Retrieving Experience: On the Phenomenology of Experience in Hegel and Kierkegaard, Arendt and Gadamer

Abstract

The purpose of the present contribution is to develop an understanding of experience that accounts for its need to be continuously uncovered and recovered in order to consolidate itself. Through critical dialogue with modern phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions I posit that this consolidation process proves porous and discontinuous as experience contains caesuras and limits, which break open and even fracture what is already known by individual consciousness so as to make room for something new to appear over the horizon. Thinking about how to engage with the phenomena given in experience draws us into a dynamic movement at the limits of singular subjectivity and the world which transcends it to all sides. After following and exploring this movement, it remains a question, which will be discussed in the end, whether all experience can be retrieved