The Conceptual History of Erlebnis: Lived-Experience from Dilthey to Fanon

Abstract

The concept of lived-experience is widely used. It is not, however, widely defined. In this paper, I argue that we need to return to the development of the concept in order to see how it is intended to be used. My argument will proceed through three parts: (i) I will give an account of the development of the term in Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), where lived-experience is developed as way to analyze the figures and aims of the German Romantic movement; (ii) building on this, I will argue that lived-experience is an applied hermeneutical strategy that interprets the way in which collective socio-historical contexts frame and coordinate individual temporal, spatial, and psychic being-in-the-world; (iii); finally, I will argue that the poetical-phenomenological source of this development is central to understand applications because it is especially concerned to conveying something of the dynamic and unvivisected reality involved in living in a given context, rather than just explaining sets of facts involved with these contexts. In this last section, I will bring in  Frantz Fanon’s use of lived-experience as a paradigm for its application as an applied hermeneutical strategy, and sketch some features that can be learned from it. My overall aim of this paper is that this will clarify the way in which this hermeneutical strategy is a useful one for applied contexts.