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Experiential meanings Arpad Szakolczai

(Published as: Sinn aus Erfahrung’, in K. Junge, D. Suber, and G. Gerber (eds.) Erleben, Erleiden, Erfahren: Die Konstitution sozialen Sinns jenseits instrumenteller Vernunft (), (Bielefeld, Transcript-Verlag, 2008), pp. 63-99)

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 1  RETURNS TO REALITY: DESCARTES’S PHILOSOPHY OF EXPERIENCE ................................. 2  

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION BACKGROUND ....................................................................................... 3  KANT ............................................................................................................................................................ 6  

EXPERIENCE BEYOND THE OBJECT ................................................................................................. 6  ERIC VOEGELIN ........................................................................................................................................... 7  VICTOR TURNER ........................................................................................................................................... 8  

EXPERIENCING REALITY: THE ETYMOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE 1 (PIE *PER) ..................... 8  REVISITING GREEK 1: PATHOS ................................................................................................................... 11  REVISITING GREEK 2: WORDS DERIVED FROM PIE *PER ............................................................................ 12  INTERMEDIATE REFLECTIONS .................................................................................................................... 13  REVISITING SANSKRIT ................................................................................................................................ 13  SIMILAR DEVELOPMENTS IN GREEK ........................................................................................................... 14  THE PIE ROOT *TER ................................................................................................................................... 14  SANSKRIT FOR ‘PATH’ .................................................................................................................................. 14  THE EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF NUMBERS ‘THREE’ AND ‘FIVE’ ........................................................................ 15  ROUNDING UP THROUGH RUSSIAN ............................................................................................................. 16  

THE EXPERIENCE OF JUDGING: THE ETYMOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE 2 (PIE *KER) ...... 17  KOSELLECK’S CRITIQUE AND CRISIS ........................................................................................................... 17  THE MEANINGS OF PIE *KER ..................................................................................................................... 17  

MEANING INFLEXIONS OF *KER AND *PER DERIVATES WITH THE RISE OF THE MODERN WORLD .................................................................................................................................... 19  ‘ACT’ AND ‘ACTION’: ETYMOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY ......................................... 20  CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................ 21  

Introduction The aim of this paper is to interpret the recent concern with ‘experience’ as a return to the in-depth analysis of reality, searching for a balance in between types of contemporary scholasticism that escape into abstract theorising or number-crunching on the one hand, and the partisan involvement characteristic of various social movements, the politics of identity and political correctness on the other. Such a concern with experience is first situated on the horizon of modern Western thought that since centuries gave a privileged position, but also a quite peculiar reading, of ‘experience’, repeatedly trying to distance itself from scholasticism, but searching for some exclusive, objective reference point for experiences, and in this way ending up constructing and then taken for granting the schismatic object-subject dichotomy that still plagues social theory. It is argued that this mental framework, constructed among others by Descartes and Kant, on foundations laid down by Luther, has been finally dismantled by two crucial

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experience-encounters of the twentieth century whose significance has not yet been fully realised: Eric Voegelin’s recognition that the basic problem with Husserl’s epistemology was that he still exclusively conceived of experience as the sense perception of an object, a recognition that originated in the conversations and correspondence between Voegelin and Schutz on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences in 1943; and Victor Turner’s encounter with the work of Wilhelm Dilthey around 1980, when Turner realised that the structure of rites of passage discovered by Arnold van Gennep actually identifies the structure of experience Dilthey was searching for in order to move beyond Kant’s theoretisation of Erfahrung through the categories of the transcendental mind. On this methodological basis the paper then moves on to reconstruct the etymology of experience as a dangerous passage, and the semantic changes encountered by related terms, making use of the works of Mario Alinei and Reinhart Koselleck. This leads to the conclusion that with the rise of the modern world a parallel and radical shift has happened with the two basic roots capturing aspects of the meaning of experience: what had previously been associated with a perilous passage now became the object of explicit search (the Weberian ‘quest for experience’ as an illustration of the ‘pleasure principle’); while what had previously been considered as the active component of diagnosing and resolving out-of-ordinary (ausseralltägliche) challenges was disintegrated into an attitude of passivity with respect to an overarching crisis, combined with an endless criticism without responsibility. The relationship between texts and reality, between words and things, between experiences and their reproduction is of course an eternal dilemma. More specifically, the call for a ‘return to reality’, away from bookish forms of knowledge, has been central for modern philosophy and social science, since centuries. Thus, in order to propose such a call for a ‘return to experience’ in full seriousness, learning from past mistakes without simply repeating them, we need to review, in a nutshell, the history of such returns.

Returns to reality: Descartes’s philosophy of experience The central figure in the history of such calls, especially connected to a novel emphasis on experience, is René Descartes. The target of Descartes was ‘scholasticism’ or ‘bookish knowledge’, and there can be no question that in his own time and place he had a case. However, it is much less clear whether the solution he suggested, the exclusive emphasis on the here and now, on a mode of experience that is easily available to everybody with a ‘common reason’ and which can be systematically repeated, would exhaust the entire range of human experience. Being overwhelmed with his preoccupation to criticise purely speculative knowledge he seemed to have overlooked the fact that books also contain accounts of events that happened or that were simply experienced; and that many of these experiences, exactly because connected to a past here and now, are not available for repetition and verification. The truthfulness of past and present experiences cannot be reduced to repetition; an assessment and understanding of the possible truth content of verbal accounts requires different modes of verification.i The singular emphasis on verification through repetition under controlled circumstances as the only truly ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ way to ascertain a truth content is all the more surprising as it is with Descartes that an activity close to repetition has been excluded from philosophy altogether: imitation. This is due to Descartes’s founding of rationality on doubt, and thus his exclusion out of serious consideration the phenomenon of

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imitation (following, copying, or doubling), an activity closely linked with doubting,ii yet so different from calculative rationality. Significantly, Descartes not only severed the connection between imitation and doubting, but also between imitation and experience, excluding the possibility that an experience could be meaningfully repeated, thus the potential truth of such an experience assessed, by performing and thus literally ‘re-living’ a text. After Descartes, performance and imitation became ‘inauthentic’ activities, incapable of carrying truth value; and we are only now beginning to realise the enormous calamities brought upon us by this operation that for us, ‘sons’ of Cartesian rationality,iii seems so ‘natural’. Descartes wanted to return to reality, to the reality of experience, away from bookish knowledge; instead, he ended up modifying by what counts as true reality; and in the process modified – together with Bacon – the very meaning of ‘experience’ as well. Before the rise of modern rationalist philosophy, ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ meant the same thing: an experience was an experiment in the sense of behaving in a way to test others, and in the process also testing oneself. The plays of Shakespeare still fully belong to this universe, in which protagonists make all kinds of experiments, in the classical sense, like trading cloths, or kings leaving their realm, entrusting it to their nominees, just to test their virtue. After Bacon and Descartes, to ‘experiment’ means to repeat a phenomenon, in an artificial setting, in order to test the truth of a hypothesis. It had evident, and enormous advantages, concerning science; and perhaps not so evident, but no less taxing, costs at the level of meaningful human life.

Renaissance and Reformation background While Descartes has a privileged place in the history of returns to reality, he was not without predecessors or followers in the sense of the gesture; only a ring in the chain. Concerning predecessors, it is of particular interest that his ideas grew, just as in the case of Bacon, out of the background of Renaissance ‘magi’, situated just in between erudite scholars and obscure magicians (Yates 1962, 1974, 1979). While the central concern of Bacon and Descartes was to find a way to separate science from magic, a crucial issue is the extent to which modern science, and modern philosophy, up to our days remained somewhat tainted by the fact that in its origins it shared a common concern with Renaissance magic in not being satisfied with understanding reality, rather searching for actively transforming it, inseparably combining knowledge with power. The means of science and magic are obviously different, just as many of the concrete aims; but in the modality of posing the aims, and in the often still heroised attitude and figure of the ‘Faustian’ scientist, the two are too close to comfort. It is to here that the roots of the problem with ‘instrumental reason’ can be traced. Concerning the problem of experience and reality, another important antecedent of Descartes is the Reformation. The Lutherian emphasis on faith alone through the Scriptures is relevant for our concerns, identifying a singular and portentous moment in the history of experience, reorganising the relationship between text and behaviour, institutions and traditions, the natural and the supernatural.

