The structure of experience
While Hutcheson emphasized that a monistic conception of experience could not adequately explain the development of our ideas and concepts, the concept of experience itself remained outside his critical investigations – a deficit, moreover, that seemed to pervade the entire history of ideas. A fact confirmed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who noted: "Paradoxical as it may seem, the concept of experience seems to me to be one of the most obscure we have". [12] Therefore, exploring the nature of experience became Leidhold's next project. He published the results first in a series of essays [13] and then in a book on "Political Philosophy."
There he proposes to define experience as "conscious participation" in reality. [14] [15] Since there are various kinds of participation, there are also various dimensions of experience. All dimensions have one feature in common: participation turns into experience when we become aware of it. The result of this analysis was a typology of experience that includes: sensory perception, imagination and creativity, spirituality and contemplation, self-reflection and consciousness. In the remainder of the book, Leidhold shows how this theory of experience affects our understanding of consciousness and religion, of metaphysics (especially of time), of anthropology, and of political reality as well.
In his next book, The Logic of Religious Experience, [16] Leidhold focuses on the religious dimension, first systematically analyzing spiritual experience and then looking at it from an intercultural and historical perspective.
By applying his theory of experience to religion and its spiritual foundations, he shows how spiritual experience has evolved in the course of human history and throughout an array of Eastern and Western cultures. This examination reveals that the way people get in touch with the religious dimension of reality, i.e. the structure of spiritual experience, has changed several times, and that the elements of its structure were only gradually brought to light. Finally, the fully differentiated conception of religious experience is to be located in the period between 800 and 200 BC, that is, in an epoch that Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) called the "Axis Age." [17] However, Jaspers gave no reasons as to what triggered these achievements of the Axis Age, and even his successors such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923–2010) and Robert Bellah (1927–2013) spoke of a "conundrum". [18]
The dynamics of experience
Leidhold's examination of the history of spiritual experience shows that the innovations of the Axis Age ideas result from changes in the experiential structure. Based on the discovery of historical change in the structure of spiritual experience he suggests that all dimensions of experience each have their own history of evolution. [19] As the review of the historical material proved, the evolution of experience begins in the Paleolithic and extends to our present.
The result is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant, but changes over time. As Leidhold demonstrates in his book The History of Experience, A Study in Experiential Turns and Cultural Dynamics from the Paleolithic to the Present Day, [20] there is a total of nine experiential turns. The first three turns took place in Deep history: the transition from unconscious information processing to conscious perception, the unfolding of conscious imagination, and the discovery of a sense of order. Three more dimensions emerged during the Bronze Age and Antiquity: self-reflection, the Inner Eye of Reason, and a distinct approach to spiritual experience. Three more turns came about at the time of the Renaissance and modernity, adding creative imagination, consciousness, and the unconscious to the list of experiential dimensions.
All nine turns develop gradually, always going through the same sequence, composed of four phases. These four phases are:
- The incubator phase, in which individual pioneers become aware of a new dimension of experience
- The phase of articulation, when the new dimension is explicitly identified
- The phase of methodical practice, when methods evolve to make the new dimension accessible to other people
- The phase of institutionalization, when the new dimension becomes a permanent cultural feature. [21]
Accordingly, there is not one single axis, but nine axial turns in the course of human history. The basic pattern of cultural evolution and the order of history both result from these nine experiential transformations. Cross-cultural and historical analysis reveals how the variable mix of experiential dimensions defines the specific character of each culture.
