Lived Experience / Regular Experience
Catch phrases often seem to come out of nowhere and catch on fast, leaving some of us scratching our heads all the while. A recent example is “lived experience.” As in, “Sorry, but that’s not my lived experience.”
For example, someone might say, “Time flies!” to which one response is “That’s not my lived experience of time.” The time flyer might respond, “Everyone knows that time flies!” To which the response goes, “That is your lived experience.”
And so on.
You may be one of those still left scratching your head: Isn’t all experience lived experience?
The answer is: yes and no.
The term “lived experience” has a pedigree: it is a term used in the philosophical field of phenomenology, most famously articulated by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Phenomenology is the study of lived experience. Lived experience is always oriented toward or about something.
One tweak that may be helpful is an idea from the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who distinguished between the explanatory and the descriptive. Dilthey claimed that the descriptive belongs in the field of natural science, the explanatory to the liberal arts.
Yes, the distinction falls into the traditional categories of objectivity and…
