something,” “to have to undergo experiences with something,” “to have become richer by certain experiences,” always convey two senses: First, they indicate a certain sense of having been disappointed and surprised because things turned out other than expected. Second, they suggest an additional learning of something new that is increasingly verified.
Let us briefly distinguish both groups or concepts of experience. 1. Experimenting in the sense of demonstrating and proving an opinion about something with recourse to sense perception of that thing itself. 2. Undergoing an experience in the sense of letting the matter itself demonstrate itself and so be verified as it is in truth.*
According to the first group of meanings, we speak of the sciences of experience as “experimental sciences.” Depending on whether we conceive the notion of a demonstrating-intuition in a narrow or a broad sense, we change the concept of experience. If we do not limit demonstrating-intuition to what is sensible—and is obtained primarily through the sense organs—but conceive of this intuition simply as the manner of confirming an opinion on the matter at hand, then the concept of an intuition of essences may emerge. For example, such an intuition is required in determining the structural relation of a subject and a predicate in a proposition, a relation which can neither be seen by the eyes nor heard by the ears. Even less will we invent something arbitrary about it. Instead, we must demonstrate the structural relation in a living proposition as such. We must render this relation evident for what it is, we must render its essence “evident” as it emerges out of the relationship itself. The intuition which delivers the essence in this first sense, is the phenomenological intuition. Because such an intuiting can be confirmed in terms of the things themselves, as they are in themselves, the phenomenological intuition can also be called experience. It was in this fundamentally extended sense that Scheler used the expression “phenomenological experience” in his early important works over twenty years ago. Recently Husserl too seems to have taken up this extended concept of experience whenever he uses that word—a practice which is in keeping with his conviction, held by him for a long time now and mentioned often, that phenomenology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood.4
The Hegelian concept of experience as it appears in the title of his Phenomenology, “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” does not go in the same direction as the aforementioned contemporary phenomenological concept of experience. In Hegel the emphasis is not on the moment of significance in confirmation by intuition. Saying this, I am saying at the same time something whose mention is really superfluous from the first, namely, that “science of experience” has nothing at all to do with the “experimental sciences” in the current sense, e.g., biology or history. With the expression “science of experience,” Hegel does not want to emphasize that this science should be confirmed and proved in the experience of either a sensible or an intelligible intuition. Therefore, it is quite misleading to try, from this point of view or in general, to establish a connection between contemporary phenomenology and that of Hegel—as Nicolai Hartmann does, as if Hegel were concerned with the analysis of the acts and experience of consciousness.
The Hegelian concept of experience moves much more in the direction of the second group of meanings which the term experience has, namely, experience as denoting, both negatively and positively, undergoing an experience with something in such a way that this something is verified, experiencing it as not being what it first seemed to be, but being truly otherwise. However, what proves to be different will not be thrown aside. Rather, the appearance in such and such a way [das So-Scheinen] belongs precisely to that which is experienced and is included in that which renders the experience richer. For Hegel this way of undergoing an experience is certainly not related to events, tools, or people. So to what is it related? The answer is given in the title of the Phenomenology: Science of the experience of consciousness. If this means that the experiences are experiences of consciousness, then this consciousness is the object of experiencing. But it is questionable whether the term “of’ in the expression “experience of consciousness” is to be interpreted as an objective genitive, however much the ordinary meaning of the title may suggest such an interpretation. “Experience of consciousness” does not mean primarily experiences that are in and about consciousness. Rather, this expression suggests that it is consciousness itself that undergoes these experiences. Consciousness, as Hegel says, is “comprehended in the experience itself.”5 If we ask in what consciousness undergoes its experiences or with what it must undergo its experiences, the answer is: In and with itself [an ihm selbst, mit sich selbst]. So maybe consciousness is the object of experience, and the above interpretation is correct? By no means. On the contrary, only because consciousness in the quite specific sense of absolute knowledge is the subject of experience is consciousness the object of experience and can undergo an experience with itself—not the other way around. To the extent that consciousness as subject undergoes the experience (consciousness and experience understood in the Hegelian sense), it cannot do this other than in itself. If, on the contrary, we take consciousness initially as an object, then it is indeed possible that consciousness can be experienced and described differently, e.g., as phenomenological experiences with [am] consciousness, which have nothing to do with what Hegel means by the “experience of consciousness.”
Experience of consciousness is, therefore, “the experience of itself which consciousness goes through.”6 What sort of experience must consciousness undergo with itself? We have already delineated the basic features of such an experience. Initially consciousness is relative knowledge to such an extent that it knows nothing about itself, about what it is. Consciousness knows only about its own object, and only insofar as it is in consciousness. It does not even know the object as such, where the object stands opposite the knowing of it. As soon as knowledge knows its object, it already knows that the in-itself is object for consciousness. This is to say, being-for-consciousness is a being-known [Gewußtsein]. This being for … is knowledge. To the extent that consciousness is aware of itself as a knowledge of … that allows the object to take a position opposite consciousness, to that extent the object loses its character as in itself and becomes something else, turns into something for consciousness, into a knowledge. And as a knowledge that is known, this knowledge becomes something other than what it formerly was when consciousness was simply absorbed in the knowledge of the object. There emerges now another mode of knowledge; and what was known formerly, the being in itself of the object, becomes different.
When consciousness undergoes its experience of itself as knowledge of the object and thus also undergoes its experience in terms of the object, then consciousness must experience that it becomes something other for itself. Consciousness verifies to itself what it really is, in the immediate knowledge of the object, which is not further known. In this verification consciousness loses its initial truth, what it at first thought of itself. However, in this verification consciousness not only loses its initial truth but also undergoes an experience and becomes richer by it, in that consciousness obtains a truth about itself. Thus, “the new true object”7 issues forth for consciousness. And inasmuch as consciousness and its knowledge are the sole object of this experience, consciousness becomes richer by a knowledge of knowledge, a knowledge of what knowledge is. Through this experience knowledge increasingly discovers the way to itself and to its ownmost essence.
Thus, the experience which consciousness undergoes with itself has a negative and positive aspect, corresponding to the second concept of experience we discussed earlier. Through the experience which consciousness undergoes with itself, consciousness becomes other to itself. But this becoming-different-to-itself is exactly a coming-to-itself. As Hegel puts it: “And experience is precisely the name we give to this movement, in which the immediate, the unexperienced, i.e., the abstract {relative}, whether it be of sensuous (but still unsensed) being or is only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from out of this alienation, is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, and becomes also a property of consciousness.”8 Hegel calls experience a “movement,” and in the introduction to the Phenomenology he says explicitly that consciousness undergoes this experience,