Episode 74 - Lived Experience Transcript
David: 0:11
Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:13
The podcast where two friends who are also professors think about the connection between ideas and, in this case, lived experience.
David: 0:22
I am Dr. David Peña-Guzmán.
Ellie: 0:25
And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:27
There's been so much discourse in recent years about who is entitled to tell which stories. Should Steven Spielberg have directed West Side Story, and how about that one movie in which Scarlett Johansson played an Asian woman.
Ellie: 0:42
Or do you remember that white woman who wrote a novel about Latin American immigrants? What was the deal with that again?
David: 0:48
Oh yes, no. Um, the, the name of the book is American Dirt and the author got a seven figure advance
Ellie: 0:55
Oh. Oh.
David: 0:56
for a book about Mexican immigration that was basically trauma porn. And needless to say, she's not Mexican.
Ellie: 1:03
Dang. And that seems like an obvious one. Like she was not the person to write about this, um, because by all accounts, she actually knew very little about the situation she was writing about in addition to not being Mexican. It's funny, David, that we're doing this episode right after our cultural appropriation episode as well, we
David: 1:22
Sounds very similar. No.
Ellie: 1:24
We'd like been thinking about some of these things in similar, yet different ways, but there are a lot more cases here where the ethics are very blurred. For instance, let's say you're a white male writer who wants to write a novel with a strong protagonist. And you know that novels in English have tended to prioritize white male characters. Do you try and disrupt this history by writing a woman of color as the protagonist? Even if you do all the research in the world on the positionality of your character, are you just not the person to write it because you're a white man? And if you aren't the person to write it, then do you just keep centering white characters because that seems bad too.
David: 2:00
Yeah. Uh, stop writing altogether, perhaps. Poor guy. No, no, that's not at all fair. That is, I, I do, I do not believe that. Let me go on record. Uh, but, but this reminds me of a, a really interesting New York Times article called The Limits of Lived Experience, where the author writes the following. Am I as a new columnist for the Times allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns? This way of thinking about writing can very quickly lead to a narrowing of creative activity where all creative expression becomes essentially a form of memoir writing, where people are only telling stories specifically drawn from their pasts. And the issue is whether one needs to have a certain kind of lived experience in order to either tell certain stories or write certain characters.
Ellie: 2:59
I've wondered about this a lot and it's made me grateful that I am not a fiction writer.
David: 3:04
Touche. I mean, not that philosophers are really off the hook. Uh, sorry to tell you Ellie, because even though we don't write protagonists, we do write in the abstract and we sometimes think that we get out of identity altogether by proclaiming that our experience is universal. Um, and it, you know, it's not quite the case.
Ellie: 3:24
Yes. The idea that a lot of supposedly philosophical universals actually describe specifically white, bourgeois able-bodied male subjects has been a huge area of discourse in feminist philosophy for decades now. So maybe I spoke too soon.
David: 3:38
But you do bring an interesting point, which is how the question of one's identity categories pertains outside the sphere of writing novels and maybe even performing in films, for example. And the idea is that lived experience gives us a certain kind of authority, which is the authority of expression. And this is not only there in the world of literature, it's also there in the visual arts. It is also there in the world of politics. It's all over the place. And often people will appeal to this concept of personal experience or lived experience when they explain their worldview or when they describe their understanding of the social field. So people will say things like, as a woman, dot, dot, dot, or you know, if I'm making it personal here, us a queer Mexican immigrant dot, dot, dot.
Ellie: 4:33
Yes, this is exactly why I really wanted to do this episode. I have been obsessing over how often I hear people talking these days precisely in these terms, and writing about lived experience. My students love talking about this, and they often frame their philosophical ideas in terms of their identity categories. I think there's a lot of good stuff to unpack here, especially because the term lived experience actually comes from the area of philosophy that we specialize in, phenomenology.
David: 5:02
Well, as a queer Mexican immigrant, I know and I look forward to talking about it.
Ellie: 5:11
Today we're talking about lived experience.
David: 5:14
What are the philosophical origins of this concept?
Ellie: 5:18
What kind of authority do we appeal to when we invoke it?
David: 5:21
And is our lived experience of the world something that varies along identity lines such as race?
Ellie: 5:36
Out of curiosity, I did one of those Google searches where you can look at the history of how frequently a word or a term is used.
David: 5:44
Ooh.
Ellie: 5:44
Such a fun thing to do. And I was looking up, obviously lived experience, like when did this word start to get used? There are very few to no references until the 1920s, and then it picks a little bit up starting in the forties and fifties, rises in the eighties, and then really spikes in say, the past 10 or 15 years. And I don't have really clear answers for why this is as a scholar of phenomenology, but I suspect that the rise of the term lived experience in recent decades has probably been linked to the increase of qualitative methods in the social sciences, like self-reports, asking people about their experiences, uh, methods that are drawn from the tradition of phenomenology as opposed to say more quantitative approaches.
David: 6:33
Yeah, thinking about it in terms of the evolution of social scientific methods is really interesting and I might want to throw in here also another possibility, which is the changing discourse on race and gender in, in everyday life really that followed on the heels of this myth of a race blind society. So if I think back to the 1990s. Everybody was just pretending that we're all equal. You know, think about the, "I don't see color friend" as, uh, somehow representing this era. Then in the past couple of decades, but most of all in the past few years, we've seen this recognition, which is new, which is that we don't have the same experience. There's been so much research showing implicit bias coming out of social psychology. Then of course you have the #MeToo movement, as well as the racial reckoning post 2020 and so on and so forth. So these are only some examples, but everyday discourse now accepts more than ever the idea that people who experience oppression have different, uniquely, different experiences than those who don't.
