In recent years, the concept of “lived experience” has become part of everyday language. This may seem bizarre. It’s nearly a tautology (isn’t all experience lived?), brought into English by a translation of the French “experience vecue,” itself a translation used by Simone de Beauvoir to express a set of ideas from the German philosophical tradition of phenomenology. At the height of Beauvoir’s international celebrity in the 1950s and ’60s, translations of her writings brought “lived experience” to America. But now, in an apparent anachronism, the concept seems to be exercising a new, and, many fear, a malign, influence.
“Lived experience,” as Beauvoir used it, connects to a central tenet of her existentialist philosophy: that each of us continually makes choices about what kind of person to be. This process, she argues, is inseparable from our need to interpret ourselves and our situations. We try to understand what choices we have and how to evaluate them, what kind of people we are and what kind we ought to be. Even our most apparently primal feelings, Beauvoir insisted, are part of this ceaseless, often unconscious, act of interpretation.
In a 1946 essay defending the death penalty, for example, Beauvoir argued that our hatred of violent criminals is not a mere impulse but a “lived” interpretation through which we evaluate our own life and the life of the criminal. When we hate a person for the crimes they have committed, we are making a judgment that their actions, according to our values, deserve hatred. Because this judgment is a claim about the world, it can be mistaken. The feelings that make up our lived experience can be incorrect.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir showed how women can “live” their experiences wrongly. In one example, a young woman, a militant communist, was “about to come to blows in spite of her obvious fragility” with a male comrade, with whom she was obviously in “love.” The woman, however, was “living,” that is interpreting, her love and “feminine frailty” by denying them, trying to act as though her desire, emotional vulnerability, and relative physical weakness — in short, all the elements of her situation as a woman relative to this particular man — could be intellectualized into oblivion by picking an argument with him. Her “lived experience,” the way she made sense of and choices about her situation, was “inauthentic.”
Understanding “lived experience,” in Beauvoir’s sense, meant investigating how feelings, self-interpretations, and choices fit together, including how they can lead people astray. Since then, much has changed. In the feminist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, many activists took as their goal the recovery and uplift of women’s experience, which they argued had been systematically denigrated and dismissed in a male-dominated society. Yet this new theory of lived experience was often far removed from Beauvoir’s. By 1991, the historian Joan Scott was warning that “lived experience” had become so impoverished that it was undermining feminism.
In her essay “The Evidence of Experience,” Scott warned that a corrupted version of Beauvoir’s concept was leading women into two serious mistakes. It was teaching them, first, to treat their feelings as beyond criticism. Emotions were being understood, she warned, as if they were automatic and infallible expressions of resistance to oppression, when, in fact, they were necessarily influenced by prejudices and questionable interpretations. Feeling oppressed is not the same as being oppressed or as knowing how to fight oppression. Second, Scott warned, too many feminists imagined that experience gave them access to personal “identity,” which they understood as a stable, knowable fact about themselves rather than as a story about themselves told to, with, and by others.
Thirty years later, the bastardized concept Scott warned of has spread far beyond feminist circles. Within the hegemonic “woke” framework, “lived experience” is called upon to give political meaning and moral authority to a range of claims. Women and racial minorities (and those purporting to speak on their behalf) appeal to the lived experience of sexism and racism in order to demand symbolic and material reparations. Such appeals have become, as Scott warned, an obstacle to thoughtful discussions of identity. Questioning a person’s claims about their gender, for instance, is understood not as opposing one interpretation with another but as “invalidating” and doing “violence” to that person’s “lived experience.”
The simultaneous impoverishment and spread of “lived experience” in recent years, and its imperviousness to critique, suggests that the concept fills a need in our culture. It seems to express a change in the way people understand themselves. If we formerly thought of ourselves as possessing an authentic self protected from public scrutiny but revealed in a private sphere of domesticity and intimacy, we now regard the self paradoxically at once as utterly personal, knowable only to individuals themselves, and as a site of public intervention requiring constant “validation” and “self-care” through a range of therapeutic practices. This notion of the self is not an unfortunate accident or a psychological problem. Rather, it is a substitute for fraying moral and political norms.
It is becoming more and more difficult for us to talk to each other about our sufferings, or seek redress for them, through shared notions of the good life or appeals to common beliefs about human dignity. It is unsurprising, then, that our public debates increasingly rely on the image of a vulnerable “self” whose wounds are recorded in “experience.” While we cannot agree on the good, we can usually agree that harm is bad. And while we disagree about not only what is true but also how to know if anything is true, we generally take people to be the best authorities on their own lives. In a country divided by a culture war, lived experience might seem to give us at least a common, albeit narrow, language in which to explain and justify our grievances about harms ranging from nearly invisible slights to brutal inequalities.
Yet while this new, therapeutic conception of the self would seem to be neutrally available to everyone, it serves in practice as a tool of class power, wielded by the agents of our managerial-administrative system. The latter use a shallow notion of lived experience, disconnected from the history of the concept, in the service of one point of view, demanding that attention and validation flow to the ostensible sufferings of some categories of people but not to others. The lived experience that drives white working-class people to die from alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide is not accorded the same moral and political force as the lived experience of, for example, racial minorities on elite college campuses. It is not seen to be a judgment by which many condemn the lives available to them as unlivable.
Beauvoir used lived experience to show how oppression warps lives. In a sexist society, she argued, women misrecognize their own emotions and bodies and make self-defeating choices on the basis of mistaken conceptions of themselves. Her idea of “lived experience” is thus an invitation to pay attention to the ways that our most personal feelings are shaped by politics and, in turn, contain implicit political demands. Taking lived experience back from the woke left may open a way forward for a politics that depends neither on a discredited standard of objective rationality nor on partisan moralizing, one that begins from the premise that everyone’s feelings are politically relevant — and potentially wrong.
Blake Smith, a Harper-Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, is a historian of modern France and a literary translator.