The nine experiential turns affect all areas of human existence: the course of individual lives and of human history in general, the dynamics of culture as well as the evolution of political order. For example, it was only the conscious use of a vivid imagination that allowed humans to create art since the Upper Paleolithic. [22]
Nine experiential turns
The first turn in experience was the turn to explicit or conscious perception. It emerged during deep history, in the Old Stone-Age or Paleolithic. This was the epoch of stone-tool-making cultures before the advent of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For the survival of living beings, information processing is vital: they react to sensory input according to a stimulus-response scheme. The schema operates as implicit information processing, a process that operates without explicit, conscious awareness. The process is biologically inherited and sometimes further improved by learning. [23]
When consciousness intervenes, this sequence is interrupted, i.e. decoupled. Decoupling creates a pause that suspends the sequence of stimulus and response. With this new sequence, humans go from perception via conscious awareness to a subsequent response. However, consciousness is also a kind of searchlight that enables subjects to direct their focus also to things outside the immediate stimulus situation. [24] This marks the transition from biological to cultural evolution. This transition becomes evident when the deliberate practice of tool production precedes the use of tools. [25]
Imagination: from implicit memory to explicit remembrance and symbolic practice (2)
While implicit memory is a natural ability common to many party of the biosphere, explicit memory, or imagination, is a cultural achievement and a new experience. Implicit memory enables an animal, for example, to instinctively find its way to the watering hole. Explicit remembrance enables human beings to imagine the way to the water before going there. In this turn, too, the intervention of consciousness is crucial. Here, again, a decoupling occurs: the memory of a route appears in the light of consciousness, so that we decide whether we want to follow this route or rather take another one.
By transforming implicit memory into explicit remembrance, humans gradually acquired a new ability. We can detect the first traces of an effective use of the imagination during the Upper Paleolithic. At that time, complex tools started to require foresighted planning. This imaginative ability developed latest with the advent of flint technology.
Before you can make flint tools, you must first find flint, dig it up and prepare it for processing. You have to imagine from which blanks you can make what kind of tools. Between the desire to use tools, for example in hunting, and the execution of this impulse, there is an intermediate step: the deliberate production of tools.
At some point, this new, imaginative talent ceased to be used for tool making only. Now, humans began to produce symbolic artifacts and works of art. While tools impact on things, symbols impact on the imagination. This new symbolic practice began with Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. It reached its peak with the art of Homo sapiens. [26]
Leidhold traces its development by means of symbolic artifacts and works of art. Similar to the production of tools, special method and institutions emerged to organize this process. Paleolithic cave paintings are a prominent example of this process.
A sense of order: the experience of participation and cosmological myth (3)
The first symbolic culture limited itself to episodic representation. The third transformation added the new experience of participation among the elements of the cosmos. In this turn, the sense of order emerged. The Paleolithic experience of the environment and its artistic expression is essentially episodic. Cave paintings depict individual situations, but they do not form a narrative sequence, and they do not follow a common pattern.
In the third turn of experience, the sense of order adds a cosmological syntax, [27] connecting the hitherto isolated episodes into a coherent narrative, later known as myth. This transformation took place at about the beginning of the Mesolithic (ca. 10.000 BC). Since then, humans began to see themselves as part of a comprehensive whole, the cosmos. Accordingly, methodically constructed settlements, symbolically designed architecture, and situationally composed artworks were the first evidence of this new experience. [28] Through the sense of order, the regular relationship of parts became the dominant principle: the cosmological system of existence. [29]
Periphery and center, the circle and the cardinal points, the calendar and cosmological myth became the dominant symbolic forms of the cosmological system. Since the advent of writing in the Bronze Age, texts have supplemented the archive of symbolic artifacts. From now on, the experiences and ideas of these times can be understood through contemporary texts. [30]
The nature-based rhythm of time is transformed into history, usually ordered by the principle of genealogy. Cities become the center of life. Finally, the order of common life is reorganized, for example, through fixed hierarchies, hereditary positions, and institutionalized property relations. [31]
The turn to self-reflection (4)
The fourth experiential turn was the discovery of self-reflection. While myth spoke anonymously, the reflective turn presents the new experience of the individual self.
The prophet Zarathustra was the first to explicitly express the new experience. With self-reflection, the focus of consciousness explicitly turns from the outside to the inside, to the self. At the core of the new paradigm stood the method of introspection and responsible action, the concepts of truth, veracity, and free will. In his writings, the Gathas, Zarathustra not only described methods to follow his paradigm. He also managed to institutionalize his teachings and his methods. The prophets of Israel followed his example. [32]
With the reflective turn, humanity's self-image changed, too: the type of the authoritative personality emerges. For the first time, humans thus became active partners in the process of history. Aside from the prophets, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, Buddha and the teachers of the Upanishads, the philosophers of Greece and China also represent the new personality type. [33]
Simultaneously, the conception of existence in society and history changed, as did the rationale of political order. While in cosmological mythology the climax of time was at the moment of creation, now the advent of the prophet became the pivot of history. [34]
The propagation of truth turned into a main motive of religious action, and the expansion of power emerged as the main task of political practice. The expansionist empire, like Persia in the age of Darius the Great, and its imperial ideology were the political equivalent of the prophetic message. [35]
The noëtic turn or the discovery of reason (5)
The fifth dimension of experience evolved in Greek antiquity, as well as in India and China, when reason was discovered as a mental faculty supervising all other modes of experience. Since the Greek term for reason is ‘nous’, Leidhold calls this transformation the noëtic turn. With this turn, the origin of knowledge shifted divine sources of myth to the human side. This shift is usually called the "transition from myth to logos". [36] The transition took place gradually, beginning with Solon, continued by the Pre-Socratics, and completed by the Sophists.