Ellie: 7:42
Yeah. And and uniquely different is right, like different in a substantive way as opposed to just being like,
David: 7:46
Different.
Ellie: 7:46
we're all different. I think this is definitely right and it's sort of a popularization of standpoint, epistemology, which is an area of philosophy coming out of feminist theory that recognizes how knowledge is rooted in our perspectives. And these perspectives don't just have to do with personal commitments or beliefs or desires, but actually with how we are treated in the world by others.
David: 8:09
Yeah. The, the focus on how we're treated is interesting because it speaks to the power and the function of invocations, of lived experience in everyday discourse because I believe that whenever we start a phrase by indexing our identity, you know, as a woman, as a queer Mexican, as a black disabled person, we're doing something fundamentally different than when we make the same claim without that personal appeal or invocation. And the reason is because those appeals are usually meant to inject authority and weight into what follows. And to some extent, it exempts what we say afterwards from conventional norms of communication. So for example, once I say, as a Mexican person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it would be weird for somebody to then kind disagree with the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the same way that it would be weird for somebody to ask for further justification since the invocation of my identity functions as a kind of warrant.
Ellie: 9:19
Yeah. I like this idea of thinking about this as a unique kind of statement because it means that when we appeal to lived experience, we're doing more than just asserting something about the world. We're saying something about ourselves and about how our worldview is itself a function of the place we occupy within a social matrix.
David: 9:36
Mm-hmm.
Ellie: 9:37
You, you're not just making like a random subjective claim, you are saying something about the world, but you're doing more than that, right? You're saying something about, about your situation in relation to it. So as soon as that is uttered, again, we're operating under the assumption now that everybody's descriptions of the world are shaped by politics, and that there is no neutral take on reality that any one individual can offer. So it shifts the underlying assumptions of the interaction.
David: 10:04
It definitely does, and the tricky thing in connection to these appeals is not whether they authorize you to say certain things or whether or not they add weight to the claims that you want to make. I think the real issue is whether your inability to make some of these appeals actually disqualifies you from speaking about particular subjects. In other words, can you have a position or express a point of view without the right kind of lived experience? And even beyond that, are there certain kinds of lived experience that don't add weight to what follows afterwards? So imagine that there is a discussion about the politics of representations of women in the media. If one of the people involved in that conversation begins a statement by saying, as a woman, dot, dot, dot. I will listen to that with a certain ear because it has that legitimizing effect. But if in that same discussion, somebody begins by saying as a man dot, dot, dot, do, it almost has a delegitimizing effect to the point that I would be like, hmm, either just say what you have to say or don't say anything at all, but don't make the claim hinge on lived experience at all.
Ellie: 11:22
As a cis white male Chad who drives a BMW.
David: 11:27
Yes, exactly.
Ellie: 11:28
The idea here is that the experience of oppression paradoxically gives one epistemic privilege. Epistemic pertains to how and what we know. So for instance, a woman raised in the U.S. will have more authority to speak on the character of representation of women in the media than the man would, whether or not he's a cis white male Chad, who drives a BMW
David: 11:49
Or not
Ellie: 11:50
as she has seen how sexism shows up in the media and has seen that reflected back on her everyday life in a way that he has been shielded from. In this case, the oppressed are epistemically privileged and the privileged are epistemically, not oppressed, but let's say less authoritative. This is why in 2020, in the context of racism, especially anti-black racism, you heard all those calls for white people to listen. The idea was, and I agree with this, that being white is an inhibiting factor for one to understand how racism functions in the U.S.
David: 12:23
And this theory about the epistemic superiority of standpoints at the margins is the reason why these appeals to lived experience almost exclusively happen in situations where questions of power discrimination and domination are involved. Because we recognize that in those cases, the individuals who bear the brunt of that oppression are much more, let's say, intimately acquainted with the dynamics of the social system that generates that oppression than those who, by virtue of their own privilege, can afford not to think about it, not to question it.
Ellie: 13:02
Well, not only are they aware of the dynamics of the social system, they are aware of the social system more than those who are privileged.
David: 13:08
That. That's right. They have a privileged kind of access and in other contexts that have nothing to do with oppression and domination, that same appeal to lived experience would almost seem to lose its power. In fact, it would almost become borderline comical. Right? It would be kind of weird, except as a joke, if I said yes, as an immigrant, I would like to have the salad rather than the fries with my burger, right? Like it, it's like not the right kind of context.
Ellie: 13:37
I can definitely see you doing that to mess with people.
David: 13:40
Well, I sometimes I do like to intentionally mix, um, racial stereotypes to confuse white people just to get a kick out of it. Um, and this would be one way to do that. I haven't done it, but I should try. And actually, not too long ago I watched a really sad movie with friends and I made a joke kind of in this register or in this key, and at the end I said, oh my god, I can't believe I'm becoming the classical stereotype of the emotionally delicate Mexican immigrant male.
