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Songs of Experience
Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
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by Martin Jay
University of California Press
Due/Published
January 2005, 431 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0520242726
Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. Songs of Experience is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis--qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful--Songs of Experience explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience--epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical--Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures. "This illuminating, provocative volume consolidates Martin Jay's standing as our leading modern intellectual historian. Ranging sure-footedly from ancient to postmodern discourse, Jay offers finely balanced readings of thinkers who have wrestled with the elusive concept of experience. Because Jay respects--and presents so clearly and sympathetically--positions different from his own, Songs of Experience gives readers the resources necessary to embrace or resist his own bold interpretations of philosophers from Kant and Burke through Dilthey and Dewey to Foucault and Rorty. This book will prove as indispensable to intellectual historians as the idea of experience itself."--James T. Kloppenberg Contents Introduction
1. The Trial of "Experience": From the Greeks to Montaigne and Bacon
2. Experience and Epistemology: The Contest between Empiricism and Idealism
3. The Consolations of Religious Experience: Schleiermacher, James, Otto and Buber
4. Returning to the Body through Aesthetic Experience: From Kant to Dewey
5. Politics and Experience: Burke, Oakeshott and the English Marxists
6. History and Experience: Dilthey, Collingwood, Scott and Ankersmit
7. The Cult of Experience in American Pragmatism: James, Dewey and Rorty
8. Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno
9. The Poststructuralist Reconstitution of Experience: Bataille, Barthes and Foucault
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