Alienation
Contents
1 “A Stranger in the World That He Himself Has Made”: The Concept and Phenomenon of Alienation
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Published:August 2014
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Abstract
This chapter describes the problems associating domain with the concept of alienation, with particular emphasis on the various dimensions of the concept and how alienation reveals itself both in everyday language and in the philosophical treatment of the concept. Alienation means indifference and internal division, but also powerlessness and relationlessness with respect to oneself and to a world experienced as indifferent and alien. Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions, and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself. The alienated person, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, is “a stranger in the world that he himself has made.” This chapter first explains the phenomena of alienation before discussing theories of alienation, such as those offered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. It also provides a brief history of the theory of alienation.
the concept of alienation refers to an entire bundle of intertwined topics. Alienation means indifference and internal division, but also powerlessness and relationlessness with respect to oneself and to a world experienced as indifferent and alien. Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself. An alienated world presents itself to individuals as insignificant and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not “at home” and over which one can have no influence. The alienated subject becomes a stranger to itself; it no longer experiences itself as an “actively effective subject” but a “passive object” at the mercy of unknown forces.1Close One can speak of alienation “wherever individuals do not find themselves in their own actions”2Close or wherever we cannot be master over the being that we ourselves are (as Heidegger might have put it). The alienated person, according to the early Alasdair MacIntyre, is “a stranger in the world that he himself has made.”3Close
Phenomena of Alienation
Even in our first encounters with the topic we can see that alienation is a concept with “fuzzy edges.” The family resemblances and overlaps with other concepts such as reification, inauthenticity, and anomie say as much about the domain within which the concept operates as do the complicated relations among the various meanings it has taken on in both everyday and philosophical language. If the “experiential content” of the concept feeds off of the historical and social experiences that have found expression in it,4Close it is also the case that, as a philosophical concept, alienation has influenced the interpretations of self and world held by individuals and social movements. These “impure” mixes make for a diverse field of phenomena that can be associated with the concept of alienation.5Close
As linguistic usage would have it, one is alienated from oneself insofar as one does not behave as one “genuinely” is but instead “artificially” and “inauthentically” or insofar as one is guided by desires that in a certain respect are not “one’s own” or are not experienced as such. One lives then (already according to Rousseau’s critical diagnosis) “in the opinions of others” rather than “in oneself.” According to this conception, role behavior and conformism count, for example, as alienated or inauthentic; but talk of “false needs” by critics of consumerism also belongs to the domain of phenomena that can be theorized as alienation.
“Alienated” describes relations that are not entered into for their own sake, as well as activities with which one cannot “identify.” The worker who thinks only of quitting time, the academic who publishes solely with a view toward the citation index, the doctor who cannot for a moment forget her fee scale—all are alienated from what they do. And someone who cultivates a friendship only because it serves her own interests has an alienated relation to the person she takes to be her friend.
Talk of alienation can also refer to detachment from one’s social involvements. In this sense one can become alienated from one’s life partner or from one’s family, from one’s place of origin, or from a community or a cultural milieu. More specifically, we speak of alienation when someone cannot identify with—grasp as “her own”—the social or political institutions in which she lives. Social isolation or excessive demands for privacy can also be regarded as symptoms of alienation. Slightly romanticized, alienation is sometimes understood as an expression of “rootlessness” and “homelessness,” which conservative cultural critics trace back to the complexity or anonymity of modern life or to the “artificiality” of a world that is experienced only through the lens of public media.
The depersonalization and reification of relations among humans, as well as of their relations to the world, counts as alienated insofar as these relations are no longer immediate but are instead (for example) mediated by money, insofar as they are not “concrete” but “abstract,” insofar as they are not inalienable but objects of exchange. The commodification of goods or domains that were previously not objects of market exchange is an example of alienation in this sense. The claim that bourgeois society, dominated by relations of equivalence (as Adorno might have put it), destroys the uniqueness of things and of human beings, destroys their particularity and nonfungibility, is a critique of alienation that one encounters even beyond the boundaries of Marxism.
Alienation means—a dominant theme already in Goethe’s time—the loss of the “whole human being,” the fragmentation and narrowing of activities produced by a specialized division of labor as well as the failure to realize human capacities and expressive possibilities that arise from it. As a mere “cog in the machine,” the alienated worker is deindividualized and carries out a narrow, partial function within a larger process he cannot see in its entirety and over which he has no control.
