Lived inexperience

On 'lived experience' and the lost vitality of its original meaning

“In processes of this kind we regard things, not as they are in themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other. ... ‘Man’ is no longer what he really is, an individual presented to us by our senses, but as we read him in the light of those comparisons and contrasts which we have made him suggest to us. He is attenuated into an aspect, or relegated to his place in a classification. Thus his appellation is made to suggest, not the real being which he is in this or that specimen of himself, but a definition. If I might use a harsh metaphor, I should say he is made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms.”

John Henry Newman, An essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).

One of the default defences adopted by left-wing identitarians is to claim the authority of their so-called lived experience. This is likely to elicit some sniggering and eye-rolling from the peanut gallery, and such dismissals of the claim are often merited. But I want to look briefly at the idea of lived experience as a sign of our times, and especially as a sign that we live in a time of a great hollowing out of meaning. It is common for what was intended to indicate something saturated with meaningful possibilities to become a caricature of itself. In the face of such a hollowing out of meaning, often the best strategy is to reclaim something of what has been lost.

The phrase lived experience, now at least, typically connotes authenticity but it also indicates, I would say, a loss of a felt sense of inwardness and subjectivity. Perhaps the appeal of the phrase relies on the general sense that subjectivity is under threat in our time even as it fails to rescue subjectivity from mass formation psychosis. I’d say that any knee-jerk appeal to lived experience tends to suggest unlived experience or even unreal experience. In pop culture and so much critical theory, lived experience signifies the opposite of what was implied in the philosophical discipline of phenomenology where the phrase first emerged.

When Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology in the late nineteenth century to investigate what’s going on in our consciousness from a first-person perspective, his core aim was to describe phenomena, the things themselves, as they appear to us as individuals. As his movement and philosophical discipline developed, thinkers have taken it in many interesting directions so that, now, one of the chief understandings of phenomenology is that it is about the examination of lived experiences. If you still have the common misusage of that phrase in mind, bear with me for a moment and you’ll see why I’m not so eager to hand the phrase over to ideologues.

Phenomenologists developed this seemingly tautological idea of lived experience to create a distinction between ordinary experience, the kind of experience we assume we have understood without necessarily understanding it, and the kind of experience we take the trouble to properly interrogate. The difference between ordinary experience and lived, or sometimes living, vital experience is the difference between the experiences we take for granted and the experiences we seek to contemplate and interpret. It’s something like the difference between sleepwalking and waking up.

Carefully interpreting experiences is an antidote to the fact that experience is often consumed by the so-called natural attitude, which is saturated with biases and assumptions. In his lovely little book Phenomenology: An Introduction in the Light of Jesus Christ, Donald Wallenfang writes, “The natural attitude passes judgment prematurely and does not give new (or old as new) ideas or experiences a chance. The natural attitude closes the door on possibility because it is convinced it already knows what is.” Put otherwise, the natural attitude is unjust to the data of experience. It offers only the shallowest perspectives because it refuses to attend to the perplexities of subjective life.

It doesn’t take too much effort to step beyond the natural attitude. Pick any object in your immediate vicinity. Assume, for a second or two, that this is the first time you have ever seen it. Now, look at it for a moment. Notice that it is not alone; that it is in a setting of overlapping and clashing and contrasting depths and appearances and things hidden from view; that it is coloured and affected not just but what is beyond you but also by what is within you. Close your eyes and tilt your head. Look at that enworlded object again. Allow the world beyond the object to make itself known to you. Invite the outside in. Assume that this second glance is also new, for phenomenology is the discipline of returning to beginnings. Your perception of the object has been interrupted and slightly altered and yet the object still appears to you as the same object in the same overwhelming context of appearances.