Ellie: 14:11
Definitely a stereotype we all know. A very common stereotype,
David: 14:17
Yeah. And obviously I'm just messing with my friends, but there are many cases in which that same appeal to my lived experience would actually be very serious and meant to be taken as such by my interlocutors.
Ellie: 14:32
Well, one way that I think your example, like obviously isn't an appeal to lived experience in any, you know, uh, serious way is that you talked about you are being a stereotype. Usually people's lived experiences wouldn't be couched in oh, I have become the stereotype. Right. I think marginalized people probably have a better conception of the stereotypes that they would be potentially falling into than others, but they certainly wouldn't be like, oh, my lived experiences that I am living out this stereotype. If anything, it would be more likely to be like, my lived experience shows that this stereotype exists, and so often, again, appeals to lived experience are actually trying to highlight broader social structures that are at work. David, I've been obsessing over how people are using this term lived experience for months now. So thank you finally letting do this episode.
David: 15:24
Okay, so for our listeners, uh, just background information, I was very resistant to doing a whole episode of Lived Experience, so I admitted it took a little bit of convincing from Ellie, but here we
Ellie: 15:34
So if your lived experience is that you love this episode, then please let us know, that you are happy I convinced David to do it. But I have been creeping for a while on how people are using this phrase on Twitter, and one thing I've been really surprised by is how I've seen multiple tweets associating lived experience with research and facts as opposed to opinions and perspectives. It seems important to people, and maybe this is partly coming out of the fact that lived experience gets used in some social science research to argue that lived experience is not an opinion but a fact. At the same time, it seems like lived experience is perfectly the kind of candidate that would seem to be in the realm of opinion rather than facts of research. What do you make of this, David?
David: 16:21
I, oh, the old fact versus feeling debate.
Ellie: 16:26
I think think the older version is fact versus opinion. Fact versus feeling is the new one.
David: 16:30
Yeah, fact versus opinion. Yeah, that's right. That's. It's funny because lived experience seems to cross the boundary between them because of course, if I have a certain kind of lived experience, that's just a fact. Again, as we said, a function of my position in a social matrix. But it is also the fact that my worldview is an outgrowth of that lived experience. So it's a fact and also the base of my opinions. But if I had to pick one, maybe I would say that it's, it's a fact. Although I wouldn't say that it's like an inevitable fact. It's not like a natural scientific fact. Of course.
Ellie: 17:04
So you can say that your lived experience is a fact. You know, maybe we wanna say like it's a psychological fact or it's a social fact.
David: 17:13
I would say it's a fact that I have had a sequence of experiences by virtue of being X, Y, or Z. So I guess that a like, yeah, it's a so, socio-psychological fact about.
Ellie: 17:25
So you're just combining, I said it's maybe a psychological factor, maybe a social fact, and you were like, no, but it is a socio-psychological fact.
David: 17:33
If you wanna add more hyphens, we can, socio-psychological-philosophical-economic fact about me.
Ellie: 17:41
Yeah, but, but of course what is not being said is that the lived experience appeal necessarily maps onto the facts of say, the social structures. I think often that is the claim.
David: 17:52
What do you mean by that? Explain that a little more. That it maps onto.
Ellie: 17:56
So if I say my lived experience as a woman is that I experience casual sexism in everyday life related to my appearance by people reducing me to my looks and saying, for instance, and this is actually something we have gotten on YouTube, like, you're too pretty to be smart, or something like that or you know, to be a philosopher. If I say that, I'm saying a fact about my lived experience, but I'm actually not necessarily saying that that maps on accurately to the structural situation. And so for instance, other women could come along and be like, well, I'm also a woman and your lived experience here doesn't map onto me. You are wrong. And then we can have a debate about what legitimacy the appeals lived experience has. Like this is a very classic kind of example in feminist theory as like a bunch of white ladies are like, this is the universal experience of womanhood, then BIPOC women are like, no, no, no, this isn't the case. So, so that's what I'm saying is that it, even if it is a factual statement, it's not a statement of fact about the material conditions necessarily. It's an invitation. It it's a claim that maybe by virtue of my positionality, I have a better chance of being right about this than somebody who doesn't have the experience of oppression. But it's not a claim that everybody who has the experience of being a woman is suddenly like universal and we're all gonna agree.
David: 19:20
Yeah. So it, it makes your opinions more likely to be correct. So you would put it on the opinion side. Is that correct? Like it makes your opinions more likely to be true, but it doesn't guarantee that there will be agreement in the about the opinion itself.
Ellie: 19:35
You know, I think I wanna buy that, David, maybe I do wanna walk back the idea that it's a socio-psychological fact. I mean, I do think it's a socio-psychological fact that I have that opinion, let's say that, or that I have that lived experience, but it's an opinion about a social structure.
David: 19:52
Okay. But yeah, the opinion about the social structure is one thing. The lived experience is arguably another. Right?
