Is Lived Experience the New Revelation?

On Persuasion and Conversion

Leo Strauss, on whom I’ve written before (see here, here, and here), posits two competing sources of knowledge and authority: Reason and Revelation.

Reason is internal to us, while Revelation comes from without. Reason is universal, while Revelation is particular to a community. Reason is timeless (1+1=2 is true for all time); Revelation takes place in history, separating time into a “before” and “after.” Reason enables discussion and debate (you can argue as to whether conclusion A follows from premise B). Revelation can only be accepted on faith, testimony, or direct experience.

A person who follows reason can be persuaded. A person who follows revelation undergoes more than a mental change. Such a person can only be converted.

In the ancient world, Revelation was thought to have its source in God. Yet I wonder if “lived experience” today plays an analogous role to divine authority, turning a person’s internal world or intuition about what’s true into an inarguable premise (at least for the initiates).

Lived experience is not up for debate in the same way that Revelation is not up for debate. Of course, people do try to refute Revelation (see the disputations of the Middle Ages) and of course, people do try to refute lived experience. But the refutations fail because initiates and outsiders do not speak the same language—debate is for philosophers, not for the faithful who believe even when it is absurd. Reason can never refute Revelation. It can only show it to be Unreasonable. But Revelation never claimed to be, at its foundation, Reasonable.

The advantage of Revelation is the passion, loyalty, and commitment, it inspires. The downside is that it fails to translate into a common language. Revelation draws a hard boundary between those who get it and those who don’t—with no hope of appealing to the foreigner, the non-native (on their terms). Reason (in its ideal form) offers the promise of a public square, a semi-neutral meta-language, where people across cultures and belief systems must appeal to rules they can all accept. But reason cannot inspire the passion of specificity precisely because it is common. Additionally, Reason is alway suspect, because outsiders can always say that what Reason claims as universal is just a covert form of particularist Revelation posing as self-evident.

My argument is not that we reject or accept “lived experience” as a source of authority. Rather, if we accept that it plays the formal role of Revelation today, we need to assess its strengths and weaknesses in light of the ancient tension between Reason and Revelation. And if liberalism is founded on the bracketing or rejection of Revelation as a source of social authority, enshrining religion as a private right, but not a public obligation—we should expect it to have a similar relationship to “lived experience.” Whether this is good or not, I leave to you. Or perhaps you reject the analogy. In which case, I ask, how do you understand appeals today to “lived experience”?

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