Suppose you were to draw the object now, to represent your most recent experience of it. You’d likely come up with a picture almost as if viewed through a cracked lens, with different perspectives clashing into and overlapping, a cubist mashup. You’d show a figure that stands out and is intelligible because of its ground. The representation would fail to capture your experience completely. It would, at the very least, indicate that a lot more is going on in inner experience than we usually notice: appearance renewed, appearance contextualised, disappearance, reappearance, adumbration, a sense of the stability of the appearance within or beyond all alterations, a sense that the appearance hides a great deal even as it reveals a great deal, and so on. What we are conscious of, even here, exposes a whole world of unconscious happenings. We usually take for granted what phenomenology wants us to take as given or even as a gift. Phenomenology wants to return us to wonder, wondering, and wandering.

A superb, if unavoidably incomplete, analogy for the difference between standard and the sort of lived experience that phenomenologists are after is from CS Lewis’s famous essay, ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’. Lewis targets the modern assumption that if we want to understand anything, we should look at it only from the outside. Moderns assume, for example, that if you want a true account of religion, you must not consult religious people but anthropologists, or that if you want a true account of love, you must consult the neurobiologist, not the lover. But this is like saying that if you are dying of thirst, you must attend a seminar on scientific water experiments instead of finding water to drink. In reality, in the case of many of the most human things, what you want is not the view from the outside—the often quantitative collection of facts and data—but the decidedly qualitative, experiential view from the inside. You want what Zen Buddhists call beginner’s mind. You want someone to sympathise or empathise with, not just a collection of dead things to examine. You want a living experience not a murdered experience. But, having said this, you want to sympathise or empathise with a real person and not merely with the readymade ideological assumptions they have that resonate with your unchecked convictions.

Lewis uses the example of his experience of being in a particular toolshed one day. “The sun was shining outside,” he writes, “and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam.” From one perspective, he was looking at that beam of light from the outside. It was a clear, clean line dividing darkness from darkness. And he saw little specks of dust floating in it. “Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.” He then moved “so that the beam fell on [his] eyes” and very suddenly “the whole previous picture vanished.” He “saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead [he] saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90-odd million miles away, the sun.”

Here we have two distinct impressions, and ultimately two different experiences, given in the same phenomenon: looking at the beam and looking along the beam. The neurobiologist may be able to describe some of what happens when a person falls in love, for example, but it is the lover who feels it, writes a poem, and has his entire experience of the world transformed. The former is like looking at it; the latter is like looking along it. While we may access something of the experience of falling in love via the scientist’s analysis because, at the back of our minds, we have some sense of the concrete lived experience, reading the lover’s poem will help us to resonate with what the lover has undergone. If you want to know about the neurobiology of love, that’s fine, possibly very interesting. There is a time and place for looking at things from a distance. But it is knowing experientially, from the inside, that provides meaning.

Staying with Lewis’s analogy, we are dealing with the same sunbeam. It is not difficult, for this reason, to establish something of a mental bridge between looking at the beam and looking along it. Seeing one thing from different perspectives can be profoundly enriching. But we may too easily separate our abstractions from our experiences. If anything, in the West, the tendency has been to think entirely in abstractions that have nothing to do with how it feels when the world manifests itself to us in a certain way to this personal consciousness. What is modernity but a lengthy movement aimed at sedimenting assumptions through the snowballing of disembodied, virtualised abstractions? Technology does this with particular force.

This tendency to forget experience is why, to quote Max Scheler, “The phenomenological philosopher, thirsting for the lived-experience of being, will above all seek to drink at the very sources in which the contents of the world reveal themselves.” “The phenomenological maxim ‘to the things themselves’,” to quote Scheler’s contemporary Martin Heidegger, “is addressed against construction and free-floating questioning in traditional concepts which have become more and more groundless. That this maxim is self-evident, that it nevertheless has become necessary to make it into an explicit battle cry against free-floating thought, characterises the very situation of philosophy.” We have to make every effort, as this suggests, to reenter our pre-reflective or pre-predicative experiences, because the consequence of not doing so is so obviously undesirable: we will inevitably mistake appearances for mere appearances and we will subsequently lose contact with life and reality. This doesn’t necessarily require us to abandon all abstractions or do away with metaphysics. Arguably, the best metaphysics has been owed to an original experience of the world and so a kind of careful phenomenological gaze will only invigorate good metaphysics. Still, it is worth placing limits, where necessary, on what generalisations can tell us about what it means to live this one wild human life.

