Richard Whittaker

It seems to me, that experience is not honored in our culture. We're free to indulge in experience, but it's not honored as a potential source of real knowledge. The question is where do the ideas and the experiences intersect, right?

Interviewer: Yes.

I think they intersect in the realm of experience. That's where I live. That's where we all live—in the realm of experience. But somehow we have the idea that we live in the realm of matter, of things. We're convinced that it's a world full of things. But, really, the only way things come to us is through the experience of them. But the problem with the realm of experience is that it's not a quantifiable realm. It's not subject to academic, scientific, technological access. So therefore, in a way, it's a realm that has fallen into dishonor, or just disregard.

For instance in psychology thirty or forty years ago, there was still this idea of the unconscious, and what was required was a psychotherapist who was an artist of sorts, who could somehow interact in a way so that the unconscious, which used to be regarded as a reality, so that something was allowed, or made possible to take place there that would be healing. But nowadays we live in a different world. We've got neurochemistry and pharmeceuticals. We've got expert chemists, expert druggists. We have psychiatrists who give pills out to everybody.

So that is just one example where the realm of experience has lost its footing as a source of meaningful mystery, a kind of grandeur, a potential place of great secrets and discoveries and of great reality. I'd say that art, at its best, is operating somewhere in that realm. I call it the realm of experience, but even more specifically, in a way, it's the realm of a quality of feeling, I'd say.

Feeling. We don't know how to talk about feeling much. Music causes people to have feeling, and so everyone is feeding themselves with iPods. But isn't that really kind of a poor substitute?

-Richard Whittaker, from Interview with Richard Whittaker