74. Lived Experience

74. Lived Experience

What kind of authority do we appeal to when we invoke lived experience? Isn't all experience "lived"? Why does the *discourse* today so frequently refer to this concept, and what are its philosophical origins? In episode 74 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the phenomenology of lived experience, including its roots in Dilthey, who considered lived experience to be historical. They incorporate Fanon’s work into the conversation to answer the question of if our lived experience of the world is something that varies along identity lines such as race.

Overthink is a philosophy podcast hosted by your favorite new professors, Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University). Check out our episodes for deep dives into concepts such as existential anxiety, empathy, and gaslighting.

Works Discussed
Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Martin Jay, Songs of Experience
Becca Longtin, “From Factical Life to Art: Reconsidering Heidegger's Appropriation of Dilthey”
Pamela Paul, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’”

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at @overthink_pod

[BillyMcBride]

It’s a beautiful experience for me to listen to you. David, you have a sharp wit, and Ellie, it is that intense quickness to the flow of to your talk that I love too. I am happy for your discussion.

[victoriafelix]

A core part of lived experience is the rise in peer work, especially peer work as applied to the field of mental health. For example, the hearing voices project involves the normalisation of auditory hallucinations, with the aim of reducing stigma. It also involves the sharing & communication of techniques & skills that help us deal with the impacts of hallucinations.

Regarding, also, systems of power within the same social systems involving mental health, this has been part of the process of shifts in the broader treatments of disabilities. So "experts" & care workers must work with the person being worked with (eg. client-centred care, "power with but not over").

[christianlaw]

Great interview with Dr. Peña-Guzmán in Spain's EL PAIS yesterday. Sharing it.

[harrycornelius]

A very topical and informative episode. (Skip to the last paragraph for the key point)

As an aside, thankfully, Flaubert was not troubled by Lived Experience ideology in writing Madame Bovary, however one might want to criticize that text. The point about reductionist commodification of experience was particularly key. The implication of commodification is that virtually everyone in 'my' abstract category has had the same experiences, experienced in the same way, and would assert the same thing. An absurdity. The appeal to lived experience tends to reify 'lived experience' claims as universal truths. 

It seems safe to say that we all afflicted with perspectival myopia emanating from the context and cultural legacy in which our experience is embedded. However, when 'lived experience' is invoked, it can be a power move to privilege one's own voice and shut down the voice of 'others' outside my category. Not without justification in some cases. Granted, for example, one should wary of men mansplaining women's experience and pronouncing on the moral imperatives issuing from this. When appeals to lived experience are asserted as truth ownership, this is an act of untruth. It is an assertion that the truth I say at the moment is both true and final and not subject to dialectal interrogation. If truth, rather than assertion, is the goal, then the question becomes 'Who should be part of the dialectic/dialogue?' Do I allow only members of my cohort to engage? A political and moral decision which in turn requires justification (theoretical or otherwise). As an aside, we see the increasing mainstream radical right make claims of truth founded in subjectivity, unhinged from and impervious to fact.

The ability to assert one's own lived experience as a truth presupposes that one knows – or can know – the truth of one's experience. To make any description or assertion first requires translating or reducing experience to words. This is where language allows culture and ideology to creep in. This is a point which could have been explored in your podcast. In my own view, knowing one's own truth or the truth of one's own experience requires constant examination and reexamination. It is alway provisional. Truth discovery necessities dialogue with others, living or dead. That dialogue can just as easily lead one astray as it can lead one to a new level of truthful insight. To separate wheat from chaff requires further theory/principle along with a (to be sure, subjective) well-developed BS detector.

[tcmackgeorges]

Hey guys, awesome episode. One of the things that I that I am primarily concerned with is how can analysis that is phenomenologically rooted allow us go beyond the individual and address the social and political? In other words, I want to think about how the lived experience of racism, sexism, or classism orients or attunes to towards specific social and political world, with oppressive systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism? While I think Dr. Anderson is right to be worried about how lived experience is being associated with research, I think the way it has been oddly associated with liberalism is even more insidious. I’ve seen the ppl argue that work of Sartre and Fanon aren’t radical because they rely on “lived experience, ” which think is wrong way of understanding what the concept is doing for such thinkers. In this regard, does a Marxist concept like alienation become particularly useful for further qualifying what phenomenologists call “lived experience?”

[Dino_Medici]

It would be refreshing if you had conversations with people on the other side. I respect your academic prowess. However idk how one of the premiere YT philosophers doesn’t engage in conversations where their ideas are challenged?

[ivane]

⭐ 36:51 ... the humanities understand while the natural sciences explain ...

[oversail]

Obviously, in general, if you want knowledge about building a cabinet, asking a carpenter is more likely to give accurate knowledge. I don't think that entails the kind of authority people claim when making arguments. There's also no reason to think knowledge (of cabinet making or anything else) is incapable of being communicated or understood. What might not be communicable is what it's like to be/feel, but that also presumes there is a broadly shared way a certain identity feels or exists. Of course people from marginalized (and thus epistemically privileged) groups frequently disagree on subjects that they should have greater epistemic knowledge of, so how elucidating is having the marginal standpoint really?

I think, frankly, our identity categories affect motive more than anything epistemic; do you have "skin in the game?"

[fede]

Because perception is always organized by some series of assumptions (consciously or not), the first task is to unpack them in order to build up a conscious theoretical framework. Obviously, the logic behind it will always be up for debate (which is why there are different kinds), but there's no neutral way of looking at the world. That said, it's important to remain cognizant of the fact that this is just one possible approach to the world and that there will always be ambiguity, exception and anomalies. This is how lived experiences become relevant: no amount of theory will ever explain everything, and engaging with what others experience in the flesh is exactly how our frameworks, no matter how sophisticated, are put to the test.

This whole thing is often considered to be some form of pandering or overzealous observance of "politeness" at the expense of rigorous inquiry. I think, though, there's a strong epistemic requirement behind deferring to lived experiences.

[g_hundman]

What role do our personal history, our thinking, our senses and our inner narator play when we talk about lived experience? When quite suddenly phenomena like the appropriation debate, wokeness, MeToo or the ideological move toward authoritarianism becomes part of our reality, how does this effect the actual lived experience? We have to keep distinguishing between sense and nonsense. Or everything is part of what is called the Thomas Theorem.

[KymHammond]

Sorry to hear you have had another mass shooting in America. Feeling empathy for those grieving shouldn’t diminish the same for those lost to drone strikes across Yemeni etc but these things do have a tendency to make us feel like there is something wrong with us (all) - with western society. Very very sad.

[cynicalcare]

Please do one talk on Sexwork from an intersectional perspective. It's a hugely contentious issue

[robertalenrichter]

"Erfahrung" is often preceded by "interesting": "das war eine interessante Erfahrung". Which demonstrates that it's mental, rational, empirical. "Erlebnis" is a large-calibre word; it defines a kind of profundity without even the possibility of bombast or irony that can't really be translated into English. I guess it combines experience with meaning. Another word, "Erkenntnis", does this as well, but here we're back again to something more cognitive, a blend of the "learning experience" and the knowledge it has imparted, knowledge that has been derived from a specific form of experience. Twenty years of translating German art texts into English (part-time) left me disabused of any notion that this is even possible to any truly satisfactory degree. I was always exasperated! Though I love English and French, for me, German, threatened by the contemporary hegemony of English, unloved and underrated, is just an extraordinary vehicle for theoretical thought, full of nouns without equivalent in the other languages, embedded in the modularity of the case system.

[TheDcline]

By dismissing empathy as a possibility one burns any bridge to understanding. (as a cis white male chad who drives a BMW) (TLDR sophistry)