ALIENATION

The word alienation has a checkered history. Drawn originally from the vocabulary of the law, the word later appeared in connection with the treatment of persons who were, as ordinary people say, "not themselves." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, property given away or sold was said to have been "alienated." This usage survives in the expression "inalienable rights"—rights that cannot be taken away, given away, or traded. The physician who treated the mentally ill was formerly called an "alienist." In contemporary usage, one speaks of being alienated from a former friend for whom one's affection has cooled or from a group in which one feels no longer comfortable. Alienation, in everyday English, refers to a specific loosening of ties to another person or a sense of estrangement from a group.

Philosophies of Alienation

In philosophy, by contrast, the word alienation has been used in a different sense to refer to estrangement from oneself, a profound disturbance within persons, their selves, and their lives. There is conflict or disconnection at the very heart of the alienated person's existence. Alienated lives do not form an intelligible whole; the alienated cannot tell a coherent story about their lives. Their lives lack meaning.

Philosophers have always said that human lives are more than a series of unconnected episodes, that they should form an intelligible whole. Hence people might ask whether human life as a whole, and especially their own, makes sense and whether it is a good life that serves a purpose and is meaningful. At the beginning of Plato's Republic, Socrates raises those questions in conversation with an old man nearing the end of his life. Plato's answer is that a good life is a just one. A just life, he also thinks, can be lived only in a just society, and thus the conversation about one's life, seen as a whole, leads to a long investigation into the just society. Aristotle gives a different answer to the question: A good life is dedicated to acquiring a set of moral virtues such as courage, temperance (self-discipline), and wisdom.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, new answers surfaced about what makes a life good. What matters in human life, according to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), is not only its moral character, but whether a person manages to be an individual rather than a conformist—dominated by the beliefs, values, and practices of everyone else. Most persons, Rousseau complained, craved acceptance by their fellows and were willing, for the sake of this, to sacrifice any independent identity.

Since Rousseau, philosophic views of the good life have become divided. Many Continental European philosophers have demanded that human lives be not only morally good but also coherent and meaningful. The majority of Anglo-American philosophers, by contrast, have continued to think only about the moral rectitude of human lives, ignoring the question of alienation. The utilitarians, beginning with the Englishmen Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), explicitly reject the possibility of alienation. They insist that a life is a good one if it contains more pleasant episodes than unpleasant ones; the connection between these different episodes is of no interest. Thus there are disagreements among philosophers—rarely articulated and more rarely debated—about the importance of the concept of alienation.

But many thinkers have taken the idea of alienation very seriously (even though not all used the word alienation to name the condition). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), in The Phenomenology ofSpirit, described some forms that alienation takes in human lives. The alienated suffer from inner conflict and self-hatred. As a consequence, they are unhappy.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) agrees with Hegel on the self-hatred of the alienated and develops the idea further. Alienated lives are not disorganized by accident or because persons do not try to unify their lives, but because at the heart of alienation lies the unwillingness to be oneself. It is difficult for the alienated to accept themselves for who they are; it is more pleasant for one who is alienated to escape into fantasy and imagine oneself different: richer, more powerful, more intelligent, or more beautiful than one is. It is also difficult to accept responsibility for one's life. Alienation, Kierkegaard believes, cannot be overcome, but can be mitigated if one is fully in one's life by dedicating oneself to a single project in such a way that every part of one's everyday existence is affected by it. Kierkegaard also believed that this needed to be a Christian project—to live so as to manifest God's presence in even the smallest details of one's life, such as taking a walk in the park and thinking about what there will be for Sunday dinner.

The German philosopher and social critic Karl Marx (1818–1883) focused on alienation in a different aspect of life—namely at work. For Marx, working for wages was inevitably alienating. Wageworkers under the command of employers have no control over their work or even whether there is work for them at all. Employers are—for the majority of wage earners—able to hire and fire them at will. It is impossible to have a meaningful life if such a large part of it is under the control of another whose goals are at odds with one's own. The employer's goal is to make as much money as possible; workers want to earn as much as they can. But they also want their work to be clean, pleasant, and interesting. Employers care nothing about this as long as the money keeps rolling in. Spending a significant portion of one's life pursuing goals that are not one's own, alienates. It makes it impossible to be one's own person—one who pursues goals of one's own choosing.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) elaborates on the theme of conformism in his discussion of the "last man." Such persons want above all to be comfortable; they eschew all effort and anything that is even faintly unpleasant. Hence it is important for them to get along. In order not to stir up controversy by disagreeing with others, they have no ideas of their own. They do not think for themselves. There is nothing they believe in fervently and nothing they are willing to stand up and fight for. They want life to be easy and pleasant. Avoiding all challenges is the only challenge that remains. Although Nietzsche did not use the term, his "last man" is clearly suffering from alienation.

