The Wild Region in Life-History

1: Experiential Sense in Life-History

1 Experiential Sense in Life-History I n the previous discussion of the relationship between one’s own history and one’s self-identity, a crucial role has been assigned to the concept of sense. I have made abundant use of terms like sense bestowal, spontaneous sense formation, and retroactive sense fixation. An unusually broad meaning has been attributed to the word sense in all of these expressions . How can this extended use of the word be justified? In order to find an answer to this question, I wish to study the relationship between (extralinguistic) sense and (linguistic) meaning in phenomenology. I shall endeavor to show that this relationship raises the more general problem of the connection between experience and expression. I shall argue that all lived experience is related to the spontaneous emergence of a dispossessed sense, whereas the conceptual and linguistic expression of this experience is necessarily based on a retroactive fixation of sense. I. The Sense of Experience Phenomenology can be viewed as an attempt to grasp reality in its sense—or even as a sense. It is not merely the meaning of linguistic expressions which is designated here by the word sense. The use of this term had been extended beyond the area of language even by Husserl himself. He admitted that, originally, the word meaning was only related to the sphere of speech. However, he considered it as “almost inevitable” and, at the same time, as “an important step for knowledge,” to enlarge the meaning of this word.1 Husserl regularly used the term sense as an equivalent for this extended concept of meaning and several phenomenologists followed him in this practice. 3 4 T H E W I L D R E G I O N I N L I F E - H I S T O R Y But how can the broad meaning of the term sense be defined? This is a difficult and controversial question. As long as this question is not satisfactorily answered, the extended concept of sense remains, however, unclear. No wonder, then, that this concept is often considered to be suspect —or even treated as a by-product of the decomposition of the metaphysical idea of a “reason in the world.” It is, however, incontestable that ordinarily, terms like meaning and sense are not only applied to linguistic expressions but also to perceptions, actions, series of events, and the arrangements of (certain) things.2 Therefore, the attempt to clarify the broader sense of these terms and to determine its relationship with the narrower concept of linguistic meaning seems to be justifiable. What is, then, sense in the extended use of the term? Early phenomenology provides here a fruitful suggestion. Heidegger, and even Husserl, is committed to the view that the structure of sense can generally be framed to the formula “something as something.” Both of them define sense by this “as-structure.” The pertinence of this suggestion can be attested to by a simple example . All of a sudden, I catch sight of a sheet of white paper in front of me; I may express this perception by saying, “I can see a sheet of white paper in front of me.” Early phenomenology attributes an as-structure to the expressed perception, as well as to its conceptual and linguistic expression . To put it in Husserlian terms, I may even say, “Whenever I catch sight of a sheet of white paper in front of me, I recognize the object of my perception as paper, and, at the same time, I recognize this paper as white.” It would, however, be misleading to describe this act of recognition , in a Kantian vein, as a result of the application of a concept to the manifold of an intuition. The term recognition is designed here, on the contrary, to indicate an inherent feature of perception rather than the outcome of its synthesis with a properly conceptual representation. I may say, as Wittgenstein would probably put it, that I can see the object in front of me as paper and the paper as white. Seeing as . . . specifies a structure peculiar to perception. It may be claimed that it is this structure which is designated by Husserl, already in Logical Investigations, as “perceptual sense.”3 That this is not an improper correspondence can be shown by a method of variation which is typically of a Husserlian provenance. A sheet of white paper takes different shapes in different situations. Under...