Alienation

« Alienation 'Alienation' is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of varioussocial or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation whichsunders things that properly belong together.

People are alienated from one another when there is an interruptionin their mutual affection or reciprocal understanding; they are alienated from political processes when they feelseparated from them and powerless in relation to them.

Reflection on your beliefs or values can also alienate youfrom them by undermining your attachment to them or your identification with them; they remain your beliefs orvalues faute de mieux , but are no longer yours in the way they should be.

Alienation translates two distinct German terms: Entfremdung ('estrangement') and Entaußerung ('externalization').

Both terms originated in the philosophy of Hegel, specifically in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

Their influence, however, has come chiefly from their use by Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1930).

Marx's fundamental concern waswith the alienation of wage labourers from their product, the grounds of which he sought in the alienated form oftheir labouring activity.

In both Hegel and Marx, alienation refers fundamentally to a kind of activity in which theessence of the agent is posited as something external or alien, assuming the form of hostile domination over theagent.

1 Hegel Hegel's philosophy regards all reality as Geist , or 'spirit' or 'mind'; Hegel's concept of spirit is at the same time a model of the human mind and human agency.

It views mind or spirit as an activity which posits a realityor object distinct from itself and then for the first time achieves actuality as spirit by knowing this object as itself.Spirit is therefore a twofold activity, of creation or self-expression and of the reconciling self-interpretation of whatit has created.

The process through which spirit actualizes itself therefore involves an intermediate moment of'division' ( Entzweiung ) in which its objectivity has been posited as external to it but has not yet been reconciled or taken back into it.

The immediate positing of the object is 'externalization' ( Entaußerung ); the experience of it as an alien reality is 'estrangement' ( Entfremdung ).

Thus spirit achieves full actuality only through becoming alienated and then overcoming its alienation.

Spirit is this process not only at the level of individual activity but even more at asocial level.

Alienation and its overcoming are a process through which whole societies, peoples and historicaltraditions actualize freedom by expressing themselves in otherness, losing themselves through alienation and thenregaining themselves through spiritual reconciliation (see Hegel, G.W.F.

§8 ).

Hegel's chief use of the theme of alienation in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is to represent the rise of Christian culture out of classical antiquity as 'spirit in self-alienation' and to portray modernity as the process of overcoming this alienation.

For Hegel, theparadigm of alienation is the 'unhappy consciousness', the finite, transitory, individual consciousness which feelsitself cut off from its essence, which it posits in a perfect, unchanging deity residing in a 'beyond'.

Or in otherwords, it is a form of misunderstood Christian religiosity which still has not achieved the form of Hegelian speculativepantheism.

But the unhappy consciousness is merely the expression at the level of self-consciousness of a socialprocess.

'Spirit in self-alienation' refers primarily to the loss of the social harmony which was present in the Greekpolis , and its replacement by the supranational despotism of the Roman Empire.

Because individuals no longer feel at home in their earthly society, they regard their true home as lying in a 'beyond', a 'kingdom of God'.

The positiveoutcome of this process, however, is a deepening and transformation of individual self-consciousness through therise of 'subjectivity': the modern conception of each individual as possessing a dignity, and of the social order ashaving to respect its sacred rights.

Modern subjectivity also involves a transformation of the social order.

As thereligious alienation of the Christian Middle Ages gives way to modern moral consciousness, the right of the individualis reconciled with rational community in the form of the modern state.

For Hegel, the decisive event on the spirituallevel was the Lutheran Reformation; on the political level it was the French Revolution.

2 Feuerbach Hegel's concept of alienation (although less often the term itself) is employed in Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of religion (seeFeuerbach, L.A.

§2 ).

According to Feuerbach, the idea of God is really no more than the idea of our own human essence or species essence ( Gattungswesen ) projected as a supernatural entity distinct from and opposed to us. Thus for Feuerbach, religion is the 'self-alienation of the human being, the division of the human being from himself'.The real appeal of religion is the appeal of our own self-affirmation, especially our collective or species affirmation,the appeal of a true human community and human love.

But in religion this love and affirmation are actuallysubverted and denied, because they are misdirected toward an imaginary being alien to us.

'To enrich God, manmust become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.' Feuerbach's critique of religious alienation is alsoaimed at its harmful moral and social consequences: the devaluation of our earthly wellbeing and of earthly(especially sexual) love in favour of its alienated religious counterpart, and the separation of men and women fromeach other in the strife of religious sectarianism and the oppressive class divisions in society.

The overcoming ofreligious alienation is for Feuerbach the prerequisite for a transformation of real life.

3 Marx Karl Marx used the concepts of Entaußerung and Entfremdung to portray the situation of modern individuals - especially modern wage labourers - who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life because their life activity as socially productive agents isdevoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction and gives them no ownership over their own lives or theirproducts.

In modern society, individuals are alienated in so far as their common human essence, the actualcooperative activity which naturally unites them, is powerless in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman power- created by them, but separating and dominating them instead of being subject to their united will.

This is thepower of the market, which is 'free' in the sense that it is an autonomous power beyond the control of its humancreators, enslaving them by separating them from one another, from their activity and from their products.

4 Thealienation of labour In the manuscript Alienated Labour (1844), Marx attempts to portray the social existence of human beings found in modern capitalism, and theorized by political economy, as a form of practical alienation.

Hedistinguishes four aspects of this alienation: (1) alienation of workers from the product of their labour; (2) alienationof workers from their own labouring activity; (3) alienation of individual human beings from their species essence;(4) alienation of one human being from another.

(1) The natural relation between labour and its product is one ofappropriation: labour appropriates its product for the labourer.

Alienated labour, however, delivers the worker's. »