Tracing the roots of an increasingly common term
Perhaps you’ve noticed the phrase in the Mamdani administration’s press releases: “lived experience.” A program for peer-led recovery claims to bring “a level of trust and lived experience that can make the difference between isolation and engagement.” Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities Nisha Agarwal has “irreplicable insight that comes with lived experience.” Rebecca Jones Gaston, the Commissioner of the Administration of Children’s Services, promises to partner with “those with lived experience” to improve the city’s children’s services.
Mamdani is far from the only New York City mayor to embrace the term. Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams’ teams also used the expression. On the national level, Kamala Harris claimed in 2020 that she would share with Joe Biden her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront.”
For as long as I have heard the phrase, it has perplexed me. What confused me was not the appeal to experience, but rather the addition of the “lived” prefix. Isn’t all experience inherently lived? Why, instead of saying “from my experience,” were people suddenly saying, “from my lived experience”? The intent seems to be to convey the prioritization of lives too often ignored by those who make public policy. But where did this phrase come from?
The answer: 19th-century German phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that seeks to understand people’s subjective experiences. So how did this phrase travel from turn-of-the-century Berlin to 21st-century New York City?
The first step is understanding the phrase’s linguistic origins. Its clunkiness — the “lived” prefix to experience — is the result of translation. The term “lived experience” is a translation of the German word erlebnis.
German has two words for “experience,” each corresponding to subtle differences in how English speakers use the word. According to Merriam-Webster, the noun “experience” is defined as:
- Practical knowledge, skill, or practice gained from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity.
- Something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through.
The first definition corresponds to the German word erfahrung, which contains the root fahren, which means “to journey.” Erfahrung represents how experience is used when one says, “The professor is very wise because he has a lot of experience.”
The second definition maps onto erlebnis, with the root leben, meaning life. Erlebnis is something that you live through, not cumulative experience. It would be used to say something like, “She wants to have the experience of going to a theme park.”
In the late 19th century, erlebnis became a key concept in German philosophy. Philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to popularize the phrase. In his works about the difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences (what today roughly maps onto the distinctions we make between the humanities and social sciences), Dilthey argued that the human sciences should not be understood through pure reason. Instead, scholars should take into account erlebnis, or how humans subjectively experience the world.
When translating Dilthey’s works into English, translators added the adjective “lived” to “experience” in order to distinguish erlebnis from erfahung.
In the early 20th century, Dilthey’s work inspired the philosophical movement of phenomenology, which explored the nature of subjective human consciousness. It employed Dilthey’s concept of erlebnis. German phenomenologists simply used the word erlebnis, while French phenomenologists used the phrase l’expérience vécue — in English, “the lived experience.”
Through a subset of French phenomenologists, the French formulation of “lived experience” became tied to the study of marginalized identities. Jean Paul Sartre employed the idea in relation to Jews in “Anti-Semite and Jew”; Franz Fanon wrote about “the lived experience of the black man” in “Black Skin, White Masks.” In “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how women’s “lived experience” influences their own self-image as weak and inferior to men. Beauvoir wrote that lived experience demonstrates how one’s self-conception is not fixed, but rather constructed through engagement with the world.
Through the 1980s, it was mainly philosophers who used the idea of “lived experience.” Then, in the 1990s, social science disciplines began more widely adopting the phrase. Though it appears in a wide range of studies — such as on the “lived experiences of persons with heart transplantation” or “the lived experience of feeling very tired” — it became particularly popular as a corrective, focusing on groups with a history of having been ignored in research and policy. The 2024 book “Disrupting the Academy with Lived Experience-Led Knowledge,” by University of New South Wales professors Maree Higgins and Caroline Linnette, says “when lived experience experts lead the way, their knowledge of how to address social injustices can enrich, transform and decolonise research, teaching and advocacy.” Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia professor and scholar of postcolonialism who also happens to be the father of Zohran Mamdani, uses the concept in his own work.
Over roughly the past decade, the phrase has taken on a new moral weight. While it used to mostly be an analytical tool, denoting an exploration of how experiences shape understanding, many now use it as something else entirely. Now, “lived experience” is often cited as a source of information to be held in the highest regard, trumping other data and evidence.
The phrase has only grown in popularity. Compare it to another piece of philosophical jargon, “intersubjectivity.” While the two words were found with identical frequency in books in 1980, “lived experience” now appears more than three times as much as “intersubjectivity.” The phrase is so common that, as per Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, it appears more than “brunch” and “selfie” in books, though still slightly less than “podcast.”
Not everyone embraces the new usage. Naomi Schafer Riley, a child welfare researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, worries about the focus on lived experience in policymaking. It’s possible that the people sharing their lived experiences may be self-selecting subset of those who feel comfortable sharing the de vogue opinion. Additionally, lived experiences — as those like Dilthey and De Beauvoir knew — are subjective, because humans’ perception of reality is never 100% accurate.
Still, for the politicians and civil servants who use the phrase, “lived experience” is always due the utmost respect. At his nomination, Mamdani’s Taxi and Limousine commissioner, Midori Valdivia, said as much: “no amount of degrees or meetings in boardrooms compare to the day-to-day lived experience of being a transportation family.” In other words, past jobs may give a policymaker experience in the professional sense, or erfahrung, to serve the public. But what is equally if not more valuable is having a shared “lived experience,” or erlebnis, with those whom they are tasked with serving.