The sophists were the real founders of rational thought, since they developed its characteristic methods – such as grammar, logic, rhetoric and Public Education – and spread them throughout Greece. The movement climaxed with Plato’s synthesis. In his Politeia, the book on the city-state and the concept of justice, Plato analyzed the noëtic turn in his analogy of the cave, calling the shift a "periagogé", a "turn-around". [37]
The Noëtic turn also created a unique model of public life. This model is closely related to the city-state, the Greek polis. In essence, the political way of life means: Replacing the eternal truths of sacred myths with fallible opinions based on common methodological practices. Thus, political culture has replaced the primary consensus based on belief in divinely endowed knowledge with a secondary consensus based on assent to the methods of rational discourse. [38] Similar contemporaneous developments occur in China and India.
Spiritual experience (6)
Exploring the particular nature of experience that underlay religions led to the sixth turn, the turn to spiritual experience. [39] While religious symbols date back to the Paleolithic, the experience they represent only came into explicit focus during antiquity. The new focus resulted from the discovery of the spirit, which became the key medium of religious or spiritual experience in its true sense.
In the Paleolithic the transcendent appears, e.g. in burials or in theriomorphic figures, as the Other Side in immediate vicinity to the world of the living. [40] In cosmological cultures, the gods and demons reside in extreme distance. [41] With prophetic experience, this "deus distans", the distant god, turned into a "deus absconditus", a hidden God. [42] With the noëtic turn, it became clear that transcendence is a specific form of reality, called spirit. [43]
Older attempts to communicate with transcendence ranged from ecstasy to prophetic revelation. For the preservation of spiritual achievements, special institutions were formed. At first, shamans figured as religious specialists, then whole classes like priests and religious orders took over. Finally, the spiritual turn established meditation as the key method in both East and West. Since anyone could learn meditation, this method was available to all people. [44]
Thus, the population as a whole became part of universal denominations, such as in a church. In parallel, spiritual experience was transformed into doctrine. This gave rise to a secondary form: the religion of institutions and dogmas. However, this development is ambivalent, as the focus shifts from spiritual experience to conflicts over orthodoxy and power. [45]
Creativity and the signature of modernity (7)
The seventh turn is about the human ability to create innovations. Humans have been innovating since the Paleolithic. Yet, until the High Middle Ages, creativity was considered the exclusive privilege of the deity. That changed with the seventh transformation. [46]
Isolated precursors, such as the Akkadian priestess Enheduanna or the Greek poet Pindar, have long suspected that humans are also endowed with creativity. However, the vast majority believed that not only the real elements of the cosmos but also all ideas, technologies and institutions existed as eternal creations since the beginning of time. The gods then donated the "new" ideas, technologies and institutions to humans one by one in the course of history. [47]
Eventually, however, general ideas ceased to be regarded as God's eternal creations, as in the Platonic and theological traditions of the via antiqua, and became human products. Since about the time of Abaelard, theology has held that God created the world out of nothing and without the mediation of ideas. Consequently, ideas were no longer eternal realities, but only names (Latin: "nomen") for human inventions. Therefore, this approach is called "nominalism". To explain the invention of ideas, nominalism therefore for the first time conceded the divine gift of creativity to humans. Richard of St. Victor [48] (ca. 1110–1173) was the first to present a theory of human creativity. [49]
Gradually, his theory became popular. Since the Renaissance, a universal cult of creativity and innovation took hold of all areas of life in Western Europe, from the arts and sciences, to engineering and economics, to politics and fashion. The cult of creativity became the signature of modernity. With Machiavelli and the contract theorists, it opened political ideas to the wind of change. When the idea of innovation was translated into political practice, two new patterns of action emerged: reform and revolution. That is why modern societies, unlike traditional ones, are constantly in a state of flux. [50]
The discovery of consciousness (8)
