Fact, Fiction, and Lived Experience

As I'm reading Morris Berman's Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West, I am continually struck by moments of keen insight and wisdom. A good book is that way, isn't it? Chords are sounded, and notes are rung true on the scale of human experience.

Berman makes the point that what we consider objectivity, and "hard" science, and fact, are really only the remains of a process that began as movement and interaction and gradual realization. The shells and tools and implements of war that remain behind long ages after living creatures inhabited the earth are not the essence of what those creatures were. They were thinking, singing, making love, arguing, imagining, looking, sensing, wishing, yearning . . . They were more than tool-makers and war-makers. Yet we have no lasting evidence of the "soft" side of their experience. Only cave paintings and works of art and literature. And those don't last long enough to help us enter the world of the primeval man that we wish to know better.

The process of making, and the experience of living, are lost in the flow of time. All that remains are the products of the work. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, whose statue proclaims its omnipotence even as the king himself has disappeared into the sands of the desert. The king's lived experience has vanished. The sculptor's has nearly vanished as well. All we have is the sculptor's interpretation of the king and our interpretation of the stone that remains.

For me, fiction and poetry are important because they (can) capture(s) lived experience in all its richness and complexity. They do not (at their best) reduce life to facts and products. Instead, they encourage us to attend to processes, moments, and meanings as they emerge from lived experience. They provide us with an extension of our own lived experience--a broader world that we can enter with complete engagement, not as scientists uncovering fossils but as new inhabitants of a living fictional world. Lived experience, and the sharing of lived experience, and the broader understanding of lived experience, are what liberal arts education should be all about.