Minimalist

The least
You can come away
From an experience with
Is information.

Here's a question for you Peter: How could you possibly avoid experience? Whether you do one thing or another, you will gain experience either way.


Les

I guess the response to your question, Les, is: how would you know you had not had an experience if you did not have one? More seriously, every experience is a composition of what we understand and what we go through, what happens to us. The very concept of an 'experience' has been a problematic concept for philosophers since Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. For most thinkers it isn't even treat like a philosophically valid concept, but that is another story. Since I brought it up, I guess I have to own up to my use of it. I view experience as what we are a part of when we engage the world we surround ourselves with. It is neither independent of us nor merely the product of our behaviour. But it is our own. What we get from it, beyond the minimum noted in the poem, is in part ourselves. We become who we are by virtue of our participation in our experience, in our lives, our consciousness, our witness to the human universe we inhabit. Our experience contributes to the very structure of our understanding as we come to anticipate what can conceivably happen to us in any given situation. So it works backward and forward to make us what we are. In philosophical terminology, rather than simply being epistemological information our experience contributes to what it is to be a human being ontologically. Wallace Stevens traced the shift from epistemology to ontology in the development of his poetry, in my view. That was what my Doctoral dissertation was about, in part.I talked about these kinds of issues, almost incomprehensibly, for almost 250 pages once twenty some odd years ago, so I'll shut up.

Thanks for visiting my little piece.

Peter

my response is certainly not 'minimalist.'

my response is certainly not 'minimalist.'


Now you're talkin' my language.


Les