The eighth turn revolves around a central concept of experience itself: the concept of consciousness. In the history of experience, two pioneers accomplished the discovery of consciousness: Buddha and Descartes. [51] The new concept initiated a radical reorientation of philosophical thought. Epistemology and the philosophy of consciousness now replaced metaphysics and ontology as basic disciplines. The Cartesian Revolution spread rapidly throughout Europe, initiating a series of repercussions. [52]
Buddha analyzed consciousness to realize his project of liberation from suffering. [53] Two millennia later, Descartes was initially concerned with finding a reliable method for scientific research. He discovered the res cogitans, the "thinking thing," as the unshakable foundation of this project, and identified consciousness as the nature of the res cogitans. [54] From consciousness, John Locke developed his concept of personal identity: Individual identity is based on the biographical context of personal experience. Montesquieu and Voltaire expanded it into the collective identity of nations and cultures. Thus, collective identity is based on the historical shared experiences of smaller or larger groups. [55]
The primacy of methodology also prevailed in the modern concept of political order. The constitution as a set of rules became the epitome of all political method. It replaced the onto-theological consensus on the divine order of power, sacred law and inherited privileges. The modern concept of republican order is based on the secondary consensus about the constitution. [56]
The dimension of the unconscious (9)
The ninth turn developed in immediate succession to the eighth and is the discovery of the unconscious. The unconscious first appears as a dark reservoir beyond consciousness, a kind of inner transcendence from which conscious experience rises. While this dimension has long been indigenous to Buddhism and Hinduism, it has only become an integral part of Western experiential culture since the 19th century.
The Enlightenment considered the mind as a transparent terrain. Leibniz, however, doubted that all perceptions were permanently conscious to us. Ever more philosophers such as Hume, Wolff, and Platner shared his reservations. Alexander G. Baumgarten was the first to assign the unconscious a specific place in the psyche. [57] He called it the "bottom of the soul." His idea quickly caught on.
At first, leading theorists such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel considered the unconscious to be only an intermediate stage on the way to conscious reflection. Finally, Schopenhauer realized that it was a genuine dimension. Thus, he created the first theory of the unconscious. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the unconscious was a popular idea, disseminated by Maine de Biran, Eduard von Hartmann, and Nietzsche in particular. [58]
Sigmund Freud, however, was the first to go from theory to method. His method is well known as psychoanalysis. Carl Gustav Jung expanded the field by adding the archetypes and the collective unconscious. [59] Political implementations emerged as mass psychology, advertising, propaganda, and public relations. These, in turn, have stimulated new theoretical approaches developed in particular by Pareto, Lasswell, Schumpeter and the Critical theory of the Frankfurt School. [60]
More turns of experience to come? (10)
At the end of his study, Leidhold asks: Was the discovery of the unconscious also the last possible transformation? Has the history of experience come to an end? His answer is: there is no reason to think so. However, future directions are still uncertain. However, there is some speculation on the subject.
The Stoics already believed that the whole cosmos is a conscious living being, permeated by a "spirit" called "pneuma". Teilhard de Chardin hoped that the human spirit could get in touch with this cosmic pneuma – an idea recently taken up by Brian Swimme. Karl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli worked together all their lives on the striking phenomenon of synchronicity. Jung used this term to describe two (or more) temporally correlated events that are not linked by a causal relationship – such as when two people think of each other at the same time and then call each other synchronously. One of Jung's and Pauli's ideas was that this link could be based on quantum entanglement. Other researchers have also focused on the role of quantum physics. Since the 1960s and Eugene Wigner’s hypotheses, the idea emerged that the human brain and especially the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness are based on quantum mechanical principles. Physicists and physicians like David Bohm, Richard Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have further developed this quantum theory of consciousness. So far, there is neither consensus on future developments, nor are any of the above projects beyond controversy. [61]