The crucial innovation of Luther in this respect concerned the joint denial of tradition on the one hand (both institutional and intellectual), and of mystical experience on the other. The radical nature of this change can be seen by realising that up till Luther, and

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since the earliest days of the Church, the central conflict within Christianity was between upholders of the institutionalised tradition safeguarding revealed truth and those who – based on their own, individual, mystical experiences – claimed direct divine inspiration. Luther simply swiped the table (thus tabula rasa), denying any validity to both, thus creating a new kind of ‘object-subject relationship’. This meant that the situation of the believer was radically altered: instead of being part of a long chain of transmission, going back to the experiences of the original witnesses, being a Christian from now on implied an overwhelming, exclusive, personal commitment to a single piece of reality: the Bible as an object-text. This meant, on the one hand, the absolutisation of the word of the Bible as an available text, legible, objective, requiring nothing else outside itself, no devotion, no practice, no tradition, no further experience; while on the other it also exaggerated the importance of human subjectivity as the believer, through the reading of the text, was required to actually, personally experience the calling movement of the Spirit. Thus, the new Lutherian frame represented a joint exaltation of pure objectivity and pure subjectivity. Luther’s impact can be understood through Gregory Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis, which has the added advantage that throughout his life Bateson was preoccupied with matters of epistemology, desperately keen – even if ultimately unsuccessful – in developing an epistemological framework that would overcome Cartesianism while incorporating into epistemology the sacred as well (Bateson 1972, 2002; Bateson and Bateson 2005). At the simplest level, the Batesonian perspective implies that, instead of handling ‘the’ Renaissance and ‘the’ Reformation as objects, or as historical periods simply following each other, they should be treated as developing jointly. This implies two things. First, the ‘Reformation’ as a process of reforming the Church did not start with Luther, rather goes back many centuries, being part of a historical dynamics between the reforming of the Church and the revitalisation of European culture, partially (but not exclusively) by a return to classical culture. Second, the public appearance of Luther led to a schism in this process, the separation between Reformation and Renaissance, implying an epistemological schism between the Protestant interpretation of the Bible on the one hand, and the related transformation of Renaissance humanists into obscure ‘magi’ on the other. We are now in a better position to understand the epistemological operation undertaken by Bacon and Descartes (and other contemporaries like Spinoza); an operation strictly parallel to Hobbes’ work in the field of political philosophy. Up to the early 16th century, European culture formed a whole, experiencing, since the Duecento, but especially in the Quattrocento, after the terrible plague epidemics dominating the Trecento, a particularly strong cultural revival. The accommodation inside this revival of Ancient culture (not only Greco-Roman, but also all kind of Hellenistic works inspired by Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Gnostic spirituality) certainly created tensions, but the break only happened due to the public appearance of Luther. Together with the subsequent schismogenesis between Reformation and Renaissance, this implied the sudden presence of three completely difference epistemological set-ups within Europe: the Catholic position, which carried forward the tradition, though itself modified by schismogenesis, rendering it much more dogmatic and rigid; the new Protestant tradition, a living paradox, as Protestantism came into being by denying the very value of tradition, implying epistemologically a heightened concern with objectivity; and the tradition of Renaissance magi, liberating knowledge into all kinds of directions, revalorising the sacred tradition of the entire mankind, but – having breached the separation between institutionalised religiou

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tradition and sheer magic – needing some kind of measuring rod to separate valuable knowledge from sheer nonsense and prejudice, while at the same time still being useful for the salvation of mankind. Concerning the political aspect of this muddle, Hobbes realised that – as the breach between the various religious sides was not possible to mend – a purely secular solution had to be worked out to solve the political crisis (Koselleck 1988). This led to the rise of absolutist government, a solution whose bad aspects it took centuries to correct. The epistemological crisis also had to be solved, as it was not possible to maintain three completely different approaches to truth within one culture. The solution proposed by Descartes was just as problematic as that of Hobbes; yet, somehow, Western philosophy is still unable to move beyond it. We must ask the question why. Let’s start by revisiting what the Cartesian return to reality, in the form of ‘experience’, could have meant. First of all, there is a great similarity between the basic, founding gestures of Luther and Descartes. The gesture is to do away with all tradition, all mediators, relegated as mere scholastics, having lost any credibility, any contact with reality. The difference is dual, though closely related. First, Descartes insists on doing away with all bookish knowledge, thus clearly implying – though not spelling out explicitly – the Bible. Second, his central concern is not with faith, but with doubt. While faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin, sequential order is fundamental. Already one of the most famous sentences of Luther (‘Ich glaube, daß ich nicht aus eigener Vernunft noch Kraft an Jesum Christum, meinen Herrn, glauben oder zu ihm kommen kann; sondern der Heilige Geist hat mich durch das Evangelium berufen’) contains a peculiar grammatical structure, and Descartes only raised this double negation to new heights by his search for a starting point that cannot be doubted. While this ‘absolutely solid basis’ of Descartes is different from Luther’s, the modality of their search is quite similar. Descartes also denies the value of tradition, wanting to go directly back to the reality of an original, founding experience; he also searches for something absolutely objective, while at the same time emphasising the single individual, the ‘subject’ in search for the ‘objective’, unshakeable truth. Even the manner of the search for the objective truth in the world out there, or the attitude of the ‘subject in search’ are very similar, and in important and singular ways: Cartesian science handles objective reality as a text that is asked to reveal the law that created it, still followed by everything; and the person in search of the discovery of such laws is similarly determined, unswerving, ignoring everything outside himself. Any attempt at a synthesis assumes at the same time some divisions; any identity can only be asserted by defining a boundary beyond which there is the different or the other. The question is how to evaluate such boundaries: whether they separate the wheat from the chaff, or whether they are schismogenetic, in the sense of Bateson. In the field of epistemology, the operation performed by Descartes had two main consequences: on the one hand, it effectively separated religion and magic, confused by the Renaissance magi; on the other, it radically separated not simply religious and scientific truth and experience, but object-like truth from the truth of an experience that cannot be repeated, though had a positive formative impact on the human soul; and also ignored the possible truth-value of the performance of a text based on experience. This was a schismogenetic development, and the deeply problematic legacy of ‘instrumental reason’ belongs to here as well. The next major step in the history of experience takes place with Kant.

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Kant The fate of modern social theory, in good and bad, is intimately tied to the work of Kant, and nowhere is it more evident than in the case of ‘experience’. On the one hand, Kant is the source of modern constructivism, or the idea that our mind, and the linguistic tools it makes use of, do not simply reflect reality but perform a constructive work as well. On the other hand, however, he attributed this work to ‘pure’ reason, through the transcendental categories as foundations, and in the process reinforced, even rendered absolute, the separation between the subject (the self-enclosed homo clausus (Elias 2000), or the human being as ‘pure’ mind, rendering possible the absurdity of ‘artificial intelligence’) and the object (everything that belongs to the external world ‘out there’, which anyway is chaotic, impossible to grasp outside the categories of the transcendental mind, thus rendering possible the intellectual legitimacy of Bentham’s absurd ‘pleasure principle’, an idea incompatible with philosophy as practiced by Socrates and Plato). The manner in which Kant affirmed that our experiences are constructed excluded the very possibility that experiences undergone can also shape the subject. The possibility and necessity of moving beyond Kant is to think the subject as formed and transformed by experiences, incorporating both passivity and activity, and in this order. In this sense the first main challenge to Kant’s thinking came not through Fichte or Hegel, who remained entrapped in the ‘episteme’ of Kant,iv rather through Schleiermacher, and his concern with religious experience in his 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher, however, lost the academic battle with Hegel, and such things mattered deeply for the ‘duelling society’ (Elias 1997) that Germany was at that time, and not only. As a consequence, even for those who tried to re-think experience, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the reference point remained Hegel, and the various lines challenging the idealist orthodoxy, for which in 1799 Jacobi invented the term ‘nihilism’, remained unconnected. The work of Schleiermacher was taken up by Dilthey, who made two crucial steps forward. He argued that Kant’s critical work must be complimented by a ‘fourth critique’, the critique of historical reason; and that this should focus on discovering the very structures of experience, as – in opposition to Kant – Dilthey argued that our experiencing of the world is not chaotic, rather possesses an inherent structure. Dilthey’s thinking, however, remained still caught inside the mental framework he tried to overcome, desperately seeking a ‘truly objective’ philosophy, thus remained unfinished and somewhat incoherent, an easy pray to the criticism of Rickert, guardian of the neo-Kantian orthodoxy of his times.

Experience beyond the object The intuitions of Schleiermacher and Dilthey were taken up and carried decisively forward by two of the most significant intellectual discoveries of the past century. However, due to the peculiar conditions in which both breakthroughs were made, still today they remain little known. One was sparked by the correspondence between Eric Voegelin and Alfred Schutz, while the other happened because Victor Turner accidentally picked up a book on the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey.

