German distinguishes experiential living through from cumulative learning experience

Evidence

Luhmann uses in his writings the two words ‘Erfahrung’ and ‘Erleben’, which both translate as ‘experience’ in English. There is a semantic overlap between the two German words, but ‘Erleben’ is closer to the English ‘to experience something’, or ‘to go through some experience’, while ‘Erfahrung’ is closer to the notion of experience in the sense of ‘to be experienced in something’, that is, to learn something or to obtain knowledge about something by having gone through the experience. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise operational distinction between Erleben and Erfahrung needed to anchor the reader’s Giddens/Luhmann comparison.
• XREF: The Erleben/Erfahrung distinction maps onto Giddens’s facework-versus-faceless-commitments divide: Erleben is direct lived encounter, Erfahrung is institutionalized accumulated competence. — connects to: Erfahrung differs from Erlebnis as culturally mediated versus immediate experience — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 2150; German lacks a natural verbal link between habit and contraction
• QUESTION: Could Ishiguro’s Stevens be read as having vast Erfahrung in butlercraft yet impoverished Erleben of genuine human relationship?