“Lived Experience” | Clarissa's Blog

“Lived Experience” | Clarissa's Blog


The problem seems to me not that it is pompous but that it is philosophically crude. To understand what a “lived experience” is must be one of the most difficult challenges philosophy could set itself. Yet the writer takes for granted that this is already obvious to any fool. There are so many layers to experience — there is living through an experience without noticing much of it, or living through it and noticing specific, culturally conditioned details, or living it and being so lacking in critical analysis that one gets the experiential details wrong. Or one can live one’s experiences backward, rather than forward, as in the case where one is traumatized and tries to go back to relive or revise the details. One can live one’s experiences in the light of other people’s experiences, or according to an ideological framework, with a distorted understanding or where certain points seem overemphasized compared to others. Or one can live without much thought, like an animal, and still have very vivid and concrete experiences, but not be able to communicate them much.