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Eric Voege l in Voegelin was life-long friend of Alfred Schutz, who defined his task as turning the philosophy of Husserl into the epistemological foundations of Max Weber’s sociology. The correspondence of the two, apart from being a unique document for the intellectual history of the 20th century, also offers valuable insights on the problem at hand. It was in the context of their discussion of Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences that Voegelin suddenly discovered the sore spot in the work of Husserl: when trying to overcome the thought of Descartes and Kant through theorising intentionality, Husserl stilled remained entrapped in the taken for granted conviction that experience means fundamentally the sensing of an object (Voegelin 1978: 14-21; 1993: 24). All this has a corollary. The reductive identification of truth with object-like truths, whether in the form of an existing text or a piece of ‘touchable’ reality, had as a consequence, at the level of the philosophy of language, a primacy attributed to names, assuming that language emerged, and fundamentally is, the way in which names become attached to things, through the sensation they produce in the subject.v But if experience is more than sense perception, then the emphasis might be shifted from names to verbs. The question of the reality of experience as captured by language thus leads to the study of verbs – first of all verbs created to denote experience. Voegelin’s discovery was made in the context of an exchange of letters between two friends, trying to survive during a World War in a foreign country, literally fighting to establish a degree of existential security; and remained unpublished for decades.vi While it became the cornerstone of Voegelin’s later work, this had its own difficult reception story, and the recognition never gained the currency it merited.

The discovery entailed a series of consequences for understanding the nature of experience, which was indeed taken up in the later work. The most important was the realisation that instead of talking about the history of ‘ideas’, one should rather consider the work of political thinkers as a symbolisation of engendering experiences, which would lead to the complete reorganisation of his entire project. This was part of a systematic shift away from the horizon of Kant to the thinking of Plato, or from ideas as representations (Vorstellungen), to ideas in the original Platonic sense of eidos.vii Furthermore, this allowed him to return to Schleiermacher’s concern with religious experiences, and to argue that religious ‘ideas’ are not simply ‘hypothetical’ statements about non-existing objects, or realities that cannot be subjected to scientific testing, but rather symbolisations of experiences. This implied a return to the ‘historical dimension Husserl wanted to exclude’, as this dimension, far from being a ‘mere’ concern with the past, rather incorporated ‘the permanent presence of the process of reality in which man participates with his conscious existence’ (Voegelin 1978: 10), this ‘conscious existence’ being ‘an event within reality’ (Ibid.: 11), as consciousness is nothing else but ‘the experience of participation’ (Ibid.: 175). Such a return to history at the same time implied a return to the problem of transcendence, beyond the Kantian transcendental mind: ‘That being which is the ground of all experienceable particular being is an ontological hypothesis without which the experienced reality of the ontic nexus in human existence remains incomprehensible, but it is nowhere a datum in human existence rather it is always strictly transcendent that we can approach only through meditation’ (Ibid.: 32). Even further, concerning the origins of philosophy, he recognised the important experiential aspect of the term apeiron, central for the thinking of Anaximander, and widely recognised as the ‘first word’ of philosophy.viii Finally, it allowed Voegelin to

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break with the linguistic version of the classical evolutionary reading of history, focusing on correspondence between objects and their names, and to argue rather that conceptual development implies a progressive differentiation of compact experiences.ix The reality of experience and linguistic symbolisation formed a tightly interrelated system: ‘There was no engendering experience as an autonomous entity but only the experience as articulated by symbols; and at the other end of the process of verification, there was no responsive experience as an autonomous entity but only an experience that could articulate itself in language symbols and, if necessary, modify the symbols of the engendering experience in order to let the truth of symbols more adequately render the truth of reality experienced’ (Voegelin 1978: 12).

Victor Turner Dilthey’s problem concerning the structure of experience was solved by Victor Turner, the well-known anthropologist and theorist of liminality. Towards the end of his life Turner literally stumbled upon the work of Dilthey that he, having been trained in the empirical tradition of British social anthropology, did not know about, and suddenly recognised that the structure of rites of passage and the concept of liminality developed on this basis, originally discovered by Arnold van Gennep, actually resolves the problem Dilthey posed about the structure of lived experience (V. Turner 1982, 1985a, 1985b).

In order to substantiate his hint, Turner even turned to etymology, evoking the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *per, still preserved intact in the word ‘experience’. Referring to the work of etymologists Turner identifies the meaning of this root as ‘to attempt, venture’, connecting there a series of words like Greek peira ‘experience’, from which comes ‘empirical’, as well as perao ‘I pass through’, English ‘fear’, or the word ‘peril’ (V. Turner 1985a: 226).x The inference is that at a fundamental level experience means a dangerous, testing and trying journey, having as a culminating point a ‘passing through’. Turner’s remarks on the etymology of experience are on the last page of an unpublished seminar presentation, published posthumously by his wife, so can be considered literally as an ultimate indication about his future research agenda. The next section of the paper tries to take up this thread.

Experiencing reality: the etymology of experience 1 (PIE *per) Given that at this point the article will go into a detailed analysis of the etymology of various terms symbolising ‘experience’, without any claim of specific expertise, the methodological presuppositions of the analysis must be clarified. The recognition of the parenthood of indo-European languages was one of the main discoveries of the nineteenth century in the humanities, done mostly by German scholars, showing German scholarship at its best, but also at its worst, and in more ways than one (Alinei 2000b). At the level of philosophical methodology, taken for granted as writing in prose, this implied that words were supposed to represent ideas, which then corresponded either to objects, or to object-like general, abstract concepts (like the ‘idea’ of running, cutting, standing, etc.), not dissimilar to the naming process by which a foreign language is learned today, by identifying the ‘names’ used

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in the ‘other’ language through the words familiar to us. Except, of course, that at the distant origins of language no ‘other’ language existed. The insights of Voegelin and Turner concern the nature of symbols and experiences at a truly fundamental level, implying a partial but significant reconsidering of the entire corpus of etymological work performed on the basis of philosophical preconceptions that are no longer binding. The crucial elements are dual. First, words do not reproduce objects or ideas as pieces of reality with a name-tag attached to them, but are rather attempts to capture and re-present (literally: making possible to render alive again) experiences: what human beings have actually undergone and lived through. Second, the representation of such experiences does not simply evolve through clarification (making progressively more ‘clear’ and ‘precise’ the verbal reproduction of objects or ideas), rather in the sense of differentiation: an experience that previously was compact, combining in an undifferentiated unity complex and interconnected sensations and impulses, now becomes separated, or broken down into constituent components and shades of meaning, implying not just a gain in precision but a certain loss as well as. The study of etymology therefore cannot be reduced to a binary decision – two words being either related or not; rather one should try to identify possible stages in the progressive differentiation of words. This is especially important as, if Alinei is right, the separation of the indo-European people happened way before settlement and agriculture, so in the original common language experience in the sense of a passage through unknown lands might well have played a truly decisive role. Compact archaic experiences take us well beyond any possible trace in written sources.

Our reconstructive study on the etymology and semantics of experience starts from the most classic of sources, the comparative indo-European dictionaries of Grandsaignes d’Hauterive (1948) and Pokorny (1959). These considerations will be extended in three main directions: the incorporation of more recent research, especially the Greek etymological dictionary of Chantraine (1999[1968]) and the indo-Iranian dictionary of Sir Ralph Turner (1989[1966]); a reconsideration from the perspective of Russian, a language not discussed by Grandsaignes; and finally and most importantly, a systematic revisiting of the basic indo-European languages themselves, especially Sanskrit and Greek, in light of the discoveries of Voegelin and Turner. *per A discussion of the PIE root *per and its derivatives must be started by a ‘sociological’ remark, in the strictest, quantitative sense of the term: this root has generated the second largest number of derivate words in all the indo-European languages, bypassed only by the root *ker, which will also be discussed soon. These two roots, central for expressing the different shades in the meaning of experience – or the ‘experience of experience’ – are the most important roots in the entire language family.

Concerning the original meaning of the root, a threefold division is assumed. *Per first of all expresses the experience of a passage,xi which eventually developed into that of a trial or a test (Grandsaignes 1948: 153). This primary meaning of the root (its Urerlebnis) confirms the Turnerian interpretation that traversed the same sequence of meaning from the opposite end, starting from rites of passage as a trial and performance, and arriving from there to the structure and meaning of ‘experience’.

