A Pragmatist Concept of Consummatory Experience

Since a consummatory experience has a narrative structure, I have constructed a grand narrative which is supposed to show, and at the same time give a consummatory experience. The result is: Niels Normanns oversjøiske reise. 27 merkelige forelesninger om pragmatisme. The work on this book was begun in 2004, and completed in 2009, and it will be published in spring 2010 on Abstrakt forlag, Oslo

 

However, this showing and giving is coupled with an internet page which one gains access to by having gone through the showing and giving of the narrative, and found a necessary password. On the internet page one will, among other things, find an analysis of the narrative, which claims to say how it shows and gives a consummatory experience.

 

In the second part I shall attempt to integrate showing and saying within the same text, that is by being inspired by how this was done by Plato in The Symposion.

There Plato tells about a party temporarily turned into a seminar about love, where the participants say, through speeches, what they believe love to be. But at the same time the narrative within which the seminar takes place, also shows, through depicting the love relationships between several of the participants and Socrates, the different kinds of love that are discussed in the seminar.

 

My counterpart to The Symposion, which has the working title The Conference (and will be written in English, is about a philosophy conference on the theme of ’experience”, arranged in Reykjavik, where different partial aspects of experience will be presented in talks and papers, leading to a final, more complete understanding of experience in the form of consummatory experience. At the same time the narrative about the participants of the conference will show how some of them become more experienced through the conference. The reason why the setting of the action is in Iceland is that this island is divided by the Mid-Atlantic Rift, where the American and the European continental plates part company, like American pragmatism and European varieties of philosophy do.