Nicholas Davey
To engage with the subtle philosophical implications of the hermeneutical term “lived experience” (Erlebnis) requires a referential differentiation not customary within Anglo-Saxon empirical thought. The latter distinguishes between (1) the physical world, primary properties, or sense-data which are the presumed basis of human experience and (2) the re-presentations or reconstructions of that world in an epistemic subject’s consciousness. This distinction provides the basis of that broad epistemological demarcation between the “objective” world as it is supposedly in itself and the “subjective world” as it is constructed by individual or collective prejudice and preference. The demarcation enforced the nineteenth century Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften distinction which rendered the study of history and culture and society problematic on the grounds that the latter could not appeal either to causal prediction or to deductive modes of mathematical reasoning. The cultural world was, epistemologically speaking, rendered secondary, a subjective in-lay on the surface of the physical world. The thinking which evolved the hermeneutical notion of “lived experience,” however, marked a decisive break with conventional empiricism.
As a philosophical category, Erlebnis was first developed by Wilhelm Dilthey. What made human expressions (actions) in art, literature, or politics explicable were the key experiences of the world (Erlebnisse) which informed them. For Dilthey, to understand Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah (1558–1603) requires sensibility to the grief over the destruction of English Catholicism. This psychologistic appeal to empathetic transference is not unproblematic, but such subjectivism assumes quite another philosophical dimension when considered in light of Edmund Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld (die Lebenswelt). Entailed in the concept is the notion that objects of experience within the cultural world are experienced within categorical frameworks of meaning and significance which are far from arbitrary and possess an objectivity analogous to those governing the experience of physical objects (Husserl 1936). The lifeworld is not a subjective projection, but a world in which meaning and significance are objectively encountered as phenomenologically real and shareable by those shaped within their historical horizons. It is that cultural and social world encountered and embedded in and formative of our linguistic, moral, and political practices which in Robert Pippin’s phrase, is a world already at work within us. Thus, the objective referent of Tracey Emin’s art installation My Bed (1998) is neither Plato’s ideal bed nor an actual physical bed but that chaotic contemporary lifeworld of partying, substance abuse, and fragile relationships expressed through and apprehended in the bed.1 Erlebnisse are not subjective projections of meaning on to an uncomprehending actuality but expressions of our engagement with, formation by, and participation in a shared historically pre-given lifeworld the content of which (whether text, film, or cathedral) is infused with recognizable and communicable meanings. The rootedness of Erlebnisse in a Lebenswelt creates the formal possibility for the phenomenological study of aesthetic, literary, and historical experience.2 The notion of Erlebnis has, then, a strong active sense distinguishing it from the passivity implicit in conventional empirical accounts of experience. It implies for Gadamer a process of “taking part in” (teilnehmen), of being taken-up by and “going along with” (mitgehen) something larger than ourselves.3
Wilhelm Dilthey’s formula, “Understanding (Verstehen) pre-supposes experience (Erlebnis) and experience pre-supposes Understanding,” is more philosophically prescient than often supposed.4 The equation is conventionally cited as evidence for the epistemological circularity of hermeneutical judgments: a pre-understanding of y is a condition of any experience of y while a previous experience of y is a prerequisite of any understanding of y. Dilthey’s formula has a philosophical richness that both transcends the limitations of its neo-Kantian context and anticipates aspects of Husserlian phenomenology. “Lived experience” is a complex “thick” term. Erlebnis, as a thought about an object, is not separate from a sensate experience of that object. It entails an encounter with intelligible content rendered in embodied form and material rendered intelligible by its form. Experience is invariably “significant,” a mode of apprehension that is simultaneously cognitive, affective, and conative. An Erlebnis entails for Dilthey (1) the cognitive: a recognition of something being the case (the building of foreboding storm clouds); (2) the evaluative: a sense of future threat in that buildup, and (3) the conative: an inclination to flee impending disaster. Dilthey does not see these capacities as equally apportioned but as variables within discernible psychological types. Heidegger senses in the notion of Erlebnis something more ontological. To undergo the “thickness” of Erlebnis is not simply to have had an “experience” but to have already become entangled in the demands of real this-worldly existence. Dasein extends Dilthey’s epistemological approach to Erlebnisse into the ontological. This move permits hermeneutics to escape from its epistemologically circular entrapment and to embrace its ontologically recursive nature.
When Heidegger and Gadamer talk of the event of understanding as performative, they are not thinking epistemologically about the application of categories of understanding to perceptual objects (as if the two were separable) but, rather, presenting understanding itself as a modality of enunciation. The event of understanding is itself experiential, a particular fusion of categories of meaning with sensuous instances such that an artwork or poignant object addresses us in a haunting or compelling fashion. Within Erlebnisse, the meaning of the terms understanding and experience become coterminous: I struggle to understand what I have experienced and to gain explicit experience of what I have come already (by virtue of being born into a distinct cultural tradition) to implicitly understand. To be “experienced” is to have undergone experience not in the sense of the cliché “Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” but to have reflected on, to have learned, and to have been changed by a series of experiential involvements and practices. Gadamer readily admits that the term “experience” is one of philosophy’s obscurest, and it is so because it is recursive, that is, the experience of understanding and the understanding of experience are both forms of cognitive movement shared and participated in beyond the level of just individual consciousness.5 It is for this reason, as we shall see, that Gadamer prefers to use the term Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis.