Both the original meaning of a ‘passage’ and the acquired meaning of a ‘trial’ carry a particular shade that helps to clarify the exact sense. Concerning the ‘passage’, the emphasis

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is on the successful completion. The basic experience, fundamental for the entire family of indo-European languages, is that of a successful passage; a completed task or mission.xii However, with the appearance of conscious reflection on the passage as a testing or a trial, the term gains a new, psychological dimension, expressing a sense of danger and feeling of dread before confronting such a perilous passage. This psychologisation of experience, a shift away from the fact of going through to a prior concern with the stakes, or from performance to preoccupation, is reflected in a series of common words expressing danger and fear in various modern languages, like ‘peril’ and ‘fear’ themselves, then German Gefahr ‘danger’, or even fahren ‘travel’ and Erfahrung, the Kantian word used for experience, reflecting the fact that travelling is a source of new experiences, but also of unforeseen dangers.

The second meaning of the root *per is ‘being ahead’, at the front. This root is best visible in the various prefixes already present in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and then in all the various indo-European languages, like par-, per-, pre-, para-, peri, pro-, for-, ver-, or vor-, creating an enormous variety of words. This second sense closely follows the first, providing further, crucial specification of this original meaning of experience, or the ‘experience of experience’.xiii The successful completion of a difficult passage implies that somebody must take the lead and show the way, by example, for the others. If the basic structure of human experience as experience is a dangerous passage, then the basic structure of human society is between those capable of making the passage first, and those who follow. Furthermore, the fact that the emphasis is on completion, on the successful realisation of the passage, and not simply on a spatial positioning of being ahead is confirmed by the wide variety of meanings covered by the various ‘per’ prefixes, including the experience of being or moving beyond, around, or against. All these modalities imply completion: the person who first made the passage, showing the way, has gone through, going around, perhaps above, or even below, but at any rate overcame the obstacle. Finally, still within the second basic group of meanings, the sense of being ahead has developed from a prefix into words representing anteriority and seniority. There are a series of Greek and Latin words expressing old age which are not kept in modern languages, except in certain derivatives expressing leadership qualities but not directly age, like ‘presbyter’ and ‘priest’; and another series of related words expressing primacy or priority, like French premier ‘first’ and printemps ‘spring’ (the first season), ‘prince’, ‘principle’, ‘primordial’, or ‘primitive’ (which originally, before the dominance of evolutionary thinking, represented the highest and not the lowest quality). The third group identified is less coherent, though complementary and crucial. The various shades of meaning are resumed by the experience of ‘obtaining’ or ‘bringing into the world’. It is further divided into three parts. The first expresses ‘bringing into the world’ in a narrow sense, as in the word ‘parent’ and its various derivatives, central for most modern indo-European languages; but we might immediately signal the evident similarity to a word like ‘father’, whose root pater seems so close. Grandsaignes also connects here Greek words like porein (obtain, see French procurer), and poris (veal; see old German far and farro ‘bull’, and German Farre ‘veal’). The second subgroup expresses the idea of preparing.xiv Modern words derived from this shade of meaning include ‘empire’ and ‘emperor’, ‘repair’, ‘separate’ and ‘parade’, Italian comprare ‘buy’ and imparare ‘learn’. Finally, the third subgroup expresses the experience of being a part of something, again with a huge number of derivatives (partition, participate, partial, depart, particular). This is an extremely important meaning that, while

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related to the experience of a passage in the sense of ‘departing’ from the previous unity, goes beyond it, towards participation and an experience of ‘home’ (Turnbull 1968). This is as far as the conventional wisdom of comparative etymology allows us to go. But now we have to go beyond, incorporating the insight of Turner at the heart of our analysis, revisiting – as far as possible, given the manifold limitations of space, time and competence – the original languages on which comparative etymology was based. Again, in order to avoid misunderstandings, we have to restate that no special expertise is pretended in linguistic matters; it is only argued that any specialised study in the social and human sciences is based on various philosophical and anthropological presuppositions, and when such presuppositions are altered on the basis of new discoveries (in our case, the insights of Voegelin and Turner), then all previous research that was based on the outdated presuppositions must be revisited and to some extent altered. For such a revisiting of the etymology and semantics of experience the natural starting point among the various indo-European languages is Greek. Greek is certainly not the most ‘archaic’ of the indo-European languages, but such claims of originality, problematic in themselves, are currently themselves under attack, due to the problematic character of the presumed indo-European invasion (Alinei 1996, 2000a, 2000b). Instead, such a start can be justified due to the importance of Greek as the origin of philosophical thinking and the source of most modern European languages, mediated partly through Latin; and also because of the peculiar fact that the central word expressing experience in Greek does not belong to the *per family.

Revis i t ing Greek 1: pathos The Greek term for experience is pathos, a word with uncertain origins and a highly peculiar linguistic history. It is derived from the verb paskho, meaning to passively undergo something, explicitly opposed to actively doing, and related to words like pentheo ‘bewail, lament, mourn’, and penthos ‘grief, sorrow, misery, suffering’.xv This seems to imply that for the Greeks, uniquely, and in contrast to the general indo-European outlook, continued by both Romance and Germanic languages, experience primarily does not mean a successful passage, but an event that happens and that one must passively suffer; an outlook on life that corresponds closely to Nietzsche’s intuition about the tragic character of the Greek experience of the world. Given that the root *per and its derivates constitute etymologically an extremely stable and clear family of words, it is particularly perplexing that paskho simply has ‘no etymology’ (Chantraine 1999: 862). The problem has since long disturbed scholars. Pokorny (1959: 641) suggested the hypothetical root *kwenth, including exclusively Lithuanian kenciu ‘to suffer’ and Old-Irish cess(a)im, with a similar meaning, but given both the geographical distance of the three populations and the considerable dissimilarity of the words it is not surprising that the suggestion is not widely accepted. Furthermore, it has been argued that the term, just as other similarly sounding but not connected words like penomai ‘nourish’, pema ‘misery, calamity’ and talaiporos ‘suffering, distressed, miserable’, it looks indo-European, so the etymological difficulties are all the more strange, rendering this group of words ‘obscure’ (Chantraine [1969]1999: 862).xvi Making this perplexity all the greater, we can add a series of Latin words that Ernout and Meillet’s classic book on Latin etymology also listed as

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highly problematic, like penus ‘nourish’, and probably linked to Greek penomai; pendo ‘hang, then weigh, consider, judge’, source of French penser (thinking) (Ernout and Meillet 1959: 495-6); or poena, meaning pain, and also repent, perhaps connected to Greek poina (compensation for crime), with similarly problematic etymology (Ernout and Meillet 1959: 518). It seems therefore worthwhile to look around for words in Greek that are similar in form, and where a possible connection in meaning could be found at a higher level of compactness, using the Turnerian insight that experience is first of all a passage. Such a search immediately yields important results – but at the same time only increases the paradox. There is a Greek word, syntactically extremely close to pathos, that means ‘passage’ or ‘path’: patos, and the related word pateo (to march, not simply to go). Pathos and patos, however, are considered etymologically unrelated; to increase confusion, the etymology of patos is also highly problematic (Chantraine 1999: 863, 927-8). It is presumed that the word is related to pontos, a term meaning the sea as a (difficult) passage, different from the general term pelagos simply denoting the sea as a flat surface (etymologically linked to ‘plane’, ‘plain’ and ‘plate’). The etymology of pontos is unproblematic, related to Sanskrit pantha ‘path’; but the meaning is judged as quite different from patos (Chantraine 1999: 863). The latter word simply means a much frequented, beaten road, while the Vedic original did not simply mean any path, rather ‘a road that one opens, where there are obstacles, a passing over’ (Ibid.: 928). From a Turnerian perspective, however, the two meanings of ‘path’ become again closely connected,xvii not only reconfirming the old intuition about the etymological connection between patos and pontos, but posing a possible link between patos and pathos as well, connecting the experience of suffering on a passage to an eventually well-trodden road; all the more so as in the history of these words back and forth changes between ‘t’ and ‘th’ are frequent (see Sanskrit pantha and Greek pontos, and Greek patos and English ‘path’).

Revis i t ing Greek 2: words der ived from PIE *per This group of words shows the existence in ancient Greek of practically all the shades of meaning identified by the comparative dictionaries (perao, perasis and poros ‘crossing, passage’; peira ‘trial, attempt’; peri ‘around’; pera ‘beyond, further’; poro ‘destiny as one’s part’). But it also brings in a series of additional, hypothetical insights. Both peirar and peras carry the meaning ‘limit’; thus, Greek derivatives of *per express the play between limit and liminality, invented by van Gennep and Turner, that is not there in the Latin word limes; a particularly significant result, given the importance played by the term apeiron for Greek philosophy. The same terms furthermore express the concept of a ‘final decision’; and, apart from ‘passing through’, perao also means to penetrate, pierce or drive through with a pointed weapon. In this context it is worth remarking that peiro, usually identified with the experience of making a passage, also has its primary meaning as ‘pierce’ or ‘run through’ (especially a piece of meat while cooking). Another set of derived words include perasis ‘crossing’, poros ‘river crossing, ferry’, and porthmeia ‘ferrying across a river’; porsuno ‘wife preparing husband’s bed’, and porphuro ‘troubled sea, dye red’; and strangeness or the status of a foreigner (perates ‘wonderer, emigrant’, from peirasis ‘attempt, especially at seduction, temptation’, leading to peiratos ‘piratery’, from which modern English ‘pirate’ is derived; see also peratikos ‘coming from abroad, foreign’).