Relationships can be described as alienated in which institutions appear as all-powerful or where systemic constraints appear to provide no place for free action. In this sense alienation or reification refers to a condition in which relations take on an independent existence (Verselbständigung) that stand over and against those who constitute them.6Close The “dead marriage” is in this sense just as much a phenomenon of alienation as certain administrative boards in modern democracies; the same holds for the “iron cage” of welfare state bureaucracy or when economic constraints eliminate possibilities for free action.
The “absurd” can also be regarded as belonging to the family of phenomena covered by the term alienation. The characters created by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus are only the most well-known literary examples of individuals who experience utter detachment and meaninglessness.
Theories of Alienation: “A Crisis in the Consciousness of the Time”
What then is alienation? “It seems that whenever he feels that something is not as it should be, he characterizes it in terms of alienation.”7Close This remark of Richard Schacht’s about Erich Fromm seems an apt description of how the concept is often used (and not only by Fromm). However, as varied as the aforementioned phenomena might be, they provide an initial sketch of the concept of alienation. An alienated relation is a deficient relation one has to oneself, to the world, and to others. Indifference, instrumentalization, reification, absurdity, artificiality, isolation, meaninglessness, impotence—all these ways of characterizing the relations in question are forms of this deficiency. A distinctive feature of the concept of alienation is that it refers not only to powerlessness and a lack of freedom but also to a characteristic impoverishment of the relation to self and world. (This is how we should understand the dual meaning Marx means to convey when he describes alienation in terms of the “double loss of reality” of the world and the human being: having become unreal, the individual fails to experience herself as “effective,” and the world, having become unreal, is meaningless and indifferent.) It is the complexity of these interrelations that has made alienation into the key concept of diagnoses of the crisis of modernity and one of the foundational concepts of social philosophy.
As an expression of a crisis in contemporary consciousness (as Hegel might have regarded it), the modern discussion of alienation stretches from Rousseau and Schiller, via Hegel, to Kierkegaard and Marx. Elevated to the “sickness of civilization par excellence,”8Close alienation became, from the eighteenth century onward, a cipher used to communicate the “uncertainty, fragmentation, and internal division” in humans’ relations to themselves and to the world that accompanied the growth of industrialization. It was this diagnosis that Marx captured in his theory of alienation and put to work in his critique of capitalism. And the “modern human’s loss of an essential definition or calling” shapes the existentialist question,9Close deriving from Kierkegaard, of what it means both to be oneself and to lose oneself. To this tradition, experiences of indifference and radical foreignness appear as nothing less than an ontologically situated misapprehension of the world and the human’s relation to self and world, which, despite all divergences from the Marxian diagnosis, also has something in common with it. Diagnoses of alienation in their modern form always concern (for example) freedom and self-determination and the failure to realize them. Understood in this way, alienation is not simply a problem of modernity but also a modern problem.
A Short History of the Theory of Alienation
One could give a (very) short history of the modern theory of alienation as follows:
Even if the term itself is absent, Rousseau’s works contain all the key ideas that theories of alienation (in the social-philosophical sense), both past and present, have relied on.10Close Rousseau begins his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men” (1755) with a striking image: “Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea, and storms had so disfigured that it less resembled a God than a ferocious Beast, the human soul, the human soul altered in the lap of society by a thousand forever recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by the changes that have taken place in the constitution of Bodies, and by the continual impact of the passions, has, so to speak, changed in appearance, to the point of being almost unrecognizable.”11Close The disfigurement Rousseau speaks of here is the deformation of human beings by society: with his nature divided, alienated from his own needs, subjected to the conformist dictates of society, in his need for recognition and with his sense of self-worth dependent on the opinions of others, the social human being is artificial and disfigured. The mutual dependence of civilized humans, their unlimited needs produced by social contact, and their finding their orientation in others give rise at once, according to Rousseau, to domination and enslavement as well as to a loss of authenticity and (self-) alienation—to a condition, in other words, directly opposed to the autonomy and authenticity of the state of nature, conceived as a condition of self-sufficiency.