Ellie: 20:00
But they're, they're related. And as much as the lived experience is, yeah. Is kind of giving rise to the opinion or is the basis on which I'm making the opinion. I do think I worry a lot about the, what I have seen on Twitter, which is this association of lived experience with research and facts. Because on the one hand I think it's really important to acknowledge that people have different experiences of oppression and privilege. And so as a white, cisgender person who teaches on topics of race and gender, I often remind my students that I'm not the authority on their lived experiences. Also, on the other hand, I worry that sometimes this important insight can devolve into, let's say, the neoliberal injunction, that we have a single commodified self with a package of experiences that are structurally replaceable with those inner identity categories. So for instance, if I add to as a woman, all these qualifiers, like as a queer Nicaraguan immigrant woman who comes from an atheist background, that is actually paradoxically making me then replaceable with somebody who has all of those other identity categories rather than it is like identifying me as a unique individual. So you are a queer Mexican immigrant, but you're not just a queer Mexican immigrant, and your experiences at the intersection of identities aren't replaceable with others in those identity categories.
David: 21:26
Yes. Unless you had enough categories that only you alone in the world match them, but yes.
Ellie: 21:32
Yeah, that's actually my point is that no matter how many categories you added, I still think the idea would be that you would be commodifying the self and treating it as like a, a set of these qualifiers.
David: 21:43
As if yourself is just the addition of those categories and whatever sum, um, comes after the, the equal sign.
Ellie: 21:50
Yeah.
David: 21:51
So yes, my experiences of course, are not reducible to those categories that you mentioned, queer, Mexican, immigrant, uh, and then you get a very different summation if you just select different categories also. And the point here is that there are all kinds of aspects of myself that just will not fit into any concatenation of categories, right? There is just my personality, which may not be tied to any of those categories or interpretable through them. There's my personal history, there are my values, there is my relationship to geography. Not to mention that even if I had, let's say, an identical twin who shared so much of all that stuff, that like even we would have qualitatively, meaningfully different lived experiences, right? And that's, I take that to be self-evident.
Ellie: 22:38
Yeah.
David: 22:39
It's a self-evident fact.
Ellie: 22:40
Yeah. And I think this question about the status of identity categories in relation to lived experience is authority one, in as much as identity categories are things that we live out, right? I am read as a woman by people around me, and so I do have a lived experience of being a woman, whether or not I kind of strongly internally identify as a woman. At the same time, those identity categories, like I have a mediated relation to them such that, yeah, it can be hard to identify. Just kind of following up on what you were saying, what is my experience by virtue of being a woman versus what is my experience by virtue of being white, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this is one of the insights of intersectionality is that actually breaking up those different identity categories is impossible to do. And so in a certain sense, like your lived experience is only ever gonna be your lived experience as you, and not strictly speaking as like a queer Mexican immigrant or me as like a white woman. Do you think that's fair, or do you think that's going way too far? And we still need to hold on to those identity claims and the way that we usually talk about.
David: 23:53
Well, not in the usual way we talk about them. So of course I don't think you can create a string that is long enough that will exhaust you or your identity or your experience of the world. And we might even add another complication, which is that even if we accept that those categories make some kind of sense, there are cases for our relationship to any of those categories, it's really complicated. So in my case, my relationship to the category of man, is contested. Um, and you know, I don't sit super comfortably in my position as a man, even though I draw tremendous social privilege from the fact that others attribute that category to me. And you see that also with any kind of anti communitarian orientation that people might have, where they resist being pulled into, let's say, a racial category or a religious category. I just don't feel super comfortable, you know, sometimes in those identity driven settings somehow supposed to embody the essence of the thing.
Ellie: 24:54
Exactly, and that makes me think that a better example that I should have given isn't whether you can say as a queer Mexican immigrant, or whether I can say as a white woman, and rather, can you say as queer and can I say as a woman, right? Can we just isolate that one thing or are we always doing so in a way that is, implicitly universalizing their experience? I do wanna hold on to the possibility of my saying as a woman, like that feels like a, an important thing to say in certain contexts, or an important like, contribution to have. Even though I take really seriously the insights of intersectionality that suggests that like there are certain aspects of my identity as womanhood that are like undeniably bound up with other privileges that I can't even fully understand and that don't map onto the experience of other women.
David: 25:43
Yeah. In one concept that philosophers have used for thinking about a way to do that without falling back onto the dangers of essentialism is just to be strategically essentialist about those categories and deploy them only in contexts where they make sense. Even if you reserve the right also to contest your relationship to the category that you just invoked at a future. Ellie, you mentioned earlier that Google search for the term lived experience, and you noted that usage for this term spiked in the past 20 years, and, uh, you suggested using your professional, educated guess, that perhaps it's linked to phenomenology gaining, uh, legitimacy as a method in the social sciences. Now it is finally time to use our expertise in phenomenology to tell our listeners how this term lived experience was originally used in the school of thought and why it matters for how we use it today.
Ellie: 27:05
Time to nerd out because I suspect that some of the problems with lived experiences in relation to identity categories that we were just talking about might be deepened, if not resolved by phenomenology. The Google tracker shows that even before this phrase saw its recent spike, it started to get used a tiny bit in the 1920s with some action around the 1950s. And after that point, its use like after really 1960, its use sees a steady and rapid incline. And I think this is no coincidence because in the 1920s, phenomenology starts to gain traction and it really takes off post World War II when existentialism a very closely linked movement is like the hottest possible commodity. Now you might have noticed something odd about the phrase lived experience. This is me talking to our listeners now. David, you already know. I'm going with this, but listeners, dear listeners, having heard this phrase lived experience, what's odd about it is that it's arguably redundant because isn't all experience lived. Why would you need to tack on the qualifier lived? And this is where we need to go back into some of the history of phenomenology because the term lived experience in English is a translation of the German word Erlebnis that I and other phenomenologists think, although we're waiting on final confirmation on this, comes by way of the translation of the German word Erlebnis into French as l'expérience vécue, which means lived experience.
