3. MARCO TEÓRICO
3.11. Herramientas de campo
4.2.2. Tratamiento de información topografía con UAV´s
The concept of genuine experience has had implicit narrative dimensions all along. A genuine experience occurs when I have a set of (more or less conscious) anticipations that are defied by some event, and this leads me to call into
myself and the world around me anew – this is both the movement of spirit Hegel traces (‘at home’, alienated, reconciled) and the basic structure of a narrative (set-‐up, crisis, resolution). Narratives have a well-‐established hermeneutical significance,334 not least because they are vital sense-‐making
practices; Heidegger noted that our everyday experience is shaped by the way we project ourselves into the future, and such projections have an implicit narrative structure (since any given moment is in the middle of some narrative); and Ricoeur notes that experiences have a structure that makes them
(potentially) the basic stuff of as-‐yet-‐untold narratives.335 Charles Taylor has
recently made the argument that many of the insights we learn through our lives are not fully detachable from the narrative of which they are a part, echoing Gadamer’s insistence that a genuine experience deepens one’s already-‐existing understanding of something.336 Since the locus classicus for narrative self-‐
understanding is MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I will begin by showing the parallels between MacIntyre’s discussion of narrative events and Gadamer’s concept of genuine experience, and then proceed to critical analysis.
In a paper on epistemological crises, MacIntyre opens with a discussion of what must count as ‘genuine experiences’ for the people involved: break-‐ups of
relationships that lead one to question one’s whole reading of a person, thinking that one is a valued employee and then being fired, etc.337 Our understanding of
others, he notes, is grounded in the schemata of a shared culture, which underlie both my ability to act intelligibly and my ability to make sense of the actions of others. When something fails to go according to plan (what I took to be a steady relationship breaks down, I am fired from the job I thought I was doing well in) then these schemata suddenly become problematic for us – we consciously reflect on them, perhaps for the first time (p. 4). The task becomes that of re-‐ writing the narrative in light of which we understand our situation; until we can do this, we remain in crisis (p. 5). When this crisis is resolved, two results are
334 See Gallagher, ‘Self and Narrative’, in Malpas & Gander (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics.
335 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1., Ch. 3.
336 Charles Taylor, The Language Animal, p. 291, and the rest of Ch. 8.
337 ‘Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science’, first published in
achieved: the new narrative allows us both to understand our situation and to understand how we could have gone wrong. The result is a deeper
understanding – although not a final understanding, since ‘our beliefs about what the marks of “a best account so far” are will themselves change in what are at present unpredictable ways’ (p. 6). This closely parallels Gadamer’s account of genuine experience: crisis is reconciled through a deeper understanding, but a deeper understanding that does not exclude the possibility of further experience.
Then, in After Virtue,338 MacIntyre elaborates this insight, concluding that the
basic structure of a good life is a life spent in pursuit of the good life – its narrative structure is that of the quest, in which the protagonist sets out in pursuit of one thing and then, in the course of events, comes to understand both himself and the thing he is pursuing better (and thus differently) than he did initially.339 The important point is that the central feature of a quest is that the
protagonist sets out to acquire something of great importance but which is not entirely defined, and along the way overcomes a variety of challenges that lead to a deepening of their understanding of themselves and of the value of the thing pursued. The essential idea is that a human life is best characterised as a quest to realise a good human life. This too can be read nicely in terms of genuine
experience. At any given time, someone has more or less determinate ideas about how their life is going and where it is going, but in the course of living it various disruptions happen – a promising project is foiled, a loved one dies, something one thought would make one happy turns out not to. These
disruptions call into question what one had taken for granted – when a project fails, I am forced to rethink what it is I am working towards; when a loved one dies, I need to restructure my life around the gap they have left if I am to cope; and when something I had been striving for fails to make me happy, I find myself either looking for something else or forced to re-‐evaluate what I had taken happiness to be.340 Understanding life as fitting to the narrative of a quest is a
way of domesticating the disruptions that happen along the way as moments in a broader narrative that itself has a coherent and broadly affirmative structure.
