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Respecting the Coherent Integrity of Another’s Experience = Respecting their Dignity

Respecting the coherent integrity of another’s experience amounts to respecting another’s dignity. For me, this is the direct implication of thinking along Jamesian lines that embraces the pluralism under the banner of an infinite possible plurality. There may be lots of room for variation in that coherent integrity, but insofar as the coherent integrity of another person’s experience does not harm another, then let it be. Respect trans folks. Respect blackness. Respect women’s bodies.

Lots of people like to claim that lived-experience is at best subjective and not a desirable datum for ethics, but most subjective things are corroborated when we look to if other people have also experienced similar phenomena. By similar, I don’t know if any experience is exactly repeatable, but they can involve common factors LIKE institutional and social habits, embodiment, values, and intentionality that make them closely resemble each other in structure. That’s why a good friend of mine can formulate an experience-based approach to the ontology of blackness in his work. These are the tools in pragmatism and phenomenology to explain why lived-experience is for this reason “intersubjective”.

Once we’re open to the ontological scaffolding and methods of listening to how others experience their relation with others, then there’s no reason to be skeptical about what they report as far as the content insofar as those people are willing to put those descriptions of lived-experience into the world. For me, the variety of interpretations of that content is where much of the impetus to do philosophy comes from and where a lot of reasonable disagreement occurs. Apart from that, the problems in philosophy that antagonize me occur mostly when someone ignores the social reality of these relations and dismisses the importance of experienced content for some higher abstract reasoning that James warned us about. Substituting a concept for an experienced particular kills the opportunity for us to understand each other. James warned us against this so wisely that when I first encountered these words, they never left my soul and they are behind everything I do as they should be part of you too. It’s that important to remind people about from time to time.

By J. Edward Hackett

J. Edward Hackett, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the United States. He specializes in American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Ethics. He is the author of several books: Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration of Moral Metaphysics (2018), Phenomenology in the 21st Century (2016, coedited with J. Aaron Simmons), House of Cards and Philosophy (2015), and a novel, Flight of the Ravenhawk (2019). Hackett received his Ph.D. in 2013 from Southern Illinois University focusing on phenomenology and pragmatism, and his M.A. in analytic philosophy from Simon Fraser University in 2008. His philosophical work has been translated in Spanish and Russian. Recent work has paid attention to the overlap between Catholic and Methodist personalism in Scheler and Brightman, process metaphysics, the metaphysical underpinnings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the ethics and political philosophy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2 replies on “Respecting the Coherent Integrity of Another’s Experience = Respecting their Dignity”

Sorry Jason, I didn’t see this. Could you say more? The integrity describes, for me, the coherence of the content and what is communicated about that content to another. Dignity is the concretization of respecting the communicable content from another’s lived-experience and insofar as those experiences are not harming others, there should be some duty for us to listen. I think the two come out in practice of what it means to be a Jamesian.

Maybe you took me as saying something else?

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