Translating Experience

March 7, 2008 9:45 AM

I'm looking for translations of a particular sense of the English word "experience."

The early 20th century philosopher John Dewey differentiated between the daily, incohate stream of experience that we all encounter and something more specific called "an experience." Something memorable and well defined with a clear beginning, middle and end. For example, you're all experiencing this question right now, but you wouldn't think of it as "an experience" in the way you would think of going to a concert as an experience.

Do other languages have better ways of distinguishing these two concepts? There's got to be something in German...

posted by Jeff Howard to writing & language (11 comments total)

I'd tend to think most languages do this with a word more live "event," or at least that seems logical to me. No particular help for you on specifics, though.
posted by Rallon at 9:53 AM on March 7

Peak experience? Flow?

Nowness? Suchness? Thusness?

You might try looking at some Buddhist texts. They have all sorts of terms for experience.
posted by webnrrd2k at 9:58 AM on March 7

From what I (dimly) recall, Russian sort of differentiates between the two, with опыт and случай (roughly: ōpēt and slūchai). The former being more situational and the later pertaining to events.
posted by jjb at 10:01 AM on March 7

Something memorable and well defined with a clear beginning, middle and end. For example, you're all experiencing this question right now, but you wouldn't think of it as "an experience" in the way you would think of going to a concert as an experience.

I can't speak to German, but since you mentioned other languages: in Spanish, that could be called a "vivencia", rather than just an "experiencia". It does follow the differentiation that Dewey makes.
posted by DrGirlfriend at 10:14 AM on March 7

I think you may be overcomplicating this. It doesn't seem necessary to look to foreign languages. "Experience" is an extremely broad, flexible word, so it can be applied to something long, like a career, or something lasting a couple hours, like a concert, or something really short, like reading a paragraph. If you want to refer specifically to an instantaneous experience, you can pick from among many synonyms: "perception," "sensation," etc. Same thing if you want to refer specifically to something longer: "tenure" to refer to a job, "journey" to refer to a trip, etc. In other words, I just don't accept the premise that you've identified any gap in the English language.
posted by Jaltcoh at 10:16 AM on March 7

From what I (dimly) recall, Russian sort of differentiates between the two, with опыт and случай (roughly: ōpēt and slūchai). The former being more situational and the later pertaining to events.

This isn't quite right. опыт means experience in the Hillary Clinton sense, not like "I experienced a feeling of remorse." случай literally means "event" or "occurrence," without the human context necessarily included. If a dinosaur ate a fish in the Jurassic, that would be a случай, but Dewey wouldn't consider it "an experience."
posted by nasreddin at 10:22 AM on March 7

Thanks nasreddin, its been a really long time since my Russian was used.
posted by jjb at 10:36 AM on March 7

Erlebnis vs. Erfahrung might be what you're thinking of. An Erlebnis is more special, more of a particular incident.
posted by creasy boy at 10:38 AM on March 7

you can pick from among many synonyms...

If you've got some more from English, that's fair game too. I'm just looking at foreign languages as a lens to view a broad concept. In English it seems more common to use the single word to mean each of the different senses of experience. I thought other languages might default to different ways of framing it.
posted by Jeff Howard at 10:46 AM on March 7

You my be interested to read some performance theory, which articulates this distinction carefully around the notions of "performance" as framed event and performance as the accomplishment of everyday life. A good place to start is Rosalind C. Morris' essay "Performance and Performativity" in the Annual Review of Anthropology (I think around 2001 or 2002). Or the classic Dick Bauman essay "Story, performance, and event." A lot of work in this tradition is directly critical of the phenomenological reduction of contextual markedness to "experience," though much of this work has also sought to integrate phenomenological and practice-based perspectives.
posted by fourcheesemac at 10:52 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]

It happens that studying German synonyms is one of my hobbies, but I'm at work, and all of my different Dictionaries of German Synonyms are at home, but you can look at various definitions of "experience" on this page. I see that the index from "Beaton" as posted on Amazon indicates that it has a few pages on different synonyms for the word "experience." Chances are "Erlebnis" is closer to the meaning you seek than "Erfahrung" but I am very curious to see what all the books have to say about this...
posted by thomas144 at 12:25 PM on March 7