Relevant article from Aeon for today’s identity struggles.
An excerpt.
“Everywhere you turn, there is talk of lived experience. But there is little consensus about what the phrase ‘lived experience’ means, where it came from, and whether it has any value. Although long used by academics, it has become ubiquitous, leaping out of the ivory tower and showing up in activism, government, consulting, as well as popular culture. The Lived Experience Leaders Movement explains that those who have lived experiences have ‘[d]irect, first-hand experience, past or present, of a social issue(s) and/or injustice(s)’. A recent brief from the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that those who have lived experience have ‘valuable and unique expertise’ that should be consulted in policy work, since engaging those with ‘knowledge based on [their] perspective, personal identities, and history’ can ‘help break down power dynamics’ and advance equity. A search of Twitter reveals a constant stream of use, from assertions like ‘Your research doesn’t override my lived experience,’ to ‘I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to question someone’s lived experience.’
“A recurring theme is a connection between lived experience and identity. A recent nominee for the US Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, is lauded as someone who will ‘bring her lived experience as a daughter of immigrants, a woman of color, and an Asian American to the role’. The Human Rights Campaign asserts that ‘[l]aws and legislation must reflect the lived experiences of LGBTQ people’. An editorial in Nature Mental Health notes that incorporation of ‘people with lived experience’ has ‘taken on the status of a movement’ in the field.
“Carried a step further, the notion of lived experience is bound up with what is often called identity politics, as when one claims to be speaking from the standpoint of an identity group – ‘in my lived experience as a…’ or, simply, ‘speaking as a…’ Here, lived experience is often invoked to establish authority and prompt deference from others since, purportedly, only members of a shared identity know what it’s like to have certain kinds of experience or to be a member of that group. Outsiders sense that they shouldn’t criticise what is said because, grounded in lived experience, ‘people’s spoken truths are, in and of themselves, truths.’ Criticism of lived experience might be taken to invalidate or dehumanise others or make them feel unsafe.
“So, what is lived experience? Where did it come from? And what does it have to do with identity politics?
“Lived experience’ is a translation of one of the two German words for experience: Erlebnis. The other German word for experience, Erfahrung, is the older of the two. It has as its root fahren, ‘to journey’. When one calls someone ‘experienced’, it is this kind of experience that is being appealed to. Erfahrung is experience that is cumulative – as one who has long journeyed a path knows the road – and is associated with practice, skill and know-how. Erfahrung can sometimes be translated as ‘learning’, and suggests experience that might be gathered in the form of practical wisdom and passed on as tradition.
“Erlebnis, by contrast, has Leben or ‘life’ as its root. Rather than experience that accumulates over time or is held in the form of tradition, Erlebnis connotes experience that is living and immediate. It is the province of the pre-reflective and innocent, as opposed to the refined and distilled. Erlebnis implies experience that is new, fresh and sometimes disruptive – what doesn’t easily fit into the public, cultural patterns associated with Erfahrung.
“In the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, German philosophers developed and exploited the contrast between these two kinds of experience. This led philosophers and translators in other languages – most notably, for our purposes, English and French – to add the qualifiers ‘lived’ or ‘vécue’ to signify when they were invoking Erlebnis as opposed to Erfahrung. So, while the multifaceted English word ‘experience’ can be used to translate both Erlebnis and Erfahrung, when someone wants to refer to the distinctive form of experience picked out by Erlebnis, they often use ‘lived experience’ to do so.
“According to Richard E Palmer in his book Hermeneutics (1969), Erlebnis first appeared in the plural form Erlebnisse in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests in Truth and Method (1960) that the first singular use can be found in one of G W F Hegel’s letters. But the word really didn’t come into common usage until the 1870s. It was then that the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey brought Erlebnis into the mainstream, when he used it in his 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher and in an 1877 essay on Goethe, a version of which was later included in his highly regarded work Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (‘Poetry and Lived Experience’; 1906).
“While himself a staunch empiricist, Dilthey was part of a Romantic movement reacting to earlier empiricists, positivists and Kantians, whom he believed relied on an unduly narrow conception of experience. Since these philosophers were primarily concerned to provide an epistemological foundation for the budding natural sciences, they focused on the cognitive aspects of experience – that is, how experience can be used as the basis for scientific knowledge of the kind produced by natural philosophers such as Isaac Newton.
“At the risk of oversimplification, these thinkers focused primarily on sensation – the ‘objective’ world encountered by the senses and, in particular, those aspects of sensory experience that could, through abstraction, be quantified, measured and shared. Other features of experience, such as meaning, significance, value, purpose, feeling and the like, were ignored and relegated to the ‘subjective’ realm of ‘inner experience’. This epistemology created a split between subject and object, mind and world, fact and value. The external or objective world became the realm of ‘facts’, while meaning, significance, value, purpose and feeling were increasingly thought of as subjective.
“While a Romantic, Dilthey was also insistent upon being more empirical than earlier empiricists. He saw his task as getting back behind the subject/object, mind/world, fact/value split to embodied, full-blooded, living experience. In a line from his work Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Dilthey writes: ‘No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.’ Dilthey believed we have to return to conscious lived experience, not because the content of lived experience is indubitable but because we have no alternative. The only way we can know anything is through conscious experience.
“Dilthey maintained that the subject/object split led us to the false belief that the world of the natural sciences was the true or fundamental reality. By contrast, Dilthey argued, since our original access to the world is through conscious experience, so-called objective reality is only the husk that remains by exsanguinating lived experience. This means that the world of the natural sciences is not fundamental, but necessarily derivative. Dilthey designed the concept of Erlebnis (lived experience) to reflect the fact that, in our original experience, we know the world as a meaningful, coherent whole – a composite of inner and outer, subjective and objective, facts and values. One can analyse the original whole of lived experience into subjective and objective elements, but this analysis is only possible because subject and object are originally bound up together in the fundamental reality of lived experience.
“Contemporary usage of lived experience still bears the mark of Dilthey’s original formulations (a point I’ve developed in more detail in other writings). For Dilthey, lived experience should first be taken to signify the view from the inside, the ‘what it’s like’ to be a human being. There is a stark difference between learning about the physics of colour and being awestruck by the prismatic beauty of a sunset; one thing to know about the biochemistry involved in love and another to experience the extraordinary, ineffable thrill of actually falling in love.”
On lived experience, from the Romantics to identity politics | Aeon Essays