There are two apparently opposed ideas that have made Rousseau’s thought influential as a theory of alienation: first, the development of the modern ideal of authenticity as an undisturbed agreement with oneself and one’s own nature and, second, the idea of social freedom, as expressed in Rousseau’s formulation of the principal task of the Social Contract, If in the Second Discourse Rousseau vividly describes the alienated character of (as he sees it there) the exclusively negative effects of socialization, he also, in the Social Contract, invents the normative ideal of an unalienated form of socialization. Without wanting to deny the tensions internal to Rousseau’s work, one could describe the connection between the two ideas as follows: the gap between authentic selfhood and society that Rousseau so eloquently articulated gives rise, in accordance with his own presuppositions, to an aporia that can be resolved only by establishing a condition in which individuals live within social institutions that they can experience as their own. On the one hand, the alienated human described by Rousseau loses herself insofar as she establishes relations to others: the natural human “lives within himself; sociable man always outside himself.”,12Close On the other hand, the human being can regain herself only through society. Since restoring the self-sufficiency of the state of nature—and with it a freedom that requires independence and detachment from others—comes at too high a price (the price of losing such specifically human qualities as reason and the capacity for reflection),13Close the solution to the problem of alienation cannot lie in dissolving social bonds but only in transforming them. The mutual dependence of socialized individuals, experienced as alienating, must be reconfigured in accordance with the idea, set out in the Social Contract, of an association in which each individual alienates all her rights to society and thereby becomes “as free as before.” What was once alienating heteronomy becomes subjection to “one’s own law.” Rousseau’s thought, then, led his followers in two directions. On the one hand, Rousseau (and especially “Rousseaueanism”) represents the continually recurring form of alienation critique that turns away from the “universal” and, embracing an ideal of unfalsified nature or primitive self-sufficiency, regards sociality and social institutions as inherently alienated. On the other hand, he is the inspiration not only for the Kantian idea of autonomy but also for Hegel’s conception of the social character of freedom.
It is left to Hegel, though, to develop the concept of “self-realization in the universal.” Although for him, too, modernity is characterized by alienation—the fragmentation of modern consciousness, the coming apart of “particular” and “universal” in relationships within a civil society threatened by disintegration—he locates the core of the problem in the cleavage between individual and society rather than in the individual’s loss of self through society. For Hegel alienation (or internal division) is a deficiency in social life (Sittlich-keit), the “loss of ethical universality in social life” (sittlicher Allgemeinheit). In this context the idea of an ethically satisfying social life refers not to the substantial ethical integration typical of premodern communities (the integrated ethical life of the premodern polis) but to a form of social integration that does justice to the “individual’s right to particularity.” Hegel’s rejection of atomism rests on the idea that individuals always find themselves already in relations,14Close the “realization” of which (in multiple senses) constitutes the conditions of their freedom.
Where Hegel takes up the set of problems outlined by Rousseau, he transforms the latter’s starting point by conceiving of freedom as ethical social life (Sittlichkeit) and ethical social life as freedom: we become free in and through the social institutions that first make it possible for us to realize ourselves as individuals. Rousseau’s still atomistic ideal of authenticity is replaced by a view that locates self-realization in individuals’ identification with the institutions of ethical social life. Although Hegel’s theory strives to overcome the ideal of freedom as self-sufficiency, it also aims to incorporate the (Kantian) idea of autonomy: its goal is to articulate the conditions that make it possible to “refind oneself” in social institutions. Hegel’s conception of Bildung gives an account of the process through which individuals work their way out of the relations of dependence they initially find themselves in and then make their social relations—the conditions of “themselves”—their own.15Close
The two post-Hegelian strands of the theory of alienation meet in Kierkegaard and Marx, each of whom undertakes versions of Hegel’s project that start from a specific conception of human nature.16Close To be sure, the late nineteenth-century emphasis on “real existence” and the “real, active human being” leads them in different directions: Marx’s turn toward economics stands in contrast to Kierkegaard’s concern for the ethical dimensions of human existence. The attention the theory of alienation pays to the problems of internal division, indifference, and loss of relation to self and world leads both philosophers to the theme of practical appropriation. Just as Kierkegaard understands “becoming oneself” in terms of appropriating one’s own actions and one’s own history—as a process of “taking hold of oneself in practice,” of actively taking possession of what alien forces have brought about—so, too, for Marx the idea of a productive appropriation of world and self functions as the model for unalienated existence.