Any use of the notion “lived experience” invites the riposte, “But what of unlived experience?” The quip is a response to the awkwardness of the English translation of the German Erlebnis, which refers to the momentous rather than the momentary nature of intense and profound experience. The riposte misfires but instructively so as it points to different aspects of this complex philosophical notion.6 There is a perfectly ordinary sense in which the “unlived” inhabits the “lived.” Though they are not direct objects of lived experience themselves, inherited linguistic perspectives and socially acquired orientations enable such experience and are, in a certain sense, given within it.7 Dilthey refers to these elements as the “understanding” which serves as the precondition of experience generally, while Heidegger conceives of them as reflections of a mode of being (Dasein) that (pre-)orientates us to the subject-matters (Sachen) of intense experience. Whereas for Dilthey these elements are grounded in consciousness, for Heidegger they reflect a mode of being. Gadamer too is intensely aware of those elements of profound experience which, though livable, are not immediately lived. Profound experience is never transparent. Its content requires time to unfold.8 Such experience withholds aspects of itself, is never amenable to full conceptual determination. Learning from these experiences is not simply a matter of undergoing an intensity of experience but concerns dwelling on their content, drawing it out, patiently bringing to life what lives on within it which has yet to be lived out. The poignancy of the profound depends, then, upon a fusion of the inheritance of what has been lived and is now held in both memory and tradition, with the promise of what that inheritance anticipates as coming, the as-yet-to-be-lived potentials within inherited experience. The complex interplay of the remembered and the anticipated within experience brings us to the philosophical juncture which demarcates Gadamer’s approach to experience from Dilthey’s. In Gadamer’s mind, “Erlebnis” is more a psychological category of experience whereas “Erfahrung” denotes a hermeneutical category of experience which explains its recursive nature.9
Epistemologically speaking, Erlebnisse represent circular units of experience: When I read a novel and empathize with the central character’s angst, the book awakens in me my and the character’s feeling of existential displacement. Erlebnisse understood as units of intense, immediate, personal feeling can only ever convey the psychological predicament of the reading subject. Dilthey’s position risks reducing the meaning of what is read to the reader’s response to what is read. Because “the ideality of meaning lies not in the subject but in the historical life” which transcends any individual subject, the “transition from a psychological to a hermeneutical account of experience” is necessary. In Dilthey’s account of Erlebnisse, the subject only ever encounters itself. Erlebnisse, in effect, only actualize and return a subject to modes of awareness that already are determinations of their consciousness being.10 By contrast, Erfahrungen are recursive not circular in nature. Erfahrungen are not grounded in the subject but in what transcends it, enabling it to encounter and be changed by what lies outside itself. Engaging with a foreign practice is not a matter for Gadamer, as it would have been for Dilthey, of reconstructing and reliving the defining Erlebnisse which ground it, but of allowing that practice to precipitate thinking differently about one’s own. Original assumptions may be returned to, but recursively so and reorganized in the process. Recursive understanding is an accumulation of different and changing understandings and not a repetition of the same.
Gadamer’s philosophical language probes the limits of conventional usage when he implies that Erfahrungen would be better thought of as distinct occasions in ongoing processes of encounter, negotiation, and engagement. Hermeneutics for Gadamer does not entail a method of “correct reading” by means of which a subject can with certainty appropriate the proper meaning embedded in a text. On the contrary, hermeneutics is the process of encountering a meaning as it presents itself through a text, testing it against what is already known and allowing the already known to be tested by it. Erfahrungen, understood as encounters with meanings are ongoing negotiations with and transformations of meaning. They imply a process of “taking part in” (teilnehmen), of being taken-up by and “going along with” (mitgehen) something larger than ourselves. It is the transcendent elements of Erfahrungen (language, tradition) that permit the subject’s horizons to be transformed. As occasions of encounter, Erfahrungen should not be thought of in subject–object terms, as a “reader meeting a text” or a “spectator viewing a painting.” Rather, they should be thought of as collisions and encounters between various horizons of meaning which variously shape global historical expectancies, local religious and political traditions, differing national linguistic perspectives, and family and community narratives, as well as articulating individual hopes and projects in continuous and indefinite ways. That such horizons can evidently challenge and contradict one another is not the point: it is the new and further determinations of meaning that such collisions give rise to that is hermeneutically significant. Hermeneutic understanding is for Gadamer not a question of fixing the inherent meaning of a text as if it were somehow “there,” present before us on the page to be deciphered. It is, rather, a matter of engaging with and negotiating the meanings set in play when the horizons of a literary tradition, of a specific text, and of an individual reader meet. In essence, hermeneutic understanding is dialogical, an ongoing self-transforming participatory process. As hermeneutic “events,” Erfahrungen constitute “fusions of horizons.” This does not imply melding different horizons of meaning into one. On the contrary, following Heidegger, Gadamer conceives of the frameworks of meaning embodied in different religious, political, and linguistic traditions as being essentially open. Though