Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The idea that each group has its own identity that was not accessible to outsiders was reflected in the use of the term lived experience, which has seen explosive growth in the popular culture since the 1970s.5 The distinction between experience and lived experience has its roots in the difference between the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which preoccupied a number of thinkers in the nineteenth century. Erfahrung referred to experiences that could be shared, as when people witnessed chemistry experiments in different laboratories. Erlebnis (which incorporates the word Leben, or “life”), by contrast, meant the subjective perception of experiences, which might not necessarily be shareable. The writer Walter Benjamin argued in a 1939 essay that modern life constituted a series of “shock experiences” that prevented individuals from seeing their lives as a whole and made it hard to convert Erlebnis into Erfahrung. He saw this negatively as a “new kind of barbarism” in which communal memory breaks down into a series of individual experiences.6 This line of thought ultimately traces back, we should recall, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the “sentiment of existence” valorized subjective inner feeling over the shared norms and understandings of the surrounding society. The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is the same as the distinction between experience and lived experience. The latter term entered the English language via Simone de Beauvoir: the seco...