Writing after World War I, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács (1885–1971) returned to Marx and elaborated on the claim that alienation is intimately connected with capitalism. Persons who sell their ability to work in the labor market treat themselves or at least important aspects of their persons as commodities—things meant to be exchanged for money. The skills and talents of persons thus become commodities that can be bought and sold—"alienated" in the old, legal sense. One's person and how it develops is no longer one's proper project, but is governed by the impersonal forces of the labor market. People are not able to study what most interests them because expertise in Egyptology, for example, does not promise to bring in a lot of money. Instead they go to business school and prepare themselves for the life of a junior executive and will, if they are lucky and sufficiently pliable (that is, a "team player"), end up as senior managers with a good income. They are forced to live where the work takes them. They dress the part of the executive. If they happen to have unpopular opinions, they will be wise to keep those to themselves. After a few years they may well forget they ever held them.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), destined by his Bavarian family for the Catholic priesthood, became a secular philosopher instead. He rediscovered alienation when reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that most people are not themselves. Their opinions ape everyone else's; they are addicted to all things new. There is nothing they stand for unless they manage to overcome the pressures toward alienation and win through to being "authentically" themselves.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) argued in his early work, Being and Nothingness, that alienation is not merely commonly chosen—a view he ascribes to Heidegger—but is inherent in the structure of human beings. People do not only think and act but are observers and critics of themselves. They can never be fully engaged in any activity or relationship because a part of them always stands aside to observe and judge. Being split against oneself is essential to being human.

In the years after World War II, numbed by a new, hitherto unknown level of prosperity paired with insistent demands for political conformity, writers in the United States produced a sizable literature concerned with alienation. Philosophically inclined writers, such as Erich Fromm (1955) and Paul Tillich (1952), brought the previously unknown ideas of Continental existentialism to the English-speaking world. Poetry, novels, and popular works in social science deplored conformism. Variants on Marxist themes attracted considerable interest and discussion in the 1970s and 1980s when a number of authors, including Bertell Ollman (1976), István Mészáros (1975), and Richard Schmitt (1983) published studies on alienation that were clearly anchored in the Marxist tradition.

Origins of Alienation

Sometimes technology is named as the source of contemporary alienation. Because technology is always a means to some end, the dominance of technology in society assures that all attention is given to means while ends remain unexamined. In such a situation, human lives lack goals and purposes because, absorbed in technological efforts, humans are unable or unwilling to reflect about the purposes of their activities (Ellul 1967). This thesis, however, portrays human beings as the impotent playthings of technology and overlooks that technology is not only used by humans but is also our creation.

The question about the origins of alienation have occasioned other controversies. For many years, philosophers have debated whether alienation is intrinsic to human nature or the effect of specific social conditions. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre place the origin of alienation in the structure of human existence. Marx and, in different ways, Nietzsche blame the existence of alienation on social and economic conditions. Existing social conditions produce alienation, but in a happier future alienation may well disappear. Neither side to this debate seems to have understood that the two alternatives—alienation as intrinsic to human nature or alienation as the product of social conditions—are not exclusive: Alienation is anchored in human nature, but it exists more acutely in some social settings than in others. Alienation is always possible. But in some societies it is well-nigh unavoidable, whereas in others it is only a remote possibility.

