Conceptualisation 🖊️ Lived Experience

[Ismael-KG]

Title

Wilhelm Dilthey coins "Erlebnis"

Date 📆

1905, as this is when Gadamer says Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung is written (Gadamer, 1960, 2015: 56).

Intro

The growth of participatory methods in research, as well as the increasing awareness of injustices that are suffered by marginalised groups, have brought the idea of "lived experience" to the fore.

Justification

De Beavoir, Gadamer, Husserl, Dilthey, HEGEL.

"Lived experience" might often be criticised from traditionalist viewpoints that speak condescendingly of "wokeness" or of the "snowflake generation", but the term has a lengthy history and complex philosophical underpinnings. These must be engaged with to ground debates in modern research ethics.

Unformed Thoughts

There would first need to be an accounts of the historical development of the term. Gadamer, in Truth and Method, says that Hegel was the first to use the term "Erlebnis", which evolved in contrast to "Erfahrung". It has been argued — I think — that it is this distinction what inspired de Beauvoir to speak of "expérience vécu" in The Second Sex.

Then, there must be talk of the influence of phenomenology on science — consider (i) Stein's phenomenological account of empathy, (ii) the inspiration of the interpretative phenomenological analysis, started by Smith (1996), and (iii) Hall's _Continental Approaches to Bioethics _ (2015).

Finally, perhaps drawing on Smith's influence, link Hegel to every project in the last decade that talks about participatory science. (This last one is a joke, sort of.)