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Finally, there are a series of words not connected to the root *per that – given the extreme stability of the root, in its two consonants – might belong here at a less differentiated level: peroo ‘maim or mutilate’, peris ‘scrotum’, porneia ‘prostitute’, and pornos ‘sodomite’. The connection might be at the level of the violent aspects of piercing, traversing and penetration. One might even wonder about an important word like pyr ‘fire’, having a very stable rootxviii – could it be related to ‘passing through’ as a baptism of fire; or to fire as a means of testing?

Intermediate re f l e c t ions A revisiting of Greek terms signifying experience, from the perspective of a Dilthey-Voegelin-Turnerian philosophical anthropology, yields an important interim result. We have to do with two different families of words, each signifying experience as a kind of dangerous passage. One is the *per family, with uncontroversial etymological connections, meaning the successful completion of a dangerous passage. The other is a much more problematic set of words, with unclear etymology, perhaps caused by a failure to recognise their common meaning, implying a trodden path where the emphasis is less on the successful completion than on the suffering one has undergone in trying to make the passage. In order to see more clearly, a return to Sanskrit will be pursued, making use of the comparative dictionary of indo-Iranian languages compiled by Ralph Turner, the preparation and editing of which covered much of the 20th century (R. Turner 1989: vii).

Revis i t ing Sanskri t A review of not simply the words associated with the root *per, but of all the terms that could be associated with experience as a difficult passage yields two basic results. First, it basically confirms the analysis conducted so far: the same senses can be found in the various words present in indo-Iranian languages. Thus, there is a group of words expressing the experience of a crossing, also closely linked to the experience of going or driving through something in the sense of piercing it (the root *PR ‘cross’ (R. Turner 1989: 473); 8100 para ‘bringing across’; 8945 prapta ‘one who has reached’; 8666 pradura ‘doorway’; 8627 pratudati ‘cuts through, pierces’; 8940 pranta ‘tip, point’).xix There is then the idea of being or going ahead (8281 puras ‘in front, before’; 8540 prati ‘towards, against, near, beside’); and of reaching, completing, or going beyond something (the roots *PR ‘fill’ (R. Turner 1989: 475), and *PRC ‘join’ (Turner 1989: 473); 7793 pára ‘distant, further’; 8355 prta ‘filled’). Significantly, however, words related to the difficulty or danger associated with such a passage, and the experience of undergoing a trial or a test seems to be missing in the indo-Iranian languages. This leads to the second result. The same set of meaning is expressed by a series of words starting not with the syllable ‘par’ or ‘pr’, rather with ‘tar’, ‘tr’ or even ‘thr’. We find in this group words expressing the experience of crossing (the roots *TR ‘cross’ (R. Turner 1989: 339) and TRD ‘split’ (R. Turner 1989: 338); 5911 trta ‘crossed’; 5911 trti ‘crossing’; 5875 tura ‘ford’; 5927 trndati ‘splits or pierces’; 5976 torana ‘doorway’); perhaps even the roots *TRUP ‘pierce, hurt’ (R. Turner 1989: 345), and 5823 tiras ‘across, beyond’; and also the meaning missing from the previous group, the sense of danger and fear (the root *TRAS

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‘tremble, fear’ (R. Turner 1989: 342); 6005 trasa ‘trembling’; 6013 trasa ‘fear’; 6092 thar ‘tremble’; 6101 thur ‘tremble’; see also the root *TRS ‘to be thirsty’ (R. Turner 1989: 339); 5938 trsta ‘harsh, rough’; 5941 trsna ‘thirst, desire’). From this group, however, the sense of ‘being ahead’ is missing. This suggests that, at the level of the indo-Iranian Urerlebnis, there was a perceived incompatibility between taking a lead in crossing a dangerous passage, and experiencing fear.xx There is a further important root starting with the letters ‘tr’, the root *TRI (R. Turner 1989: 343), meaning the number three. This path, however, can only be pursued once another set of words is analysed, related to Greek pathos and patos.

Similar deve lopments in Greek Such similarities between words with ‘pr’ and ‘tr’ roots and initials are not restricted to Sanskrit, but are also present in Greek. These start with teiro, used only in limited tenses, expressing the effects of pain and sorrow on the body and the mind; a word linked with terms like toros ‘piercing’, trupao ‘pierce’, toreia ‘carving, chasing’, tribo ‘rub’, truo and tridzo ‘use by rubbing’, titroskho ‘hurt, cause and injury’ and trauma ‘wound, hurt’. All these words are derived from another basic Proto-Indo-European root, *ter.

The PIE root *ter This root has three branches, and also two extended versions *terek and *ters that, together, quite closely reproduce the experiential meaning of *per. There is, first of all, the experience of going through, as in Latin trans, German Durch, and English ‘through’, from which the idea of reaching the end is derived, as in Greek terma, Latin terminus, and their modern derivates (the third sense of *ter in Grandsaignes 1948: 217-8). This is closely related to the second sense of *ter, the experience of ‘rubbing’ or ‘biting’, but which also implies the experience of ‘turning’, just as the series of related terms ‘torment’, ‘tribulation’ and ‘torture’. This meaning is quite close to the extended root *terek, listed separately by Grandsaignes, connected to the Sanskrit root *TARK ‘revolve’ (R. Turner 1989: 325), and including such words, related to an inquiry, as ‘torch’, ‘torture’, ‘torsion’ or ‘retorting’. Even further, the first sense of *ter provides us with the central experiential meaning accompanying a dangerous passage, the experience of ‘trembling’, and the related terms ‘terrible’ and ‘terror’, indicating that the while ‘on the road’, while completing the passage, one might have experiences that seem to point beyond the obvious threats to one’s physical life, to the ‘experience of the sacred’, identified by Victor Turner with liminal moments (V. Turner 1967). The last related term, the other extended root *ters, brings in a new aspect that, however, will much help to round things up. The root expresses the experience of dryness, connected to Sanskrit 5942 trisyati ‘thirsty’, leading to such modern terms as ‘torrid’ and ‘toast’, but possibly also including Latin terra, and all its derivates related to the dry earth (Grandsaignes 1948: 218-9).

Sanskri t for ‘path’

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While the experience of going through a passage is expressed by ‘pr’ and ‘tr’ roots, the actual name of a path (thus, related more to naming than to experience) is rendered by a different word, already alluded to when discussing Greek patos and pontos. The question now is to identify the underlying experiential basis.xxi The central term is 7785 pantha ‘path, road’, and a series of derivates like 7786 panthin ‘travelling’ or 8091 pantha ‘traveller’, occasionally losing the ‘n’ as in 7743 patha ‘path’; 7745 pathika ‘traveller’. No terms related to Greek pathos (suffering, mourning, veiling) can be found in the neighbourhood, but there are two words with a very similar phonetic structure that seem worthy to consider: 7645 panka ‘mud, wet, watery’, and 7655 panca ‘five’. Concerning the former, ‘mud’ and ‘water’ are similar not only in the ‘objective’ sense of mud being equal to earth mixed with water, but also in the ‘experiential’ sense of rendering travelling particularly difficult: human beings can only walk at ease on dry land – thus reinforcing the possible link between trans ‘through’ and terra ‘earth’. Concerning the latter, if considered together with related Greek terms, a series of similar transformations combined with strong phonetic stability are remarkable. The Greek word for five is pente, with a ‘k’-‘t’ alteration, but occasionally the root is further changed, like in pemptos (the five of us) or pempakso (count on five fingers). This brings into the picture terms like pathos ‘experience of suffering’, pontos ‘sea passage’ and patos ‘passage, path’, but also penomai ‘nourish’, pema ‘misery’, perhaps even pempo ‘send, guide’ – each (except for pontos) without a stable etymology. Could some of these difficulties be eased through the number five? For suggesting an answer to this question, here we need to return and take seriously the transference or interference between ‘pr’ and ‘tr’ roots and initials. The root *per has no link to any numbers; but its evident ‘equivalent’ *ter is strikingly close to the number three, identified with the root *tre, *tri, or *treu by various etymological dictionaries, furthermore undergoing similar syntactic transformations between ‘tr’ and ‘thr’ initials (see Latin tri, Italian tre, Russian tre, French trois, but Old Frisian thre, English three), or a ‘t’-‘d’ change (see German drei). Can such surface similarities actually reveal something important?

