Opplevelse, erfaring og formsvar

Jeg lager meg fra tid til annen tankefigurer, for kanskje bedre å forstår hvordan begreper kan knytte s til hverandre. En slik figur forsøker å knytte sammen opplevelse, erfaring og formsvar.

Et formsvar kan være en kunstnerisk eller funksjonell løsning som svarer på et behov, eller en utfordring, hvor resultatet er en gjennomtenkt form. Formsvar kan slik sett være resultatet av en estetisk (lærings)prosess.

Sammenhengen mellom opplevelse og erfaring er noe jeg ennå ikke føler jeg har kommet helt til bunns i. Skjønt det handler nok mest om at jeg stadig sliter med den norske oversettelsen av John Deweys Art as experience.  

Jeg følger Dewey fullt ut i forhold til at estetiske opplevelser og -erfaringer er noe som vi møter på alle områder i dagliglivet. Det engelsk «experience» er imidlertid tvetydig, og sammenhengene mellom estetisk opplevelse og estetisk erfaring kommer tydeligere til uttrykk i de germanske språkene. Hans Georg Gadamers diskusjon omkring Erlebnis (opplevelse) og Erfahrung (erfaring) knytter opplevelse til de umiddelbare og private hendelsene som mennesker møter i sitt hverdagsliv. 

Erfaring viser hos Gadamer til det tyske «fahren» – en «reise» gjennom livet – et ekstrakt av hendelser. Slike hendelsesreiser inkluderer relasjoner til andre mennesker, livshendelser og steder, der enkeltopplevelser settes i sammenheng med minner, ulike sosiale, kulturelle og geografiske  kontekster. Enhver erfaring involverer aktiv konstruksjon der en estetisk opplevelse blir til estetisk erfaring når hendelser og refleksjoner blir relatert til hverandre (mye sakset fra Hoem og Eide, 2023). 

På norsk ville vi gjerne si at en konsert kan gi en fantastisk opplevelse, mens mange års konsertbesøk gir erfaring. I mitt hode gir det et fruktbart, analytisk skille mellom det umiddelbare og det som utvikles over tid. Deweys mening med «An experience» er knyttet til at begge deler på samme tid, når den estetiske opplevelsen er så komplett og intens at den samtidig blir en del av individets erfaring. 

Jeg forstår nok ikke Dewey fullt ut, men for min del er mange opplevelser også retrospektive – jeg gjenkaller ofte opplevelser, for eksempel ved å lytte til et lydopptak, se et bilde eller en video, eller holde noe i hånden som gjenkaller et minne. Den umiddelbare, intense kvaliteten blandes da med den reflekterte, tilbakeskuende og meningsdannende prosessen, og minner (som neppe er tro mot det som faktisk en gang skjedde) blir formet. 

Jeg tar også meg selv i å fotografere mye i ulike utstillinger, nettopp fordi jeg ofte er like interessert i ideen (det jeg kan omsette og knytte til egne erfaringer) som til selve opplevelsen, der og da. Jeg nok mange ganger mer interessert i hva jeg selv kan skape, om mindre interessert i hva andre har skapt. Det betyr imidlertid at jeg også kan bli svært interessert i verk jeg egentlig ikke opplever som "gode". Det er nok noe ved dette som kan karakteriseres som å "ikke være fullt til stede", men en må kanskje ta høye for at det ofte er mange måter å være til stede på.

For ytterligere dypdykk: Dewey’s Aesthetics 

Eller som fra kilden: Art as experience, (side 35-37):

Philosophers, even empirical philosophers, have spoken for the most part of experience at large. Idiomatic speech, however, refers to experiences each of which is singular, having its own beginning and end. For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout. A flight of stairs, mechanical as it is, proceeds by individualized steps, not by undifferentiated progression, and an inclined plane is at least marked off from other things by abrupt discreteness.
        Experience in this vital sense is defined by those situations and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being "real experiences"; those things of which we say in recalling them, "that was an experience." It may have been something of tremendous importance—a quarrel with one who was once an intimate, a catastrophe finally averted by a hair's breadth. Or it may have been something that in comparison was slight—and which perhaps because of its very slightness illustrates all the better what is to be an experience. There is that meal in a Paris restaurant of which one says "that was an experience." It stands out as an enduring memorial of what food may be. Then there is that storm one went through in crossing the Atlantic—the storm that seemed in its fury, as it was experienced, to sum up in itself all that a storm can be, complete in itself, standing out because marked out from what went before and what came after.
        In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and interest to its successive portions greater than exist in the homogenous portions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.
        Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical junctions, and dead centers when we have an experience. There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement. They sum up what has been undergone and prevent its dissipation and idle evaporation. Continued acceleration is breathless and prevents parts from gaining distinction. In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so—just as in a genial conversation there is a continuous interchange and blending, and yet each speaker not only retains his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his wont.
        An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it. In discourse about an experience, we must make use of these adjectives of interpretation. In going over an experience in mind after its occurrence, we may find that one property rather than another was sufficiently dominant so that it characterizes the experience as a whole. There are absorbing inquiries and speculations which a scientific man and philosopher will recall as "experiences" in the emphatic sense. In final import they are intellectual. But in their eir actual occurrence they were emotional as well; they were purposive and volitional. Yet the experience was not a sum of the different characters; they were lost in it as distinctive traits. No thinker can ply his occupation save as he is lured and rewarded by total integral experiences that are intrinsically worthwhile. Without them he would never know what it is really tot think and would be completely at a loss in distinguishihing real thought from the spurious article. Thinking goes on in trains of ideas, but the ideas form a train only because they are much more than what an analytic psychology calls ideas. They are phases, emotionally and practically distinguished, of a developing underlying quality; they are its moving variations, not separate and independent like Locke's and Hume's so-called ideas and impressions, but are subtle shadings of a pervading and developing hue.