they cluster around key ideas and concerns (Sachen) which have gained a determinate historical character, such determinations are never definitive: there is “always something more” that can be said of them. Belonging to a cultural or political tradition requires commitment to an open historical project and its quest to understand and realize more of the possibilities within its constituting concerns. Gadamer is a philosophical pluralist: he recognizes the complex hermeneutic environment which is the lifeworld. Accident, trade, and war guarantee the encounter of different horizons of meaning. Their inherent openness permits the possibility of transformation. That the defining ideas of a tradition are rooted in historical and linguistic practices which transcend it means that no tradition can claim ownership of its defining “truths.” It is, paradoxically, precisely a commitment to those truths that impels a tradition toward engagement with another in the hope that new determinations of its key concerns might be revealed. Erfahrungen concern these critical encounters in which one horizon of meaning prompts another to think differently about itself. Gadamer (2007, 200) comments: “Experience … is never merely a confirmation of expectancies, but a surprise of them”; it “is initially always experience of negation, something is not what we supposed it to be” (Gadamer 1989, 352). Furthermore, “Every experience of the name thwarts an expectation” (Gadamer 1989, 356). Erfahrungen are part of a dialectic of experience in which retention, memory, and expectation are brought into play (Gadamer 1989, 346). The challenge entails a reflective experience that exposes previous beliefs as inadequate, reveals present beliefs as limited but also opens toward the future possibility of configuring those beliefs differently. As Gadamer comments, “All expectation of the future (and its challenge) … rests on experience. In every present moment not only is a horizon of the future opened up, but the horizon of the past is (also) in play” (Gadamer 2007, 198). In response (and to understand itself more completely), hermeneutic experience must reorganize its expectancies and recover aspects of what has shaped its experience so as to uncover their as yet unlived possibilities. The “dialectic of lived experience” (its recursive capacity to turn back on itself to recover future potentials) defines the philosophical parameters of hermeneutic understanding itself: open to past and future, never conclusive, and amenable to learning from other perspectives.
Hermeneutical involvements allow one to learn a good deal about history and languages, but Gadamer argues that their proper outcome is not learning per se but something closer to wisdom, a way of life open to the possibility of things becoming otherwise: “The ‘dialectic of experience’ has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (Gadamer 1989, 355). Encounters with the challenging and strange become hermeneutical when they engender open reflection upon how the other perspective adds to, enhances, or challenges one’s own. Erfahrungen bring a hermeneutical subject to a reflective awareness of its limitations. Erfahrungen “teach not this or that particular thing but insight into the nature of humanity” (Gadamer 1989, 357). It is in the experience of negation that the hermeneutical character of Erfahrungen becomes apparent. The claim of the different forces us out of the complacency of the “lived-moment” and reveals the extent to which we actually live in the continuum between memory, immediate experience, and expectation. The negativity of experience exposes the world already at play within us. The experience of hermeneutical negativity opens a reflective space between the past (the limitations of what I took to be the case are revealed), the present (the advantages of looking at something differently are now manifest), and the future (experiencing the insecurity of previous judgments opens me toward the possibility of how my present beliefs may yet be challenged and transformed). The negativity of experience brings hermeneutic consciousness to itself: as it reveals the finite nature of past and present understandings, it discloses the infinitely open horizon of future understanding. Gadamer (1989, 362) argues that “hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in the methodological sureness of itself but in the readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma.” The limitations of human understanding may be known of theoretically, but it is only the actual experience of negation which moderates the certainty one claims for one’s understanding. It is precisely because we “take part in” and are “taken up by” projects and horizons of meaning that the experience of negation is so affecting. However, the experience of negativity is not itself negative. It reveals the extent to which we have been shaped by, and can yet be transformed by, processes of meaning that are much larger than ourselves. Hermeneutic consciousness cannot be taught but emerges as a consequence of those experiences through which one becomes experienced. Its wisdom is emergent, acquired through immersion in those practices the presuppositions of which both shape and transcend individual existence. The practiced hermeneutician will have expectations of a text but will know that, though necessary to its understanding, they can be otherwise. On the basis of the “negativity of experience,” the practiced hermeneutician has come to know how not to take his interpretive commitments too seriously, while remaining alert to the emergence of alternative understandings that can extend, criticize, or transform his own.
A certain worldliness characterizes hermeneutic consciousness: it is openly critical of managerial thought. Gadamer’s philosophy of Erfahrung exposes the arrogance, presumption, and folly of any claim to economic and political certainty that does not acknowledge or calculate for alternative outcomes. Yet it is not pessimism but optimism that is born of such negativity. The lesson of hermeneutic experience—its wisdom—is that the finitude which necessarily limits human understanding also maintains the openness of its horizons and thereby upholds the ever-present possibility of its transformation.