Alienation springs from human nature insofar as it is characteristic of human beings to reflect about their lives as a whole. They ask whether their lives have a purpose, or whether their identity is well integrated. Gifted with certain capacities for reflection and the need to be able to tell a coherent story about their lives, they are, therefore, susceptible to alienation. But these general human characteristics do not inevitably produce actual alienation. Alienation arises when societies, as does America's, make conflicting and irreconcilable demands, for instance, when it asks one to love one's neighbor as oneself at the same time as it exhorts people to be aggressive competitors who give no quarter in the great contest for wealth and power. American society asks its citizens to be free and autonomous beings after hours but, during the day, to work in hierarchical organizations, in which one must be subservient and obedient to employers and supervisors. Surrounding daily life is a chorus of voices telling people to buy this, to buy that, to look like this model, or to have their house look like some dream house. Americans are told how their children must appear and how they themselves must spend their days and enjoy their leisure. Throughout one's waking life, these voices are never silent. Consequently, it is no wonder that there is a pervasive sense among Americans that their lives are not their own (Schmitt 2003). A variety of aspects of American society make it extremely difficult for Americans to live lives that are coherent and to be persons who pursue goals of their own choosing. American society fosters alienation.

Questioning Alienation

However interesting, such historical discussions of alienation remain extremely general. A number of original thinkers have provided a range of insights into alienation, but professional philosophers have mostly been content to repeat and embroider these original insights instead of developing them in greater detail. As a consequence, many important questions about alienation remain unanswered.

The concept of alienation refers to important characteristics of the modern social world. But it also directly refers to each person separately. If alienation is pervasive in modern society, as many authors have alleged, people must reflect, each with respect to their own person, whether they are conformists and therefore alienated or whether they lead lives of their own. But such questions about one's own conformism or independence are not easily answered. Humans are social beings, learning from others and sharing ideas with them. As a social process, is that participation in thinking a sign of conformism and hence of alienation? For example, Western people share the belief that freedom is important and that democracy is preferable to tyranny. Does that make Westerners conformists and manifest their alienation? Surely, there is an important distinction between sharing the ideas of one's fellow citizens and being conformist. But that difference remains unclear, and the discussions of philosophers do not provide much help. The idea of conformism, as one finds it in the literature about alienation, is not sufficiently specific to be useful to the individual's self-examination with respect to conformism and alienation.

Conformism is only one of several constituent concepts of alienation that have not been sufficiently developed. The alienated are often described as not being themselves with lives lacking unity and identities fragmented. But postmodern thought has provided an important reminder: that selves are multiple and complex (Flax 1987). Most people have more capabilities than they are able to develop; in different contexts—as their parents' child or as the boss at work—their personalities differ. People change over a lifetime and are rather different persons at seventy than at seventeen. Are all these diversities within one person signs of alienation? Are there not important differences between the alienated personality, which is vague and poorly delineated, and the complexities of the multiple aspects that well-constituted persons display in the different contexts of their lives and over an entire lifetime?

Traditional discussions of alienation have concealed the complexity of alienation in another respect. Human beings are very different from one another; they lead different kinds of lives because they are born into different conditions, have different abilities and defects, think in different ways, and have different character structures. The general symptoms of alienation mentioned in the literature will manifest themselves differently in different lives. Aimlessness leads to complete idleness in some lives, whereas in others it takes the form of frantic busyness—all of it trivial. The self-hatred of the alienated appears in some persons as constant self-deprecation and jokes at one's own expense, and in others as pompous self-importance. One does not really understand alienation until one is able to tell many concrete stories about the alienation of different persons, differently situated and therefore manifesting alienation in very different, sometimes, flatly contradictory ways.

The possibility of alienation flows from the human need to reflect about one's life (to ask whether it is coherent and has a purpose) and about one's person (whether one is autonomous or conformist). It is tempting to evade these reflections because their results are often confusing or discouraging when one finds that one's life is aimless or one's person ill delineated. As Kierkegaard pointed out forcefully, one can evade the pain of reflection about one's life by discoursing abstractly about alienation while refusing to try to apply this abstract philosophical discourse to one's own person and one's own life. The refusal to take one's own life and person sufficiently seriously to reflect about their meaning and coherence is one form of being alienated, of being a fractured person leading a haphazard life. Philosophical discussions of alienation foster this form of alienation because the very generality and lack of precision of many philosophical discussions of alienation make it difficult to engage in serious self-reflection.

RICHARD SCHMITT

SEE ALSO Existentialism;Freedom;Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich;Kierkegaard, Søren;Marx, Karl.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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