Kierkegaard’s ethical ideal consists in becoming a “singular human being” in the face of the conformist tendencies of contemporary bourgeois society, whereas Marx’s approach is characterized by his understanding the appropriation of one’s own human essence in terms of an appropriation of “speciesbeing” (where species-being, Feuerbach’s concept, can be understood as a naturalized version of Hegel’s vision of an ethically satisfying social life [Sittlichkeit]). Thus, both the starting and end points of the existentialist critique of alienation diverge importantly from those of the Hegel-Marx line of development insofar as alienation is understood in the latter case as alienation from the social world, whereas in the former case the condition of being immersed in a public world is itself regarded as the source of alienation, understood as the subject’s loss of authenticity in the face of a public world defined by leveling (Kierkegaard) or by the rule of “the They” [das Man]” (Heidegger). Nevertheless, there are multiple points of overlap between these two strands of the theory of alienation (and not only with respect to their historical reception): Hegel’s diagnosis of internal division focuses on the fact that individuals cannot refind themselves in social and political institutions; Marx’s analysis of alienation in the 1844 manuscripts argues that in alienated labor we are unable to appropriate our own activity, its products, and the conditions of communal production; the existentialist-inspired conception of alienation points to the structural obstacles to individuals’ ability to understand the world as their own and to understand themselves as subjects that shape that world.
In the twentieth century the discussion of alienation (and therefore the social-philosophical legacy of Marx’s thought) played a prominent role in various strands of Western Marxism. This created the possibility for a normative dimension of social critique that was of fundamental importance for the development of a critical theory of advanced capitalism. Already in the 1920s, without yet knowing the 1844 manuscripts’ account of alienation,17Close Georg Lukács extended Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism into a theory of alienation, or reification, in his well-known essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”18Close Here, with his central thesis of the “universality of the commodity form” as the distinctive feature of modern society, the theory of reification became a theory of modern capitalist society in all its manifestations. The influence of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization and Georg Simmel’s diagnosis of objectification (Versachlichung) led Lukács to a view slightly different from Marx’s that regarded as salient the phenomena of indifference, objectification, quantification, and abstraction, which, with the spread of the capitalist market economy, come to characterize all relations and forms of expression of modern bourgeois society. Weber’s image of the iron cage, in which humans are imprisoned by a bureaucratized capitalist society; Simmel’s description of the “tragedy of culture,” in which the products of human freedom take on an independent existence as something objective over and against the human being; his analysis of how, with the spread of the money economy, freedom is turned into a loss of meaning—all fruitfully captured the phenomena that Lukács saw as “in the air” at the time. The intersection of Marxist and existentialist themes was a distinctive characteristic of Lukács’s thought,19Close and it is easy to see both that this theoretical mix was crucial for the further development of Critical Theory and that even today it remains crucial for the concept of alienation in its various guises.20Close
I borrow the expression “experiential content” from Negt and Kluge, Öffent-lichkeit und Erfahrung. It refers to concepts that make experiences possible and that, in turn, give life to those same concepts.
As Raymond Geuss says, all interesting philosophical concepts are “impure.” Raymond Geuss, Glück und Politik, 56.
See the “Translator’s Introduction.”
There is no disagreement on this among interpreters of Rousseau. Thus, Hans Barth describes Rousseau as a theoretician of alienation “avant la letter.” Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie, 105. And, according to Bronislaw Baczko: “The Hegelian-Marxian term [alienation] corresponds precisely to the condition for which Rousseau has no name but which he constantly describes.” Baczko, Rousseau, 27.
Frederick Neuhouser brings this out very decisively in his interpretation of Rousseau. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, 55–81.
For the discussion of atomism in social philosophy, see Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” 211-229.
I am speaking here of Hegel’s treatment of alienation as a problem of contemporary society. His philosophical concept of alienation, on the other hand, exhibits the following structure, which informs Marx’s concept as well: alienation is the self-alienation of Spirit that is unable to recognize its own products as such. On this level the concept of alienation is not necessarily intended as pejorative or even normative. See Nicolaus, Hegels Theorie der Entfremdung regarding the various dimensions of Hegel’s theory of alienation.
The 1844 Manuscripts first appeared in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe in 1932 and were enthusiastically welcomed at the time by Herbert Marcuse, who regarded them as revealing at last the philosophical foundations of Marx’s critique of political economy and theory of revolution.
It is logical that Habermas’s grand-scale attempt to refound critical theory and reformulate it using the paradigm of communicative action leads to a reconstruction of the theory of reification: thus the thesis of the colonization of the life-world transforms one of the central intuitions of critical theory since Marx.
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