338 First published 1981.
339 After Virtue, Ch. 15, esp. pp. 219-‐20.
340 A deep study of this latter phenomenon, what Hegel would call the bad infinity of desire, is
But genuine experiences are even more disruptive than this, since it seems entirely possible that what one comes to realise is that the narrative of one’s life has changed: perhaps one realises, too late, that one was deluded about one’s real priorities, concealing a lie one comes to see as reprehensible behind a veneer of good intentions that fools even oneself; or, less pessimistically, that one’s priorities were all wrong. Raymond Geuss has noted that understanding one’s life in terms of a single narrative may just be too restrictive: ‘A human life “as a whole” does not seem to me at all like a single huge race or the deployment of a craft. It seems to me highly questionable whether my whole life admits of treatment as a single narrative in any interesting sense, but even if I were to grant that it is or could be such a narrative, the kind of narrative in question would have to be the one that would be only contingently related to the “story” of a single agon, competition, or race. [...] If we at any particular time give our desires some minimal order by reference to some conception of a single
overarching good, we also know that those conceptions of a unitary good change during our lives. Any unity of desire is “necessarily” and unavoidably fleeting, transitory, fragile, and imposed on much more chaotic structures that are, however, not just nothing or “empty”.’341 The idea here is that grasping human
life as a single narrative, a single quest, totally passes over the way our projects and priorities can change so much that it becomes extremely difficult to see myself as having, in the past, been working towards anything that is of real importance to me now; and I can recognise now that this contingency means that I may in the future come to repudiate everything I am working towards now.342
However, it is not at all clear that this means I cannot, from the perspective of the present, always construe my life in terms of a narrative that makes sense of where I am now; past episodes in which I pursued things that appear to me now as totally idiotic, misguided, confused, etc., could be construed as side episodes and distractions, or as the history of blunders that brought me to where I am. A narrative does not necessarily have to form a coherent whole, anyway; as Eagleton has noted, understanding your life as a narrative ‘does not mean that
341 Geuss, A World Without Why, p. 64.
342 This is in opposition to the Stoic ideal of ‘constancy’, of remaining true to the same set of
priorities in all circumstances. For a recent biography of Seneca that reads his life in terms of his success or failure to live up to this ideal, see Emily Wilson, Seneca: A Life (Penguin, 2016).
everything from cutting your first teeth to losing the lot of them has to form a logically coherent whole. Not many narratives of any degree of subtlety have that kind of unity. Narratives can be multiplied, ruptured, recursive and diffuse and still be narratives.’343
Nonetheless, there is something hermeneutically very significant in Geuss’s rejection of the idea that one can sum up a life in a single narrative ‘in any interesting sense’. This can be brought out by considering the view of life that finds its expression in Dante’s Divine Comedy: that any and every life can be summed up in a single image. As Geuss puts it: ‘The lives of those whom Dante encounters are seen as in some way summed up in a single image: Paolo and Francesca buffeted by the unending wind of desire, the sodomites running an eternal race over a desert, Ulysses in his flame.’344 Dante’s view, it seems to me,
only makes sense if there is some kind of final perspective on what is significant in human life: what matters in the end is how well one avoided sin and practiced (Christian) virtue; everything else is so much worldly stuff, of no final
importance. But if there is no final perspective, but rather only an endless array of shifting perspectives that reflect one’s present priorities, then no life can be thus summed up without remainder – whatever is sidelined or left out in this image or this narrative may well be of fundamental importance for another narrative. Hermeneutically, it makes all the difference in the world whether one can establish a final viewpoint or not. My contention is that we cannot establish a final viewpoint, and that Gadamer’s attempt to smuggle one in ends in failure.
The trouble with Gadamer’s concept of genuine experience, and with
MacIntyre’s notion of life as a quest, is that they are both implicitly affirmative: genuine experience leads to reconciliation and deeper understanding, and the quest transmutes today’s suffering into tomorrow’s insight into the good life for man.345 Implicit in Gadamer’s concept of the ‘experienced man’ is that his life
343 Eagleton, After Theory (Allen Lane, 2003), p. 127. 344 A World Without Why, p. 244n26.
345 This is connected with what Grondin calls ‘the truth of hope’ in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I am
claiming that Gadamer passes beyond hope (I can hope that today’s suffering will be tomorrow’s insight) into optimism (Gadamer does not really consider the possibility that this process won’t be fulfilled). See Grondin (2004), ‘Gadamer’s Hope’, Renascence, 56, 4, pp. 287-‐292. Weinsheimer claims that, for Gadamer, experience is the disappointment of hope, but this hope is the hope that my current understanding will be borne out (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, p. 201); he then modifies this a few pages later into the form I am offering a critique of: ‘If experience does not reach
narrative will ultimately be affirmative: even though one wished one did not have to suffer one’s way into truth, it is better to be what one is now. My
objection is not that this is wrong, but that it is incomplete. Gadamer would seem to be unduly optimistic in his confidence that a genuine experience is ultimately a good thing. As his reference to Aeschylus makes clear – pathei mathos, ‘by suffering learned’ – genuine experience is to be understood on the model of tragedy; but the model of tragedy he has in mind seems to be broadly Hegelian: the human spirit only progresses through its encounter with negativity, but progress through negativity it does.346 He opposes one kind of teleology of
experience (its completion in the concept), but replaces it with another (the growth of openness). However, genuine experiences do not necessarily end well, nor are lives necessarily characterised by increasing insight or openness to the future. The upshot of a genuine experience might be that one comes to see one’s life not as a quest but as a failure,347 or that one comes to a reconciliation that
others will struggle to affirm, or one might fail to learn anything at all.
