form of subjective experience not centered on the subject but rather open to multiplicity.
This shift from the history of our understanding of experience in the first part of the book to the question of how experience may change in an algorithm-controlled and globalized world in the second half raises a question. Is Lash’s goal primarily to describe the history of how philosophy and social science have conceptualized experience, or is it to describe actual changes in the lived experience of humans? In other words, is what is at stake here that our conceptualizations of experience have profound impacts on policy and practice, or is it that our way of experiencing the world has changed over time? It is not always clear what the answer is to this question, and it possibly changes from chapter to chapter. One of the lessons of the spread of homo economicus seems to be, however, that how we scientifically conceptualize experience may in turn shape what we actually experience. Perhaps ironic for a book that is called Experience and is so deeply engaged in explicating various forms of experience, a clear articulation of the scope of experience as a concept is lacking.
Overall, this book demonstrates not only Lash’s incredibly broad range of knowledge but also a mind that makes many interesting and unexpected connections. This breadth also presents the reader with a potential challenge. The areas of history and theory that Lash draws on are exceedingly wide, and names come at the reader fast. Depending on one’s background knowledge, various threads may be more or less difficult to follow. The journey is worth the effort, and, heeding Lash’s own suggestion, the reader may find selective or non-sequential reading based on interest to be a fruitful approach to the book.