The exper ient ia l basis o f numbers ‘ three ’ and ‘ f ive ’ What links could be between the idea-experience of a passage, in its various modalities, and the numbers three and five? Can the two numbers correspond to the basic modalities in which a dangerous passage can be experienced? I think the response is affirmative; and it cannot possibly be due to mere chance or coincidence. One should start by recalling that numbers played an important role behind the 1913 conflict between Durkheim and van Gennep. Central to the latter’s critique of the Elementary Forms was the point that Durkheim, following his training in neo-Kantian philosophy, imposed an alien, static, dichotomistic-dualistic framework, under the sign of the number ‘two’, on the anthropological material,xxii implying that instead it should have been analysed as a process, having a starting point, a climax and a conclusion, thus being intrinsically related to the number three, as rendered evident in his own classic book (van Gennep 1960). The point was taken further by Victor Turner, who even found a place for the concern with number two. He argued that such dichotomies, prevalent in the thinking of Lévi-Strauss, his own arch-enemy, in fact dominate liminal situations, where the complex structure of social order is suspended, and binary oppositions become dominant (V. Turner 1969: 106-8). In this way, instead of taking the Kantian-neokantian dichotomous thinking

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for granted, or simply criticising them, Turner managed to contextualise them, identifying their limits, and assigning them to their proper place. Far from laying down the foundations of all kind of ‘rational’ thinking, Kant simply expressed the experience of his own, highly liminal times, in his politics (the concern with maturity and autonomy), just as in his ethics and epistemology (the preoccupation with critique and limits), without it ever crossing his mind that his thinking might be historically bound. Remains to be explained the role of number five. From the preceding it seems clear that this number is more closely associated with the difficulties of the passage than the eventual success. Five replaces three, still according to the internal logic of passage, in two situations: either when the passage fails, in which case there is a need to turn back and try again the crossing, thus the sequence has five steps instead of three (a matter already thematised in Turner’s earlier idea of ritual as ‘social drama’); or when it involves a return trip, a situation particularly frequent when waters are involved, thus again having five elements: the preparation, the outward crossing, the reaching of the target, the return crossing, and the arrival. In both cases, there is extra difficulty and suffering involved; and there is a clear thematisation of the ‘return’: a revolving and not linear movement.

Rounding up through Russian The previous considerations can receive further support from Russian, a language not well integrated into the classical comparative indo-European framework.xxiii A coherent set of Russian words not so much repeat the argument, rather build another web around the same affinities explored so far. The first set is centred around the words ispytanie ‘inquiry, test, trial, examination’, opyt ‘experience’ and pytatj ‘interrogating by torture’. While the links to semantically related Western European words are not evident, they can be connected to Sanskrit pitati (Vasmer 1953, II: 379).xxiv In analogy to the Greek pathos-patos-penta series, the Russian terms can be connected to words like putj ‘path, road’ (linked to Sanskrit pantha), vspjatj ‘backwards’ and pjatitj ‘move back’ (having as its Russian root pnu ‘brace, tighten, move, a word linked to Greek penomai ‘nourish’ and ponos ‘hard work, toil’; see Vasmer 1953), pjatitjcja ‘walk backwards’, and the number five itself (pjatj). The other group is around the Russian word for experience in the sense of both suffering and passion, thus the exact equivalent of Greek pathos, which is stradatj, and includes terms like strada ‘heavy work, drudgery’, strah ‘fear, terror’, strastj ‘passion’, strahovanie ‘security, insurance’, and strashno ‘terribly, horribly’, but perhaps also terms like strana ‘country’, stranno ‘strange’, and strannik ‘traveller, wanderer’. The first set of words constitute an etymological puzzle, as traced to Sanskrit stradati ‘suffer’ (Vasmer 1953), Greek strenos ‘rough, pointed’, and Latin strenuus ‘active, vigorous’ (see English ‘strenuous’);xxv but the problem is that Latin sterna, to which these words are traced, have a quite different sense, meaning a good omen. The latter set of words have a somewhat simpler etymology, connected to Sanskrit strnoti ‘spill or scatter’ (Vasmer 1953), Greek sternon ‘chest’ and stornemi ‘making bed, then spread and strew’, and Latin sterno ‘extension, lying on the ground’, from which, through strata, a series of words are derived, expressing both ‘layer’ and ‘road’ (see ‘street’ or Italian strada). So, while the apparent similarity between Russian stradatj ‘suffering’ and Italian strada ‘road’ is spurious according to conventional etymology, one might wonder whether the two basic senses of experience as ‘being on the road’ and ‘suffering something that happens to one’ might not be also behind such a seeming fortuity.

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The experience of judging: the etymology of experience 2 (PIE *ker) The root *ker is not only the statistically most important indo-European root. It also has something to do with experience. In order to see this point, and to recognise its significance, we need to turn to another crucial social theorist of the past century, who belonged to the same generation as Victor Turner (1920-83) or Mario Alinei (born 1926): Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006).xxvi

Kosel l e ck’s Cri t ique and Cris is The central thesis of Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis, his Habilitation thesis, was that the two title words, having such a different sense today, actually were not separated until the eighteenth century. In the 1733 lexicon of Zedler, the word ‘crisis’ and ‘critic’ still possess the same meaning (Koselleck 1988: 104). At the same time, apart from the separation of meaning, something else happens as well: ‘crisis’ as decision and judgment loses weight, is replaced by mere ‘criticism’. According to Koselleck, this is indicative of the ‘hypocrisy to which eighteenth-century criticism had degenerated’ (Ibid.).This parallels in modality and character the split between experience and experiment; a development whose significance can hardly be exaggerated, as these four words arguably represent the four most important words of modern thought, given that ‘experiment’ is the central term of modern science and its ‘scientific method’, that ‘experience’ is the central substantive term of modern philosophy since Descartes, that ‘critique’ is the central methodological term of modern philosophy since Kant, and that ‘crisis’ is the central term of the modern, diagnostic social sciences – a word whose use by now has gone beyond all limits, but which as a fact should be considered a crucial symptom of contemporary life, supporting the diagnosis of ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai 2000: 215-26). Koselleck argued that both ‘critique’ and ‘crisis’ are derived from the Greek verb krinein, meaning to divide, and in three major senses: in a politico-military sense to make a decision about a fight or a struggle; in a legal-juridical sense of making a judgment; and finally in a medical sense of making a diagnosis and then to decide about the cure. Eventually, in the New Testament, a fourth – and similarly crucial – meaning was gained: the Last Judgement, combining ‘critical’ judgment with apocalyptic expectations. Behind the word krinein, so important for the philosophy of Plato, who was much more careful than Kant in realising the inevitable traps around the intellectual activity of making verbal separations, central for the linguistic tricks performed by the Sophists,xxvii there is the verb keiro ‘cut’. This takes us directly to the other central PIE root *ker.

The meanings o f PIE *ker The root *ker has three major senses, generating an almost infinite number of words in all indo-European languages. The first is the experience of ‘curving’. Apart from ‘curve’ itself, related words include Latin corona ‘crown’ (as a circular object), ‘circle’ itself and its various derivates like ‘circus’ and ‘circuit’, but also verbs like French chercher and Italian cercare ‘to look

