Experientialist Ethics

G. Michael Blahnik's Experientialist Ethics: A Comparative Study advances an ethical framework that is contingent upon a unique version of experientialism. Blahnik's experientialist ethics ultimately assumes that as experiential beings, it is only in experience that reality may be ascertained. In this, experience equals reality. This controversial view will certainly rankle those theorists that purport that experience is merely one component and an often misleading one at that in a larger network of human functions that are in fact capable of perceiving reality. One must consider whether "mere" experience is enough to generate and sustain epistemological conclusions of any real weight, as well as whether the conclusions experientialism can engender are the right ones.

If experience equals reality, one might suggest, then reality itself is little more than a collection of conflicting sensations. In this, the experiential reality of Blahnik has little ethical force and no normative thrust whatsoever. What help, then, can the individual actor hope to receive from (as Rousseau once put it) illusions that deceive no one but himself? Blahnik, however, shows that the opposite can be true, and that the experientialist ethic can be rich in its prescriptions.

Blahnik explains in his introduction that "Experience is defined as the necessary combination of cognition, affect, behavior, sensations, the 'physical' environment, and the 'I'" (v). In this, he is creating a thi

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g comes to us from "outside of experience" (x). In this, Blahnik seems to indicate that if we can think it up, then it already exists for us from within the structure of experience. This is a catch-all that serves experientialists well, and binds human beings together as experiential beings. Curiously, a commitment to this notion does not likewise commit Blahnik to the idea that nothing can exist beyond our range of experiential structures; rather, if something does exist beyond our ken, this is basically "not a matter of concern" to us. The moment we perceive that something "real" or "new" appears to be outside of our experiential structure (for example, a "life form ten thousand light years away from us"), we are mistaken: we are not in fact perceiving anything beyond our experiential structure at all. On the contrary, we are experiencing a belief that this thing exists, and this belief in turn "exists as a part of the experiential structure within which we participate"(x). Put simply, "All validation of beliefs occur within experience" (xii). These ideas place all ethical, moral, even religious sensibilities firmly within the realm of the experiential structure. This endows every individual with a deep wellspring of p

Category: Psychology - E