Erlebnis German term for experience used in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy. Erlebnis denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived fullness. It contrasts with the more typical German word Erfahrung, denoting ordinary experience as mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. As immediate, Erlebnis eludes conceptualization, in both the lived present and the interiority of experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and extraordinary: it reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking. Typical examples include art, religion, and love, all of which also show the anti-rationalist and polemical uses of the concept. It is especially popular among the Romantic mystics like Novalis and the anti-rationalists Nietzsche and Bergson, as well as in phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism.
As used in post-Hegelian German philosophy, the term describes two aspects of subjectivity. The first concerns the epistemology of the human sciences and of phenomenology. Against naturalism and objectivism, philosophers appeal to the ineliminable, subjective qualities of experience to argue that interpreters must understand ‘what it is like to be’ some experiencing subject, from the inside. The second use of the term is to denote extraordinary and interior experiences like art, religion, freedom, and vital energy. In both cases, it is unclear how such experience could be identified or known in its immediacy, and much recent German thought, such as Heidegger and hermeneutics, rejects the concept. See also ERFAHRUNG, EXISTENTIALISM , PHE- NOMENOLOG. J.Bo.