The tension between strategic philanthropy and Erlebnis is not resolved by our typical, chirpy rejoinder “Why can’t we just do both?”—which always evokes satisfied nods at conferences where these matters are discussed.
Googling “philanthropy + lived experience” produces an avalanche of results—no surprise, since “lived experience” is becoming such an important concept in the world of foundations and nonprofits. “Promoting Meaningful Partnerships with Lived Experience;” “Benefits of lived experience on nonprofit boards;” “Centering lived experience in a meaningful and impactful way;” “Letting Lived Experience Lead the Way;” the hits just keep on coming.
So it’s worthwhile to figure out where the notion of lived experience (henceforth without the quotes) came from. That’s Patrick J. Casey’s task in “What is ‘lived experience’?,” which appears on the Aeon website out of Australia. Casey, who teaches philosophy at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, observes that in today’s discourse, “lived experience is often invoked to establish authority and prompt deference from others since, purportedly, only members of a shared identity know what it’s like to have certain kinds of experiences or to be a member of that group.” When you hear a sentence that begins “speaking as a ___,” you know to back off. “Outsiders sense that they shouldn’t criticise what is said because [such criticism] might be taken to invalidate or dehumanize others or make them feel unsafe.”
Casey notes that lived experience came into common academic usage in the 1870s, with German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s critique of the scientific way of understanding reality. Those seeking to construct a sound “epistemological foundation for the budding natural sciences” discounted all forms of knowledge that didn’t arise from “sensory experience that could, through abstraction, be quantified, measured and shared.”
But Dilthey insisted that this represented nothing more than “the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.” In Casey’s description, Dilthey believed instead that “we have to return to conscious lived experience” because it’s “the only way we can know anything.” The scientific account of reality is, in fact, nothing more than the husk of what remains after the variety and substance of the observed world have been systematically removed. Only through a return to lived experience—in German, Erlebnis—can “we know the world as a meaningful, coherent whole.”
What we know today as lived experience’s entanglement with racial identity showed up in the existentialism of the 1940s and ’50s. Frantz Fanon, for instance, wrote about “the lived experience of the black man” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Then through the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor in the 1990s, Casey notes, we were urged to “see identity politics as a response to the human need for recognition—for one’s most authentic self to be seen and valued.”
The authentic self, especially as shaped by “an identity which is viewed as historically marginalized and oppressed,” now demands “recognition on behalf of that identity group, thus fostering political change by undermining the structures which have inhibited the authentic way of living of marginalised people.” The lived experience of the oppressed becomes not just another way of knowing, but a “privileged knowledge which others should defer to.”
Objections
Casey poses a number of objections to today’s casual deployment of lived experience, and the following does not do justice to their philosophical subtlety. But several points, crudely summarized, apply to today’s philanthropic use and abuse of lived experience.
For instance, in Casey’s view, an argument that begins “In my lived experience as a Black woman” may be designed to empower the speaker, but in fact it “surreptitiously reinforces or ‘reifies’ (freezes and treats as real, timeless and natural) historically constructed categories like ‘Black’ and ‘women.’” Casey continues: “Rather than liberating marginalised people, using this language risks making us complicit in the persistence of categories that should be deconstructed.”
Furthermore, Casey notes, it’s possible for lived experience to be misinterpreted. It presents itself as personally authentic and indisputable, but “ideology can distort and oppression corrupt our own self-understanding.” That is, the experience of the self isn’t pristine, but has already itself been deeply imprinted by the society and culture in which it’s embedded. Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that “experience is ‘never unmediated and self-interpreting.’” It’s not unreasonable to point out to someone discussing his or her “unchallengeable” lived experience that there are suspicious echoes of contemporary political arguments therein. Hence lived experience, as Casey puts it, “doesn’t warrant reflexive deference, even though [it] has become so closely tied to identity and dignity that others’ refusal to defer to their willingness to ask questions or critique may feel like erasure.”
Appiah also reminds us that, say, “if Black people seek recognition as Black people … this goes hand in hand with creating boundaries—what it means to be ‘authentically’ Black.” The effort to define the authentic Black lived experience can create “a kind of social prison,” because “between the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line.” If lived experience is “to have weight, only the experience of some people can be allowed to count.” Hence the familiar phenomenon of conservative Black intellectuals or public figures being dismissed as somehow not “genuinely Black.”
Living in a liberal democracy
Casey argues that the reliance on lived experience as the primary source of authority is particularly problematic in a liberal democracy. If the essence of lived experience is that it’s “private and can’t be shared,” we undermine the effort to “understand experiences other than those of one’s own group.” But political change in a democracy can only happen when groups struggle toward some sort of mutual understanding and accommodation. In Casey’s words, “incommunicable lived experience might serve as a license for political authority and demand for deference, but it can never serve as the basis of solidarity.”
In a 2023 Quillette essay on the problems created for democratic politics by the lived experience idea, Penn State professor Sarah A. Font and the American Enterprise Institute’s Naomi Schaefer Riley highlight philanthropy’s particular tendency to abuse it for political ends. “The irony of elevating lived experience is that, while it appears power is devolved to the speaker,” they write, “power is often held by mysterious ‘Wizard of Oz’ type figures who selected the people with lived experience to serve on advisory boards, testify to Congress, give media interviews, or otherwise disseminate their story.”
Groups with intellectual and political clout inevitably pre-sort which lived experiences are given a voice and which are not. Hence “the selection of voices is never viewpoint neutral or without an agenda.” Instead of “pure” lived experience authentically rising from the community, we confront an ersatz lived experience as imagined and constructed by political and cultural elites in order to promote pre-existing ideologies.
There’s a larger positive argument to made, however, about the importation of lived experience into the discourse of the nonprofit sector. As noted earlier, lived experience—Erlebnis—originated as a powerful critique of the poverty of mechanistic, positivist science. Dilthey and other skeptics of the scientific approach were right to point out that it’s a cramped, sterile, smothering way to approach reality, ultimately unable to give a full and adequate account of what’s happening in the real world.
Especially in a democracy, the claims of scientific expertise to govern depend upon the consent of the governed. So the opinions of those most immediately affected by the problems to be solved indeed must be paramount in the formulation of solutions. Under the regime of “strategic philanthropy,” though, all such considerations were treated as secondary to the overriding goal of working toward objective measurable outcomes, which foundation professional elites regarded as the only scientific way to promote positive social change.
However problematic the idea of lived experience, then, it’s a critical corrective to the reign of philanthropic positivism. Students of philanthropy should be aware that the tension between strategic philanthropy and lived experience is not resolved by our typical, chirpy rejoinder “Why can’t we just do both?”—which always evokes satisfied nods at conferences where these matters are discussed. For that tension reflects deep philosophical conflicts about the very way we understand reality. While this may seem frustrating at times, it can also imbue our work with a sense of its dignity and worth, opening as it does in this instance to some of the most-profound questions of human experience.
