From the Summer, 2010 issue, we are happy to make available here Professor Reinhard Huetter’s (bio) article, Experience and Its Claim to Universality.

From the text:

The refusal to surrender to the truth of the status viatoris can take two forms. First, and most frequently, is the attempt at an alleged self-protection from the truth: cynicism. The cynic who has seen it all and knows it all, who has always already been there and done it and whom therefore no new experience can ever touch and wound anymore, prefers a death to experience to the vulnerability that is inherent in remaining open to all of reality and hence to inherently unpredictable and therefore genuinely new experiences. What the cynic forgoes is any genuine insight that can only be gained by the death to expectations to which previous experiences gave rise. The “wisdom” of the cynic is nothing but the well-camouflaged absence of insight, the mark of a truly wise person.

Besides the misplaced attempt at self-protection, cynicism, there is another form of refusing to surrender to the truth of the status viatoris: despair, that is, giving up each and every attempt at “having experiences,” that is, despairing at the arduous but necessary work of integrating and narrating experience. Despair is to give oneself up to “non-sense,” to the mere flux of experiencing . . . full text (pdf)