This loss of contact with life and reality is the trouble we face now, especially in an extremely online world. It is easy to think that our existential and political battles are all merely conceptual; that the solution to the complexity of the world is to find another meme to shelter under or share. We may think that as long as people have the right ideas and can fling about the correct facts, all will be well. In many cases, however, the larger conceptual battles stem from a widespread loss of access to a vivid lived experience. And yet, lived experience is what so many modern anti-realists refer to, as if access to lived experience is easy and requires no diligent effort or concentration.

Perhaps an example of a wrongheaded appeal to lived experience will help. I think of Gloria Jean Watkins (aka. bell hooks) ranting in one of her books about formulating theory “from lived experience” to bear witness to “a feminist theory, a feminist practice, a revolutionary feminist movement that can speak directly to the pain that is within folks, and offer them healing words, healing strategies, healing theory.” She goes on (unfortunately), falling rapidly into that all-too-familiar enemy of lived experience, namely a neo-Marxist zero-sum-gamification of reality. She piles one untethered abstraction upon another, forcing actual living experience into submission.

“There is no one among us,” she continues, “who has not felt the pain of sexism and sexist oppression, the anguish that male domination can create in daily life, the profound and unrelenting misery and sorrow.” This, as far as I can tell, is just spiteful banality dressed up in ideological garb; and it’s all so very tiresome. I don’t deny that there may be a real pain, a real struggle, in hooks’s books. What I deny is that ‘sexism and sexist oppression’ is even close to sufficient for illuminating the true nature of the experience. To naturally associate the one thing with the other thing without further qualification is rhetorical trickery. I therefore also deny that ‘a feminist theory, a feminist practice, [and] a revolutionary feminist movement’ is the best way to deal with whatever trouble it is that hooks is referring to. We vulnerable and flawed human beings are all capable of reaching for something that looks like an answer or an explanation but is a mask that keeps us from understanding the nature of the questions our very lives are asking us. We’re all capable of shielding ourselves from possibilities of deep meaning and insight by using words chosen as mere incantations.

In the above example, you can no doubt sense how real lived experience is destroyed in the name of ontological voids and politicised abstractions. The thing the phenomenologists want us to appeal to is soon swept away in the debris of bad thinking. It is much easier, much more the modern default, to point fingers at ambiguous conceptual containers than it is to identify and name the details of concrete, subjective experience. The former, after all, allows for a certain abdication of responsibility while the latter does not. Indeed, phenomenologists appeal to lived experience out of an awareness that perception is not a merely passive thing. No one is merely a victim of perception. That is an awkward truth for the zero-sum-game gifters. We are responsible for how we take offence. We are responsible for seeking out wonder and not just woe.

For activist types, it seems to me that lived experience has become a rhetorical tic used to defend their refusal to wake up, which is a refusal of responsibility for consciousness itself. They are looking at themselves from the outside. They are merely pawns in a game. Their so-called knowledge is not embodied and personal but disembodied and anonymous. Their so-called knowledge may be called kitsch. It preaches. It tells. But it does not show. Against this, therefore, we need something else. The name for that something else is also lived experience. Call it living experience or vital experience. It is the experience that is open to being understood on its own terms, not simply swallowed up in ideological jargon or newspeak. And reflecting on this vital experience should be accompanied, of course, by stillness, lingering, deep contemplation and prayer. In all likelihood, you will not be able to sell it or hold a protest in its name. But you will find yourself capable of coming into contact with a miracle: you are this one unique life in this world now, and you are amazingly alive.