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Title: Life As Experience Author: E. Armand Date: 1906 Language: en Topics: life, experience, individualism, Libertarian Labyrinth Source: Retrieved on 17th September 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/e-armand-life-as-experience-1906/ Notes: E. Armand, “La vie comme expérience,” L’Ère nouvelle 4 no. 44 (Fin 1906): 41-42. | Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur
I consider life as an experience—or, to be honest, as a series of
experiences—that are to be rendered as rich, as abundant and as varied
as possible. I think that individuals attains the state of
consciousness, of intelligent reaction to the environment, to the degree
that we analyze and renew the experiences of life, as we run the gamut
of emotions or sensations, sometimes because we encounter them
inevitably on the keyboard of our existence, and sometimes because,
knowing this and wishing it, we provoke them.
What I say of life in this sense must be understood of the inward or
intellectual life, that of the sensations or the affections. Life
considered in terms of the accomplishment of organic functions — however
indispensable these may be to the development of the inner being —
hardly gives space for the complexity of experiences. Variety in the
preparation of meals will never seriously interest the being hungry with
true curiosity. Neither are there a hundred ways to breathe, to digest,
to sleep or to reproduce one’s self. In this domain, therefore, the
field of experience is limited. And equally indifferent, to my mind, are
the experiences involved in the quest for a “position”, of glory, of
honours, of a good reputation, etc.
⁂
I maintain that we have an interest in multiplying the experiences of
life: an interest for those who modify or renew them. Their horizon is
widened, their knowledge increased, their sensibility refined; if they
love experience for the experience itself, if they seek to educate
themselves as much as they seek to make a measurable and palpable
profit, if they do not fear sorrow or dread pleasure, the possibilities
for individual development seem almost limitless. I do not think that
men can be made “good”, to understand the diverse situations of their
fellows without judging them, if they have not passed through the
crucible of experience.
⁂
To attain its maximum utility, the journey of research, the quest for
experience, demands that it be recorded, reported, analysed and
communicated to another, so that others may learn thereby how to live
more fully, more amply — that they may be inspired to gird their loins,
to take up their staff and to take to the road themselves.
I think that the Experience that profits only the one who has it fails
to achieve its purpose. It is like a new process that a scientist
discovers, but whose formula he keeps locked in the strong-box of his
memory. Effort and experience do not achieve their power to influence
and never provide intellectual pleasure, except to the extent that they
are exhibited to the world, the world of the hungry and thirty, as food
or drink. It matters little that those who do not wish to consume it
turn away, shrugging their shoulders. The work of propaganda is
nonetheless accomplished: the fertile work that emanates from the self,
from the heart of the individual to the world outside them, to
illuminate the social ensemble, the work of distinction and of
individual selection among the masses.
Naturally it is necessary, for it to be recorded and reported, that the
quest for experience should be worth the trouble.
⁂
Life as experience is lived constantly outside “law” or “morality” or
“customs” — all conventions calculated to assure idleness and internal
stagnation to those who refrain from risking themselves, whether through
fear or through self-interest.
Life as experience tears up programs, treads decorum under foot, breaks
the windows, descends from the ivory tower. It abandons the City of
Established Facts, out through the Gate of Settled Matters and roams,
vagabond, in the open countryside of the Unforeseen.
For Experience never accepts the established fact as definitive and the
settled judgment as beyond appeal. Indeed it wanders, the life without
experience, as an “outlaw”, without a fixed abode, attired scantily or
not at all — a fright to moralism, a terror to the proper, respectable
bourgeois, who is in a constant panic at the thought that someone will
come, one night, to pound on their front doors and to wake them from
their stupefying habits.
Life lived as experience is not troubled by defeat or by the volume of
results obtained. It is no more disturbed by it than by victory.
Triumphs, failures, obstacles skirted, barriers overturned, falls in the
mud, all are so many subjects of experience. One thing only is capable
of troubling it: the thought that it might be lived uselessly or without
profit.
⁂
All things considered, we conclude that the true educators are those who
teach to embark without fear on the road of experience and to look Life
squarely in the face — life with its incalculable wealth of diverse
situations. The true educator does not seek to destroy sensibility, to
annihilate feeling, to lay out the individual life like a piece of sheet
music, to limit its vibrations, to narrow its breadth. Oh no! – For to
make us think and value for and by ourselves, there is nothing like
equipping others and arousing in them the desire for experience. And the
more difficult that experience has been to pursue, the richer it has
been in surprises, the more it has been interspersed with difficulties
and saturated with pleasures, the less those who have risked it seek to
impinge on the liberty of others to think and to act. And so will grow
the number of those no longer afraid to live, because they have known
how to experience.