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i really do not see how the opposition between bellief and experience works, outside of a totally unjustifiable empiricist framework.
your experience is heavily mediated--obviously--from the categories you use to bundle data to the assumptions you inhabit with reference to the nature of space, of movement, of time....are these assumptions amenable to being formalized? to an extent yes....does that formalization mean that you are somehow stepping outside them, and by doing that are able to work out the extent to which they are simply beliefs? not really, because you would build elements of that register into your analysis itself.
does the fact that your field of vision presents you with what appears to be an "objective" view of the object world mean that you in any way have unmediated acceess to that world? well no, because as you focus your attention on any given object and make judgements about that object--what is this thing---you enter directly into the space of explicit mediation--and your field of vision is itself constituted across a whole series of assumptions.....
if you cannot claim that experience provides you with immediacy, then on what basis could you oppose it to questions of belief? it seems more logical that your experience is simply another register across which your beliefs are deployed.
montaigne was at least consistent about this--what he looked to was not the object world, not individual experience, but rather history in that for him history was the result of a kind of collective working-out of relations to the world...for montaigne, however, the question of history was not a gateway to immediacy, which to an extent it was for his conservative epigone, edmund burke....both of these positions explain why i understand this question of belief as being properly political....because it involves a shift in relation to history and arguments about the nature and meaning of that shift.
questions of religion are easier to address, but for that are (to me at least) less interesting.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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