The Way to Experience

The problem is deeply rooted. For if we are to reach this deeply buried root, we must dig through the strata of dirt that thousands of years have settled over it and become sedimented around it, and this process of unearthing could very well endanger the root which we are seeking. Experience is a very old tree. It's roots have become very tough as it has grown into its ever-changing environment, and as its environment has changed in order to accommodate its needs. We could content ourselves with leaving it be and resting comfortably in its shade, but alas - it has grown so old that it has come to wither. What is to fault? It has an abundance of the sunlight of reason shining onto its leaves, and we water it regularly with the outpouring of our life's blood (er-lebnis). Alas, but the roots dig deeper and deeper into the earth to find a ground with enough nutrients to permit it to grow healthily, and it meets with nothing but the clay of dead cultures compacted hard all around. The strata of meaning that have separated us from the goings-on of experience are too responsible for threatening its life.

The only thing left for us to do, we human beings, caretakers of the garden of thought, is to carefully dig out the dead soil and replant the entire tree. But what labor must be done for such a feat! Even for the smallest plant, it is a great danger to lift it out of its defining environment and bring it into another. For such a majestic Sequoia as experience, it should surely prove impossible! We must remind ourselves that if we are indeed gardeners, the whole garden is our concern and we should not allow one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. Has experience grown so wide, so thick and so high that it has cut out the sunlight for the young saplings at its base? If it is the life of thought itself that is threatened by the overgrowth of one Idea, is it not for the best that it die so as to bring new life to the rest? But it has not yet been settled whether experience means the life of thought or its denigration. What if just the opposite were the case - what if experience should prove to be the very lifeblood of the garden of Anglo philosophy? In the words of Saint Mark, what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? If experience is that, our soul of philosophy, we would bring our vivacious garden to lie fallow were we to let it die. Indeed, this is the problematic of experience: if it is worth our while, it is the most important thing in the world - but if it means nothing, we would be wasting our time were we to tend to it at all. With regard to the role of experience in philosophy, the matter is still very much up to question.