We might oppose to Aeschylus’s pathei mathos348 Euripides’s much bleaker
picture of reality. In the Hekabe, for example, nobody seems to learn anything through their suffering. Hekabe has just witnessed the destruction of her city, she has fallen from queen to slave, her husband is dead, almost all of her children are dead – and it breaks her. One thing piles on another: Polyxena, her daughter, is torn away from her so that the Greeks can sacrifice her to appease Achilles’s ghost; and then she discovers that her son Polydorus, whom she had thought was her sole surviving son, is dead – murdered by Polymestor, the man to whom
closure in knowledge, that is because being experienced consists not only in preserving hope to the end but extending it beyond every end and, in an openness to new experience, to the unexpected, to possibility, and to the future’ (ibid., p. 204). Risser, too, moves immediately from the pain of new experience (when the self is forced to accommodate itself to something other) to recovery (The Life of Understanding, Chs. 2 & 3).
346 On the tragic element in Hegel’s thought, and for further references, see Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Blackwell, 2003), Ch. 3.
347 Schmidt makes a similar point when he suggests that ‘ethical understanding needs to be able
to account for, and come to terms with, [the] inherent errancy of life’, which Gadamer does not adequately account for. See Schmidt, ‘The Sources of Ethical Life’, pp. 47-‐48.
348 Had it been written by Euripides, I would suspect parody in ‘Seven Against Thebes’ when
Antigone comments of her two brothers that only now (that they are dead) do they understand the folly of trying to shed each others’ blood: ‘You have learned the lesson by experience,’ she says (l. 989; trans. David Grene in Grene & Lattimore (ed.) The Complete Greek Tragedies, 4 volumes [Chicago, 1959], 1:298). The Greek does not contain either pathein (to suffer,
experience) or mathein (to learn), however; the operative verbs are oida (to know) and diaperaw (to pass through). My thanks to James Horan for discussion of this passage.
she had entrusted him. All of this sends her mad with grief, and she takes her revenge by blinding Polymestor and murdering his sons in turn. Hekabe’s experiences have driven her beyond anything a human can bear, and so in the end she is turned into a dog.349
Alice Munro’s story ‘Gravel’ also presents us with a genuine experience that has destructive force, a genuine experience rooted (unlike Hekabe’s) in the experiences of daily life.350 The story is told in retrospect by a young woman who
was, at the time of the events narrated, only a small child. Her mother has just left her father (an insurance salesman) for Neal, who is something of a hippie, and represents to her (the mother) some kind of liberation. She takes her two small children to live in a caravan with Neal, on the edge of the town they lived in. Near their caravan is a gravel pit, perhaps 10 or 20 feet deep, which in winter is filled with water. Caro, the narrator’s older sister, for obscure reasons (in protest against her mother? for the fun of it? simply to cause a fuss?) jumps into the water after throwing their dog in, and the narrator has to run back to the caravan to get the adults. Her memory is confused, but, whatever happened, help didn’t arrive in time, and Caro drowned. Neal leaves, and her mother and father now avoid talking about it, but when – years later – she visits Neal, he gives her this advice: ‘The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.’ The story then ends with this reflection on the part of the narrator: ‘I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.’351
This narrative exhibits all of the hallmarks of a genuine experience. Something interrupts the normal flow of life, and calls a whole lot of things into question (to name but one, not indicated in the plot summary above: Caro’s swimming
lessons had been interrupted by her moving to the caravan with her mother); it
349 For this reading, see Anne Carson’s preface to her translation of ‘Hekabe’, Grief Lessons (NYRB
Classics, 2006), p. 93; cf. also Dante’s Inferno, Bk. XXX.
350 Collected in her Dear Life (Chatto & Windus, 2012). 351 Dear Life, pp. 108-‐9.
changes the lives of the whole family. And it remains standing out: the narrator, years later, is still unable to make sense of the event. The experience will not let her go.
Next, let us consider the plight of Winston in Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-‐Four – in particular, his ultimate fate. While Winston spends much of the novel
increasingly gripped by the conviction that the true history of the world matters, he is broken at the end. The final paragraph of the novel runs:
He gazed up at the enormous face [of Big Brother]. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-‐ willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-‐scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Winston’s understanding of the world has been totally transformed. While he spends most of the novel in the grip of rebellion against the powers of the world, against Big Brother and the Party, running from them and thinking himself one step ahead, it all comes to a terrible end for him. The transformation is brought about by O’Brien, the Party member whom Winston mistakenly thought was also