Songs of Experience

by Jay, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780520248236
• ISBN10: 0520248236
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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 Experienceis 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 Experienceexplores 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.

Author Biography

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
INTRODUCTION	1	(8)
1 The Trial of "Experience": From the Greeks to Montaigne and Bacon	9	(31)
2 Experience and Epistemology: The Contest between Empiricism and Idealism	40	(38)
3 The Appeal of Religious Experience: Schleiermacher, James, Otto, and Buber	78	(53)
4 Returning to the Body through Aesthetic Experience: From Kant to Dewey	131	(39)
5 Politics and Experience: Burke, Oakeshott, and the English Marxists	170	(46)
6 History and Experience: Dilthey, Collingwood, Scott, and Ankersmit	216	(45)
7 The Cult of Experience in American Pragmatism: James, Dewey, and Rorty	261	(51)
8 Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno	312	(49)
9 The Poststructuralist Reconstitution of Experience: Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault	361	(40)
CONCLUSION	401	(10)
INDEX	411