What is “lived experience” (Erlebnis)? This is an important question because phenomenological human science begins in lived experience and eventually turns back to it. Dilthey (1985) has suggested that in its most basic form lived experience involves our immediate, prereflective consciousness of life: a reflexive or self-given awareness which is, as awareness, unaware of itself.
Dilthey gave special meaning to the notion of Erlebnis, which is translated into English as “lived experience.” He suggested that lived experience is to the soul what breath is to the body: “Just as our body needs to breathe, our soul requires the fulfillment and expansion of its existence in the reverberations of emotional life” (1985, p. 59). In German language leben is to live and erleben can be translated as living through something meaningful. Lived experience is the breathing of meaning. In the flow of life, consciousness breathes meaning in a to-and-fro movement: a constant heaving between the inner and the outer. There is a determinate reality-appreciation in the flow of living and experiencing life’s breath. Thus, a lived experience has a certain essence, a “quality” that we recognize in retrospect.
A lived experience does not confront me as something perceived or represented; it is not given to me, but the reality of lived experience is there-for-me because I have a reflexive awareness of it, because I possess it immediately as belonging to me in some sense. Only in thought does it become objective (p. 223).
Selected Readings:
Dilthey, W. (1976). Dilthey: Selected Writings. (H. P. Rickman, ed.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dilthey, W. (1985). Poetry and Experience. Selected Works, Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dilthey, W. (1987). Introduction to the Human Sciences. Toronto: Scholarly Book Services.