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for’. The second meaning is the head or the brain, including Sanskrit 2784 karanka ‘skull, head’, Greek kara ‘head’ and kranion ‘skull’, just as Latin cerebro ‘brain’, continued in French cerveau or Italian cervello. The same root yields the various words for ‘horn’ (see Greek keras, Latin cornu, French corne, and then cerf ‘stag, deer’, German Horn). The third branch generated by far the widest range of meanings. This includes the experience of ‘cutting’, present in Sanskrit 3432 krntati ‘cuts’, 2858 kartari ‘scissors, knife’, and 3425 krti ‘knife’; Greek keiro ‘cut’ and kormos ‘a piece that was cut’, or Latin curtare ‘cut’. The derivates are a mirion: in the most direct sense French court ‘short’, from which English ‘short’ itself is derived, German scheren ‘shear’ and Schere ‘scissors’, and a whole range of English words like ‘shear’, ‘share’, ‘shore’, ‘score’, or ‘shirt’. Of the various extensions let us mention only ‘harvest’, Latin caro and Italian carne ‘flesh’, Latin corium and French cuir ‘cook’; ‘cork’, ‘certainty’, ‘discreet’, ‘discern’, Latin scribere and French écrire ‘write’. Finally, there is Latin scrutor ‘examine, search into’ leading to various terms about ‘scrutiny’, and Latin scrupus ‘sharp stone’, then ‘anxiety, disquiet’, leading to various terms about ‘scruple’. These last words, with their evident semantic links to inquiry and examination, thus to test and trial, seems to close the circle by taking us back from PIE *ker to *per. Before we could pursue this line, however, we need to summarise our findings concerning the root *ker. The two central idea-experiences behind the root, that of curving and of cutting, seem to be difficult to bring together, given that a cut, especially one made by a knife, rather implies a straight line, along which an object is shortened or cut into two or more pieces. However, the link between the two roots is particularly strong, visible not only in the identical Sanskrit root KRT for ‘cut’ and for spin’ (R. Turner 1989: 177),xxviii but in a similarly all but identical series of words (2854 kartati ‘cuts’ and 2855 kartati ‘spins’; 3432 krntati ‘cuts’ and 3433 krntati ‘spins’; or 3434 krntana ‘cutting off’ and 3435 krntana ‘spinning’)xxix. The puzzle can be solved and the two can be brought together by the related concerns of complexity and irreversibility. A curve is always a sign of complexity, especially in the sense of a curve on the road – and the experience of travelling as a passage, we have seen, is a most basic experience for all indo-European languages. Curves are dangerous, as we don’t see behind them; or because we have to negotiate them, whether we are running or riding a horse. A similar complexity is evoked with the need of cutting an object into pieces, as such a cut cannot be reversed: it remains the way the decisive cutting was made. The third main meaning fully confirms this hypothesis alongside complexity, as it is the head or the brain itself, the centre where decisions are made. Experience as a dangerous passage, and the making of a judgment as a ‘cutting-edge’ act are closely related, as evidenced by the ‘scrupulous scrutiny’ linked to such a decision. However, in strict analogy with the PIE root *per, it might be possible to extend the meaning of this root, even incorporating another important number. Just as the root *per had affinities with words having a root like ‘pent’, the same thing seems to apply for the root *ker, and its possible links with words having a root like ‘kent’. Grandsaignes assumes a root *kent-eo ‘to prick, goad, spur on’, with only two further Greek words belonging here: kentron, meaning a pointed needle, and then centre (as in kentrikos ‘belonging to a cardinal point’), also taken up in Latin centrum; and kontos ‘pole, pike, crutch, goad’, and also ‘short’ (Grandsaignes 1948: 85). The etymological difficulties are confirmed by Chantraine (1999: 515). The first term has evident and important affinites with the meaning of *ker as head or brain, as kentron gives the word ‘centre’ present in all indo-European languages; while the second, apart relevance in meaning, parallels in form pontos, the possible etymological link between Sanskrit pantha and Greek patos. This link between

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centrality and complexity is further underlined by the possible link with PIE *kent, meaning the number hundred. On the one hand, this is the number for complexity, meaning ‘very many’ in several languages, much more than ten that after all can be counted on one’s fingers. On the other hand, this number also gives a good way to represent, by drawing, a centre: all it requires is to place all our ten fingers on a line, then drawing two parallel lines orthogonal to both end points, thus gaining a square, and finally marking the centre by the two diagonals. The previous considerations were highly hypothetical, pursuing suggestions derived from a shift from Descartes-Kantian to Dilthey-Voegelin-Turnerian epistemology, where words are not identical to ideas reflecting objects, but actually express and literally re-present (bring into the present by performing) experiences. Instead of pursuing detailed and specific analysis, which should be the task of experts, rather an attempt was made to indicate that from the perspective of experience as a dangerous passage involving and implying all kinds of central mental and spiritual efforts and processes, a number of past difficulties might be resolved jointly; connections become visible that previously remained hidden or were considered as irrelevant or unintelligible. There is, however, a further aspect that leads us directly back to one of the central tasks of sociology, the diagnosis of the modern condition. This concerns fundamental and parallel semantic shifts in the meaning of *per and *ker derivate words. Here we need to take up again and develop further the work of Reinhart Koselleck.

Meaning inflexions of *ker and *per derivates with the rise of the modern world Originally experience meant a highly dangerous passage that one had to undergo, associated with fear, threat, often also suffering, and that at any rate had the character of an event. A critical decision, however, implied a complex judgment to be actively made, involving difficulties in making up one’s mind and taking risks in the exact manner of execution, but that still fundamentally was something to be done in an active and conscious manner, and with full responsibility concerning the outcome. Now, in a manner whose significance cannot be exaggerated, these meanings simply became inverted with the rise of the modern world. The first change took place in the early seventeenth century, with the end of the Renaissance; while the second in the eighteenth century, with the rise of the Enlightenment. As Koselleck argues in detail about the second of these changes, with the philosophes ‘critique’ came to mean an act without immediate responsibility, a kind of running social commentary on the times that the literati – modern-day ‘Sophists’ – offered, lacking any means, often any inclinations, of pursuing the real implications; a position that eventually changed into the disastrous idea of ‘let’s first destroy the existing world, we can worry about the future after’. At the same time ‘crisis’, separated from active judgment, became an experience that one was simply passively undergoing by becoming the suffering witness of historical events. The full significance of this change in meaning becomes visible by considering it together with the parallel shift, due to the split between ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. ‘Experience’ no longer represented a challenge that a human being (or an entire community) had to undergo, a problem to be solved, whose success always depended on forces that to some extent were outside the control of the individual, and thus had the character of an event – an event, furthermore, that was formative or constitute of both the individual and

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the community, putting at stake their very identity; rather, it became associated with sense perception, especially the experiencing of pleasure that the individual subject, assumed to exist before the experience and not being modified by the experience at all, actively hunts. With modernity, therefore, it was the subject who came before the experience, becoming as much the active subject of experience as of (scientific) experiment; a perspective from which ‘bad’ experiences of suffering came to be defined simply as sense perceptions to avoid. With the rise of utilitarianism, pleasure and pain were radically separated as sensations to be controlled, chosen or avoided by a fully rational and conscious subject. The concluding section of the paper will shortly assess and evaluate the meaning of this development that cannot be more radical as it contrasts the modern experience of life with all other and previous modes of experience. Before doing so, however, and giving further weight to these points, a short sketch will be given of a parallel development in a closely related and similarly central term for sociology, much to do with instrumental reason: ‘act’ or ‘action’.

‘Act’ and ‘action’: etymology and conceptual history These words have simple and straightforward etymology. They are traced to the PIE root *ag ‘to drive, set in motion, move, lead, draw out or forth’, present in Sanskrit root *AJ ‘drive’ (R. Turner 1989: 8) 1090 ajati ‘drives toward’, or Greek and Latin ago, practically without any alteration in syntax or semantics. It is tempting to connect this sense of ‘leading’ to the root *per, meaning to go ahead and make the passage; but one should note that the original meaning of the term is closely connected to the activity of shepherding animals, of literally pushing them ahead, and not directly to the activity of leading human beings by showing them the way, for which for e.g. in Latin the term ducere ‘conduct’ is used. However, and rendering the connection more plausible, derivate words in both Sanskrit (see agmas) and Greek (see ogmos) have the sense of ‘way, road, path’. It is in Latin that the word undergoes a series of important modifications, acquiring meanings not present in Sanskrit or Greek. On the one hand, the verb starts to mean the force or spirit that actually set things into motion; on the other, it also gains the exact opposite meaning of an imitative stage performance, as in actor.xxx Still as part of the same process a new word is developing, actiones, as if doubling the term actus. Changes in the meanings of the English words ‘act’ (both as a verb and as a noun) and ‘action’ seem to tell a similar story; as if taking off from the developments in Latin. According to the OED the use of the word ‘act’ as a noun preceded that of the verb. The original, and now obsolete, senses of both terms were related not simply to the fact of doing, accomplishing or performing something, but – close to PIE *ag – to the experience of putting or bringing into motion; and, in particular, to the active principle or force that is actually driving this motion. It is by no means accidental that practically all the examples listed in the OED for such archaic uses are theological or religious, referring to the soul, the spirit, God, or divine grace. On the other hand, the closer we move to modernity, the more the word ‘act’ gains the exclusive sense of a performance in the theatrical or legal sense, no longer connected to doing or completing something, which then becomes exclusively connected to the term ‘action’ – which, however, also carries legalistic and theatrical overtones. The result, with the obsolescence of the original agricultural-pastoral meaning, due to its close association with the theological meaning over time, is that exactly those

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meanings of ‘act’ and ‘action’ that carried a strong performative, legal or theatrical sense now came to be seen as standing for the very principle of activity, and then eventually came to be theorised in the sociological theory of action as the very principle of human autonomy and agency, completely ignoring the imitative aspect of an ‘act’. A study of ‘act’ and ‘acting’ leads to the same result as the earlier analysis of experience: a radical alteration and reversal of meaning with the rise of the modern world. While action, following the root *ag, just as experience, following the root *per, implied a complex, structured process in which some went ahead, completing the difficult and dangerous task by showing the way, while others followed (imitated), with more or less success, often encountering suffering, in the modern world leading and following have become cut off from each other, turning the latter into mere miming, and then it was exactly this mimetic act that, with the rise of the modern subject and its pretence at autonomy, became the principle of ‘agency’ and ‘action’, arrogantly ignoring any models to follow. Modern thought and philosophy, from Baconian ‘experiment’ and Cartesian ‘experience’ through Kantian ‘critique’ up to the Parsonian ‘theory of action’ simply mirrors these phenomena, if not being its active agent; it fails to identify and analyse their specificity. It is to this task that this paper hoped to make a contribution.

