Experience and Experiences

Dewey distinguishes between Experience and experiences. For him, an experience is marked by a distinctive beginning and a consummation, and by a unity that is the product of emotion. For example, a mellow meal in a restaurant is an experience. What such an example implies is, first, that without the pervasive mellowness, the meal would lack its unity of experience, e. g. it would be broken up into two experiences if a pleasant conversation during the entree erupted into an argument during the dessert. Second, it implies that Experience, in general, lacks unity and consummation. Now, if there is any unity to such a meal, it would seem to derive first and foremost from its uniformity of location, i. e. beginning at sitting down at the table, ending when rising to leave, regardless of any emotional coloring. Furthermore, a restaurant meal could be part of a date, which could be part of a courtship, which could be part of a long-term relationship, demonstrating that Dewey's parameters of an experience are arbitrarily drawn, and that it is the drawing of those parameters that is the source of its unity. Hence, an entire life, as an experience, has unity as much as the episodes that it includes. Now, on the Evolvemental analysis of Experience, every moment is a combination of Propriation and Exposition, and Propriation is the Formal Principle of Individual Experience. So, Evolvementalism disagrees with Dewey's thesis that only emotionally-colored discrete experiences, not Experience itself, possesses unity.