David: 28:34
Yeah, there is a lot of language jumping here. So you have this German term that again, yes, it's likely that it was first translated into French, and then from French it came into English, which is why the English version lived experience looks a lot more like the French than the German.
Ellie: 28:52
Yeah, but I wanted to be careful cuz like we're not totally sure about that. And this is very actively something that we were having conversations with other phenomenologists about and didn't have clarity on. And so you are part of the sort of scholarly discussion around this as Overthink listeners.
David: 29:07
Yes, live discussion. Hot take on the origin of the term.
Ellie: 29:10
Living. Yeah.
David: 29:12
Yes, the living history of this term and one of those philosophers with whom we've had these discussions is our dear friend, Dr. Becca Longtin, shout out to her.
Ellie: 29:20
Mm-hmm.
David: 29:21
Becca and some other phenomenologists from across the world recently had a really interesting discussion on Facebook thread about this, trying to trace the origins of the term lived experience in phenomenology. And that's where this discussion of like, did it come directly into English from the German or did it travel through the French, was, was being debated. And so that's the background here, this Facebook thread discussion.
Ellie: 29:49
This thread reminded me that Facebook can be a very fun place. It's where the hot continental philosophy topics are happening. And it was indeed like amazing international cadre of people sharing thoughts on how the term lived experience like became, you know, so popular nowadays. And so rather than going through the traditional peer review process, which I probably will, will do with some version of this later, uh, we're going, we're bringing it straight to our Overthink listeners. So here is our working hypothesis about the origins of lived experience in German phenomenology. And I know it's not like we're getting really into the weeds already. I instantly talked about German and French, et cetera, et cetera. But listeners go with us here because we do think this really sheds some interesting light on the nature of lived experience claims.
David: 30:37
That's Ellie's way of saying go with us cuz it's about to get worse. Even more technical.
Ellie: 30:44
Okay? Yeah, because I'm about to drop some German on you all, but I know. I know. You're here for it. You're here for it. Okay. German has two words for experience. Unlike French and English. In French and English, it's expérience or experience. The German words for experience are Erlebnis and Erfahrung. I'm kind of like americanizing the pronunciation, but it's not like I have that great German pronunciation. Anyway, Erfahrung is the word for experience that's used most frequently in the natural sciences and also in some like kinda old school philosophy, like the work of Immanuel Kant, it tends to connote neutrality or even objectivity. And thanks Becca Longtin for, um, helping me learn this through your wonderful article. It's rooted in the verb fahren, which means to drive, go, or move. So that's Erfahrung, this standard word for experience in German that has like this connotation of neutrality. Then you've got its sexy sibling, Erlebnis. The other word for experience in German. Erlebnis connotes an intense or immersive experience, so it has connotations more of subjectivity and personal experience. Erlebnis is rooted in the verb leben, which means to live. Thus, when Erlebnis gets translated into French and into English, lived gets added onto it to distinguish this kind of experience from Erfahrung.
David: 32:10
And often when people translate Erlebnis into English, they do so systematically using the phrase lived experience. And the reason for that is precisely to distinguish it from Erfahrung, and the philosopher Martin Jay says that Erlebnis, quote, connotes some more immediate pre-reflection and personal variant of experience than Erfahrung. And in that sense, it seems pretty close to what people describe today when they make, again, these very famous appeals to their lived experience, to that subjective way of experiencing the world.
Ellie: 32:50
The famous appeals to lived experience I think that's right. And lived experience in phenomenology is deeply rooted in the living body, which is the site of the interface between what's outside and what's inside. And this is something that the philosopher Sara Heinamaa pointed out to me in the legendary Facebook thread.
David: 33:11
Legendary
Ellie: 33:13
Is that lived experience gets used in this way to describe the experience like of the living body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
David: 33:21
Well, and Heidegger is famously very critical of this idea. Heidegger thinks that the idea of lived experience or or Erlebnis presupposes an isolated subject at the center of experience, for him is, is really at odds with how we actually encounter the world. Heidegger is resistant to anything that's smacks of that interiority that you referred to, Ellie, because he believes that interiority is just this hangover from bad ideas that we've inherited from Christianity and, uh, the history of metaphysics and the philosophical tradition more generally.
Ellie: 34:00
Yeah, the Heidegger critique is what I'm most familiar with in phenomenology and Heidegger is responding here to the emphasis on lived experience in the work of his,
David: 34:12
Influencer?
Ellie: 34:13
Yeah, yeah, his influencer. Exactly. I'm like trying to think about what the right word. Total influencer, and that's Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey is often forgotten today, but he was actually the number one biggest influence on being in time and Dilthey made lived experience a cornerstone of his philosophy. He thought it was the basis on which creative art emerges. For Dilthey, and I think his account is worth going back to because even though, like you said, Heidegger was critical of it, like he's got a pretty interesting view here. Dilthey thinks that the humanities are a really important area of human inquiry because they give us insight into an aspect of the world that does not conform to scientific laws. When we're studying human experience, it's important that we are not ourselves outside of this human experience, and this means that the human sciences are necessarily self-reflective and immersed in the experiences they're attempting to examine. They're deeply related to our lived experience, and so Erlebnis refers to this approach to thinking that characterizes the human sciences where we are immersed in our lived experience even as we're reflecting on it, it's also crucial here that lived experience is not some static thing that we can merely look back on, but rather it's temporarily dynamic and ongoing. And so for Dilthey, it's really important that lived experience is historical. It involves living through something or involves a perspective that changes over time.
