Abstract

This essay offers a reflection on the notion of experience considered within the context of framework of relational ontology. The primary advantage of such a consideration is that it escapes the consequences of subject-object accounts of experience, accounts which either laud the cognitive subject as master of the experienced world or exile it to an existence in a world it does not experience as its own. Setting experience within a relational ontology and developing a participatory epistemology around the concept offers an inter-active account of experience as an ontological process and an integrated account of knowing and being. This ends the traditional privileging the human as a cognitive subject and opens the way to thinking of all elements within interactive processes as interpretive agencies. Furthermore, it allows the category of interpretation to be freed from the domain of cognitive subjects and to become a descriptor of ontological interaction in general.