Conclusion Words like experience and experiment, critique and crisis, or act and action, especially together with the directly implies terms like inquiry, trial, truth, rationality, and autonomy of choice are not just among the most important concepts of modern science, philosophy, art, law and sociology, but simply define the episteme the modern world in which we live. The significance of the radical shifts in meaning they have undergone over the last centuries therefore can hardly be exaggerated; and a study of such shifts gives us unparalleled insights into the changes that took place over this period at the most basic anthropological level, pinpointing their highly problematic character. Two of these changes, lying at the heart of the socio- and psychogenesis of modernity, both in the sense of being symptoms and active agents, are the receding of events and the closely related rise to dominance of the ‘pleasure principle’. Up to the modern age the life of human beings and communities was dominated by events: things that simply happened, for better or – more often – for worse, which were surprising and unexpected, and which required quick and adequate response. Such events ranged from wars and natural disasters through unexpected arrivals and departures (including births and deaths) to friendship, love or betrayal, and very often implied a close awareness of the presence of the supernatural, or of mere chance (fate, destiny, Fortuna). The modern world, especially through modern science, attempts to limit the scope of ‘event’, in the name of human happiness; at its limit, in the most extreme version of the mechanical world view as depository of rationality, it even denies that events at all can happen: everything is governed by laws – a view just as extreme as the Puritan idea that everything happens due to the inscrutable will of a hidden God, of which it is a direct descendant. The experience of living in a world totally defined by mechanical regularities is extremely oppressive, so it ‘had’ to be complemented by its twin hypothesis, equally absurd but a similarly unshakeable bedrock of the modern experience of the world: the pleasure

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principle. According to this idea human beings simple ‘are’ maximisers of pleasure – which really means that the only line of conduct remaining for ‘hominoids’ (animals provided with rationality) in a world dominated by iron necessities outside is to maximise the amount of pleasurable sensations one could procure inside. In this way, as if by a fabulous illusionist trick, the oppressive and alienating characteristics of the modern world are transformed into an unprecedented opportunity to maximise pleasure – a principle presumed to lie at the heart of human nature, but oppressed in the unenlightened past by all kinds of institutions, regulations and values. This idea underlies Bentham’s ‘radical’ philosophy; and the great value of Durkheim’s sociology, in spite of all its evident shortcomings, is that he placed the repudiation of utilitarianism, in all its form, at the centre of sociology. By their persistence in going to the bottom of things and unearthing the basic meaning of experience and crisis, Voegelin, Turner and Koselleck laid down the foundations for a better understanding of the genesis of the modern world and its highly peculiar rationality that Weber singled out as the problem underlying his life-work (Weber 1988: 1, 11-2).xxxi Eric Voegelin, Victor Turner and Reinhart Koselleck are not simply ‘important figures’ of contemporary social theory. Their work rather contains crucial indications through which the worst false passes of modern social theory, in the footsteps of the Enlightenment and neo-Kantianism, but also of Marx and Freud, could be overcome.

Notes i This point is brought into view, though only tangentially, in Foucault’s concern with parrhesia (see Szakolczai 2003). ii See the close links between the words ‘doubt’ and ‘double’, each derivates of the number ‘two’. iii In the Weberian sense; see Weber (1988: 1, first line). iv About ‘episteme’, see Foucault (1966). v The idea can be traced to the works of Hobbes. vi It was first published in the German edition of Anamnesis in 1966; Anamnesis was published in English in 1978, but the letter to Schutz only in 1993. vii Differently from the word ‘idea’, eidos can refer at the same time to image or to word. viii The point is discussed in detail in Szakolczai (2003). ix This is particularly close to the perspective of the last work of Plato, see especially the Statesman and Laws. x For a more detailed study of these words, see below; at this point, let me only add that peira is not the main Greek word for ‘experience’, as its central meaning is ‘trial, attempt’, in the sense of ‘being proved’, though can also mean ‘to have experience of’; and the link between peira and ‘empirical’ is by no means direct. xi Following the methodological considerations exposed above, or using ‘Turnerian’ and not ‘Kantian’ methodology, we should talk not so much about the ‘idea’ but the experience of a passage. The implications concerning the Platonic ‘eidos’ cannot be elaborated within the limits of this paper. xii One could conjecture that Russian, where all verbs have continuous and perfective or completed aspects, somehow ‘preserved’ this centrality of the experience of completion; an all the more likely conjecture as the prefix that makes a verb completed is ‘po-’ or ‘pro-‘.

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xiii It should be noted that the sense of being ‘ahead’ refers more to space then to time. xiv Incidentally, the word ‘pre-pare’ is a redoubling of the same root *per. xv For reference to Greek terms, unless otherwise indicated, see Liddell and Scott (1951). xvi Obscure words in the vicinity include pempo ‘send, guide’ (Chantraine 1999: 879) and pempsiks ‘breath, air’ (Ibid.: 880). Though these are not indo-European, they might have interfered with the others in their linguistic history. xvii It should be noted here that Victor Turner considered the word ‘trailblazer’ as particularly illuminating for his kind of ‘anthropology of experience’. xviii See Sanskrit pur (R. Turner 1989: 472), German Feuer, English fire. xix For rather evident reasons the complex spelling notation of indo-Iranian words is not followed in this paper. Given that every single word has a unique number in Ralph Turner’s Dictionary, their identification is easy. xx At a further remote, one could even mention the roots TARK ‘revolve’ (R. Turner 1989: 325), yielding important words like 5714 tarka ‘inquiry, conjecture’ (but in various indo-Iranian languages also meaning ‘doubt’, ‘guess’, ‘balance’ or a ‘pair of scales’), and 5717 tarku ‘spindle’; and TARJ ‘threaten’ (R. Turner 1989: 325), with its derivate 5718 targa ‘terrible, strong’. xxi Making things even more intriguing, Hebrew paskha, from which terms for Easter like French Paques and Italian Pasqua are derived, means ‘passage’. xxii ‘Take my word for it, this is bookish ethnography, the sort of thing one gets when the wrongly named German method is applied to Greek and Latin texts’ (van Gennep 1984: 205). xxiii See Ryan and Norman (1995), Vasmer (1953), Wade (1996), and Wheeler, Unbegaun and Falla (2000). Comparison to Hungarian, being a non-indo-European language, is also particularly illuminating, but unfortunately leads beyond the scope of this paper. xxiv See indo-Iranian terms like the root *PIS ‘carve’ (R. Turner 1989: 464), 8218 pista ‘crushed, ground’, and 8165 pittayati ‘stamps into a solid mass’; words themselves not easily connected to each other. xxv For reference to Latin terms, unless otherwise indicated, see Marchant (1948). xxvi Other central figures of this ‘Second World War’ generation include, among others, Pierre Hadot (born 1921), Mary Douglas (born 1921), Erving Goffman (born 1922), René Girard (born 1923), Shmuel Eisenstadt (born 1923), Alessandro Pizzorno (born 1924), Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925), or Michel Foucault (born 1926). xxvii See espeialy Plato’s Sophist and Statesman. xxviii Ralph Turner separates as a different Sanskrit root *KRUNC ‘curve’ (R. Turner 1989: 186). xxix Occasional differences relate to omitted accent, subscript or superscript. xxx In Greek a quite different term was used for the actor (hypocrites). xxxi His aim being ‘die besondere Eigenart des okzidentalen und, innerhalb dieses, des modernen okzidentalen, Rationalismus zu erkennen und in ihrere Entstehung zu erklären’ (Weber 1988: 12). In the same paragraph, preceding the quote, terms like ‘rationalism’, ‘rational’ and irrational’ are placed in between quotation marks six times. The English translation by Parsons omitted all of them.

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