Ranchers face off with the Bureau of Land Management in a dispute over historic public land grazing rights near Bunkerville, Nevada on 12 April 2014. Photo Jim Uruquhart/Reuters
The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity
Patrick J Casey is assistant professor of philosophy at Holy Family University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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 20th centuries, 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.
The external world became the realm of 'facts', while meaning, value and feeling were increasingly thought of as subjective
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)....
more...
https://aeon.co/essays/on-lived-experience-from-the-romantics-to-identity-politics
F. Kaskais Web Guru
No comments:
Post a Comment