David: 35:46
Yes. And I like the idea of associating Erlebnis with the humanities which refers to fields that try to capture the human spirit or understand ways of expressing one's self that cannot be understood scientifically. So our Erlebnis would match onto the humanities and Erfahrung, which also has connotations of gaining knowledge and accruing information or, or facts would then get mapped onto the social sciences. And furthermore, we could map those terms onto the difference, as does Dilthey actually between understanding and explaining. So Erlebnis or lived experience is something that we can understand, that we can come to have a holistic, unified, embodied feeling for, but it's not something that we can explain in the framework of the natural sciences using causes and effects. That's the work of explanation, which is the work of Erfahrung. And so we could say that the humanities understand while the natural sciences explain, and that's the difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung.
Ellie: 37:00
Yeah, and I think that last point actually puts pressure on your initial analogy, which you mentioned a moment ago, which is that we could nowadays map on Erfahrung to the natural sciences and Erlebnis to the social sciences because I actually think Dilthey would have a really big problem with quote, the social sciences becoming sciences or trying to model themselves after the hard sciences for him these are different in kind. And so studying sociology, anthropology, psychology, fundamentally involved lived experience, which is not amenable to scientific explanation. And so I think he would actually be all for really holding a firm boundary between those two things and saying that, hey, when we're talking about lived experience, like that's a really essential part of human life, but it's not something that we're gonna be able to make some kind of factual statement about.
David: 37:53
Correct, except that if you think about the trajectory of the social sciences over the last 80 to a hundred years, they have moved in the direction of the natural sciences and they have modeled themselves after their image.
Ellie: 38:05
I'm saying I think he would didn't, he would not like that.
David: 38:07
Yeah, no, he would not like that. He would say, if you are somebody who specializes, let's say in psychology or in even sociology, where you in some way have to think about the interiority again there, the beliefs, the intentions, the desires of individuals, you actually have to come over to the camp of Erlebnis because that's what individuals do. They understand the world. They feel the world. So I think you're right about that. And for Dilthey, at the end of the day, what differentiates, again, the work that happens in the humanities versus the natural sciences has to do with prediction. In the humanities and the social sciences, when done in a humanistic way, you just cannot predict human behavior. Whereas the whole point of the natural sciences is that if you study the past, you will be able to predict the behavior of inanimate objects moving forward. Whereas that's not something that you can do in economics. That's not something that you can do in psychology. That's not something that you can do, even in connection to history. You can understand history, but you cannot explain it in such a way that you predict the future.
Ellie: 39:16
So aside from the sort of natural sciences, social sciences debate, I'm wondering what we can take from Dilthey's account of lived experience as figuring this historical dynamic approach to thinking about the way that we live our lives that is self reflective. One thing that's coming up for me is the fact that Dilthey's account helps us understand what people are saying when they talk about their lived experience of identity categories. Because what they're actually talking about is a certain kind of access to history, right? The history of oppression, like the claim about epistemic privilege that we were talking about earlier is really a claim about a different relationship to the history of a particular culture. Does that resonate with you, David? Do you feel like there are other elements from Dilthey's account that we might bring into the mix here?
David: 40:07
Yeah, so there is a history connection. Another thing that I might throw in the mix is that when Dilthey talks about Erlebnis, he talks about it again as non-conceptual or preconceptual. It's something that you live through or that you feel, and, uh, whose authority comes precisely from the feeling of it, rather than from giving reasons and arguments on top of it. And I think that's what happens in these appeals experience in debates about oppression. That people say, look, this is something that I'm just so intimately acquainted with in the first person's standpoint. It's just the kind of thing that it is that I don't need to give you further information, further warrants further their justifications. That would be the realm of Erfahrung the fugley sibling, in this German taxonomy.
Ellie: 40:58
I understand you wanna tell us a little bit about how this relates to French culture? And by way of moving on to that, I just wanna point out a quick quote from Dilthey David that I think really resonates with your point. He says that lived experience does not confront me as something perceived or represented, right? It's, more like the waters that we're swimming.
David: 41:16
It is not an object that confronts us from outside that is independent of us. It's an experience of ourselves as rooted in a world, and that's, and those two things are very different now. You're right. I wanna talk a little bit about French culture and French history, or rather the French context in the early 20th century, because as we mentioned, our working philosophical hypothesis about this term that's now super common in everyday speech is that it originates in German as Erlebnis. Then it first gets translated into French as l'expérience vécue, and then it gets translated into English as lived experience. Now earlier, Ellie, you raised a point about the possibility of redundancy, right? Why is it called lived experience rather than just experience? And it has to do again with this tension between these two German words, but also through the movement through French. And part of the reason this is now something that I am speculating about is that when people are translating, phenomenological works into French in the first half of the 20th century because of the evolution of French philosophy for 200 years before the early 20th century, the term experience really just means sensation. It only refers to the senses to the way which our sense organs are affected by the world. And that has to do again with the fact that there is a long tradition of what is known as sensationalism in France and sensationalism is just a tradition that grows out of the enlightenment that reduces full experience to a kind of mechanical affectation of the body by external stimuli. So the body is impressed by the external world almost in a mechanical sense, and that's very far from how phenomenologists are thinking about Erlebnis in the early 20th century in Germany. And so once it gets introduced into French as l’expérience vécue then it's easier to translate it into English using that qualifier lived. And one final thought here, just to throw in the mix, even though the term was primarily translated as l’expérience vécue, vécue is an adjective, lived experience, in Merleau Ponty and in a couple of other French phenomenologists who pick up this term, the term lived is also used as a noun, which is interesting. It's used as le vecu.
