EXPERIENCE. - From experior (I test, I attempt), it is, in a generic sense, every perception of contents and data of consciousness (v.), hence every modification and determination of the conscious life of the "I", and in an objective sense, the total complex of conscious phenomena. According to the specific diversity of these, experience too is divided into various kinds, taking on more determinate references. External experience is the perception of all contents of knowledge given as external to the subject, whereas internal experience is that which refers to phenomena and subjective states (acts and functions of psychic life); sensible experience if it has as its object the data proper to sensibility, spiritual experience if it concerns the data and contents of intellectual and volitional life. One also speaks of religious (v.), artistic, etc. experience, meaning particular states of consciousness in which phenomena of a religious, artistic, etc. order are lived, which determine corresponding psychological situations more or less deep or permanent in the subject. Close to this acceptation is the vulgar sense of experience which refers to the acquisition of a habitual, objective, certain knowledge, through a repeated series of situations "lived", "experienced" (cf. "experience of life", "personal experience").
In a more restricted sense, already in use since antiquity and especially valued in modern philosophy, experience is the direct, concrete and positive knowledge of the sensible world, of its phenomena, of their laws, by means of observation and experiment. As such, experience is contrasted with rational and a priori knowledge which develops general principles by a purely logical-synthetic process. In this latter sense experience constitutes the basis of the analytic-inductive method (v. ANALYSIS), and is the indispensable source for an objective knowledge, and therefore also for an objective philosophical interpretation of nature.
In the history of philosophy one can discern a recurring oscillation of gnoseological-metaphysical systems, as a function of the different evaluation of experience understood especially in the last sense indicated. In Greek philosophy experience, overvalued by Heraclitus, is neglected by Platonic rationalism, whereas in Aristotle it regains its natural scientific function as the means and way by which the human intellect ascends from the particular to the knowledge of the universal (cf. Met., I, 1; Phys., VII, 3). In the principal currents of medieval Scholasticism, especially in St. Albert the Great and in St. Thomas, and then in Roger Bacon, the scientific-philosophical function of experience is expressly recognized, whereas it was instead often forgotten by the cultivators of late Scholasticism. In modern philosophy experience, inculcated by F. Bacon and scientifically promoted by Galileo, is proclaimed the sole source of knowledge, by empiricism and phenomenism (Locke, Hume, Stuart Mill), to the point of denying every conquest of thought that asserts itself as an essential overcoming of the data directly presented by experience itself. In Kant experience, posited as a subjective synthesis of external impression and transcendental intuition of sensibility, loses its ancient value of objective knowledge: a position taken up and accentuated by modern scientific relativism. In the last idealistic systems there is a return to the a priori method and to the devaluation of experience, which, even when not denied, is forcibly constrained within absolute theoretical schemas, independent of experience itself.
BIBL. The problem of experience and of its value is treated, more or less extensively, in every treatise on the theory of knowledge (v. conoscenza: v. also ESPERIENZA: ESPERIENZA). - A. Lalande, Expérience, in Vocab. de la philos., 5th ed., Paris 1947, pp. 309-311 (new redaction of the entry); A. Guzzo, L'io e la ragione, Brescia 1947, pp. 134-30.
Ugo Viglino