Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been
as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet,
to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of
experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many
different traditions have been compelled to understand it. Songs of
Experience is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of
human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual
historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative
analysis--qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so
distinctive and so successful--Songs of Experience explores Western
discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the
concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting
any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that
transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate
the entire spectrum of intellectual history.
As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding
experience--epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and
historical--Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and
American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and
British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French
poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual
philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant,
Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite,
this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the
ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical
meaning of "experience" in modern cultures.