Ellie: 43:52
Yeah. The lived.
David: 43:54
And I actually really like that as a translation more than lived experience. Cause I do think lived experience then makes you wonder, well is there a non-lived experience, like a dead experience or a dead end experience of sorts. Whereas the lived draws attention to this moving through time with the body, the thing that you live through.
Ellie: 44:17
Well, and so David, maybe if we're worried about the redundancy of the term lived experience, we should pull a French and now just start talking about the lived.
David: 44:26
Lived, it just sounds a little weird, but I think that might not be a bad idea.
Ellie: 44:30
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David: 45:00
Once the term l’expérience vécue entered philosophical discourse through phenomenology by way of French, different philosophers ran with it in different directions. Some began searching for the structures of subjective experience that all humans have in common, independently of time and place.
Ellie: 45:20
A classic phenomenology move.
David: 45:22
Yes, very universalist, um, and very ambitious too. While others began questioning whether the lived experience of members of specific groups, actually should force us to rethink our assumption that human experience is one. And one of the thinkers who moved in the second direction toward difference is the Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon. Now, in 1951, Fanon published an article entitled “L’experience vecu du noir” which is French for the lived experience of the black, um, of the black person in a journal called Esprit. And later he included this article as one of the chapters in his now famous book, Black Skin, White Masks.
Ellie: 46:09
And I think it's the most famous chapter of the book, at least like the one gets taught most often. And in this book in general, Fanon sets out to critique the legacy of French colonialism in the Antilles, as well as the psychological effects that it has had on black subjects. And this book is so good because it brings a poignant critique of colonialism together with a psychological framework to think about how colonialism shapes the psyche of black children, black men, black women. Because Fanon himself was a psychiatrist. He was a doctor who specialized in psychiatry. And he thinks that all of these black subjects in different ways develop racial psychopathologies due to the fact that they are forced to identify with white colonizers in spite of their not being white.
David: 46:54
Yeah. Actually, I don't think I've ever told you this Ellie, when I went to Martinique, uh, the island in the Caribbean where Fanon is from, I actually, I was walking around the street trying to find a sandwich and I ran into a plaque on the side of a building and it was, it said, this is where the philosopher, Frantz Fanon had his clinic, and yeah, he was convinced that to understand colonialism, you have to understand its impact on, on psychological development and psychological health.
Ellie: 47:21
It said philosopher on the plaque?
David: 47:23
I don't remember. I don't, there's a picture, I have a picture. I have a picture of it somewhere. I,
Ellie: 47:27
Okay. I would, I would be kind of surprised cuz I feel like Fanon's own relationship with philosophy was like a little bit complicated. But anyway.
David: 47:33
So in this fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon articulates a really interesting critique of ontology and ontology is in short terms, the study of the things that are there. And there is a sub-branch of ontology called social ontology, which is the study of the kinds of social entities that make up social life. A lot of philosophers out there have created a model of social ontology that hinges on two terms, self and other. And so they just understand all social interactions through these kind of basic generic categories. I am a self, there's another, and then there's an interaction between the two.
Ellie: 48:15
Probably most famous example is Hegel, Hegel's, master-servant dialectic, all the people who take up that model.
David: 48:20
Yes. Now Fanon says it's fine to think about the social field through these categories, but you need to think about the lived experience of these ontological poles and their relationship to one another in the given racial situation they find themselves in. In other words, not all selves are the same, and not all others are the same, and you cannot have this universal framework of human experience. And the main example that he uses is colonialism. In a colonialist context. This is a quote from Black Skin, White Masks. He says, the black man is black only in relation to the white man. In other words, the blackness of the black man is created relationally in connection to the whiteness of the white man. And if you tried to insert people with different racialized identities into that framework, it wouldn't work in the same way. And in fact, the introduction of colonialism actually turns the traditional ontological framework of self and other completely on its head. Because once you introduce race and coloniality, you realize that the black man is not even an other. For the white man, he's actually the inferior. And that's not the same. It's not the same thing to be the other versus the inferior. And so the dynamics of self recognition, other recognition that a lot of philosophers would write about, he says, just never even get off the ground when you're talking about the colonizer and the colonized.
Ellie: 50:02
So this is a claim about how lived experience shapes our understanding of social reality and that lived experience is not just a personal experience, but is a group experience that is rooted in the personal, that would be my initial response to, how we're thinking about this in terms of this episode. Fanon begins that chapter by recounting an experience he had on public transportation where a young white child pointed at him and said, look, a black person. And that experience of being objectified by that white child was a personal one. Right? But it also provides occasion for him not to just talk about the lived experience of Frantz Fanon, but to talk about the lived experience of the black person.
David: 50:54
The black man.
Ellie: 50:55
Yeah. Gets translated as the black man is just in noir in French. So I think we can ask, how does it happen that Fanon moves from the personal to, let's say, the structural.
David: 51:05
Yeah. I think here the, the concept of the gaze is important. And you see that in the example that you just gave Ellie of the child that looks at Fanon and then yells, look, mom, a black man. And for Fanon, that experience is racialized in a unique way because if it had been a white child looking at a white man, it would have a different meaning.
Ellie: 51:27
Well if the, the kid would not say, look a white man,
David: 51:30
Yeah, exactly. Yes. And so the, the, the very, the, the very fact that he becomes the object of a child's curiosity already tells you a lot about the social field. And the point that Fanon makes is that, normally philosophers assume that when self encounters other, it's kind of like a relationship of mutual interest. Like, ooh, who are you? I want to get to know you so I can recognize you and so that you can recognize me. And he says, that's not what happens between the white and the black subject. In fact, the black man encounters the white gaze as something that reduces him to nothing, as something that weighs him down, and that prevents him from moving through the world with confidence, with dignity, and even with a, a feeling of safety even.
Ellie: 52:17
So, but I, I guess my question is still how Fanon gets from the personal to the social. He actually even disavows ontology in this and he, he says that he's ontology doesn't give an accurate account of the black man's experience. And so he's talking here about moving towards something about lived experience that can't be captured by ontology, but he does unless offer some broad structural schema. So he talks, for instance, about this idea that comes up in phenomenology known as the body schema. The idea is that we all have a kind of intuitive sense of our own bodies as we live them in everyday existence, and that is from the first person perspective. And Fanon says that, well, what gets lost in that account is these other schema that the black person has to live with, including a historical racial schema. The black person's body isn't read as just like a body that they're living from the first person perspective. It's also read in the context of the history of slavery and in, you know, the social meanings of race, to the point that there's also this other additional schema that he talks about, which is the racial epidermal schema. You're literally just being perceived even outside of history as like sheer skin, sheer flesh. And I think that if we think about that back in terms of Dilthey suggests that maybe the lived experience of the black person under colonialism partly has to do with being prevented from having a history that is yours may, and maybe even having a history at all.
David: 53:45
Yeah, and I actually think Fanon's claim is a little bit stronger than just, there's the body schema and then on top of that, there is this historical epidermal schema because he says the problem with colonialism at the level of lived experience is that the black individual fails to develop a body schema in the first place. Because the way in which we develop a normal body schema is by moving through space, by feeling comfortable in our interactions with the world. But saw with the example of the white child, that's precisely what the black subject cannot do. And so there is a sense in which the political field or the the racialized feel actually disrupts the black subject's relationship to their own body at the most fundamental level so that they can't develop a coherent sense of embodiment. And he says, once I can't develop a body schema that allows me to navigate the world intelligently. It gets replaced by this historical racial schema. It's almost as if like the black man becomes just the very racial myth or the racial fantasy that the white man has created for him. So you like you become the other person's image of you,
Ellie: 54:58
Yeah. Yeah. And maybe that relates back to your point that you're not even really considered the other at all, but would be considered inferior or in this case, like the object. And at the same time, of course, Fanon is talking about his experience of being black in the world and that, you know, of course implies like a subjectivity and a lived experience, he's not all object. I do see in Fanon, and I think some people might disagree with me on this, still an attempt to hold on to lived experience in a certain way. And there's one point of the chapter in particular that I think does a pretty interesting job of explaining how he moves from the personal to the general. I'm gonna read you a little bit here, he says, and then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes and unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. This is his claim to, you know, be a subject in the world. In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. So what we see there is a move from the first person he had to meet the white man's eyes to the third person in the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties. So it seems like he's saying that his lived experience, it does give him this authoritative reflection on the nature of the white world.
David: 56:14
Yeah. And it's not just his own, again, it's the, the lived experience of the black, the black subject more generally. And I think the I, I agree with you that he wants to retain, lived experience as a central category. And the reason for that is because it's the lived experience of the black individual that allows him to point out the contradictions of colonialism. Right? It's especially the, the neurosis and the psychosis, racial neurosis, racial psychosis of, of black individuals that really give you a sense of the extent to which colonial relations dominate not just economically and politically, but psychically. And so, you can't have that psychological critique without that concept of lived experience. And so if we go back to what we discussed already, like half an hour ago, Ellie, of the fact versus opinion distinction, I think Fanon is telling you that the lived experience of the black man is a fact, but it also a revelatory fact.
Ellie: 57:15
And interestingly this chapter has been translated the fact of blackness. And when I've taught it, sometimes, you know, I, I've told my students it is lived experience. It is not fact because as somebody who's like rooted in phenomenology, I really wanna be careful around those terms. But you're right, David, maybe following what we said earlier, Fanon is on board with the people I've seen on Twitter talk about lived experience as a fact.
David: 57:39
Well, maybe because I don't think he would agree with the idea that experience is reducible to facts. Again, that can be explained using the, the language of Erfahrung or the language of the natural sciences that he would very much reject. But there is a sense that the fact of a certain interior life gives you access to social critic. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 58:13
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David: 58:19
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Ellie: 58:28
We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.
David: 58:36
And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.