History of the concept of alienation

General Philosophy
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Alienation is a term whose roots are English, circa the 15th Century, when it referred to separation from God or property transfer. Mainly from the former, it was associated with being blocked from something good and fundamental, with the possibility of being reunited with this something. The first philosophical use of the word is in Rousseau’s Second Discourse. He believed that within every human is a primitive self that is 1) driven to meet its needs, and 2) equipped with natural compassion. It’s in a social context that alienation from this proto-self develops. Association with others creates competition, and out that comes a quest for what Hegel called recognition. Hegel agreed with Rousseau that this quest for recognition creates a secondary sense of self, which is built partly out of the opinions and expectations of others. This secondary self is what most people would think of as themselves.

In Rousseau’s views are the bare bones of what alienation and authenticity will come to mean in the hands of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx. The basic idea is that the proto-self has freedom that the secondary self has lost. The question is whether this freedom can be regained in a society that values equality.

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Taking a broader view of the concept, it involves separation between a subject and an object. The subject is going to be some kind of agent, because we’re talking about a social or psychological disease. It doesn’t have to be an individual person, though. It could be a group of people, as in: city people are alienated from nature, and that example shows that the object doesn’t have to be an agent, but it could be.

The concept generally presupposes that the subject and object in question belong together, so a moral dimension is not an add-on to the concept. If you talk about alienation, the connotations are going to be that something bad, if not evil, has caused this separation. I was going to edit that last sentence, but I think I’ll let it stand.

Per the SEP:

These problematic separations can be indicated by a wide variety of words and phrases. No particular vocabulary seems to be required by the basic idea. The linguistic variety here might include words suggesting: breaks (‘splits’, ‘ruptures’, ‘bifurcations’, ‘divisions’, and so on); isolation (‘indifference’, ‘meaninglessness’, ‘powerlessness’, ‘disconnection’, and so on); and hostility (‘conflicts’, ‘antagonism’, ‘domination’, and so on). All these, and more, might be ways of indicating problematic separations of the relevant kind. Of course, particular authors may use language more systematically, but there seems little reason to insist that a specific vocabulary is required by the basic idea.

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Rousseau did separate the Natural man from the Social person. There are important differences between his conception and the thinkers you mention.

The only use I can find of alienate in the essay points to a limit to the separation of nature and social selves:

Pufendorf says that just as one transfers one’s possessions to someone else by conventions and contracts, so one can also divest oneself of one’s liberty in favour of someone else. That, it seems to me, is extremely poor reasoning. For, first of all, the goods that I alienate become something totally foreign to me, and their abuse leaves me indifferent. But it is important to me that someone does not abuse my liberty, and I cannot, without making myself guilty of the evil that I will be forced to do, risk becoming the instrument of crime. Furthermore, given that the right of property is only a convention and a human institution, any man can dispose of what he possesses as he wishes. But it is not the same with the essential gifts of nature, such as life and freedom. Each man is permitted to enjoy these, and it is at least doubtful that he has the right to strip himself of them. In giving up one, he degrades his being; in giving up the other, he destroys his being as much as he can. And since no temporal good can compensate for one or the other, it would offend nature and reason at the same time to renounce them no matter what the price. But even if a man could alienate his freedom just as he can his possessions, it would be very different for children, who enjoy their father’s goods only by transmission of his right; whereas, liberty is a gift which they hold from nature in their capacity as human beings, and so their parents had no right to deprive them of it. Hence, just as it was necessary to treat nature with violence in order to establish slavery, so it was necessary to change nature to perpetuate this right. And the jurists who have solemnly pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave have decided in different terms that a human being would not be born a human being.
Origins of Inequality, Rousseau

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Frederick Neuhouser (2014) has argued that the evolutionary story is merely a philosophical device designed to separate the natural and the artificial elements of our psychology (for a contrasting view see Kelly 2006). –SEP

Sure. Hegel acknowledged his debt to Rousseau. Nietzsche, Marx, and Kierkegaard were familiar with his works and were engaged with his ideas in positive and negative ways.

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So to try out the idea, think of some case of separation in your life. It’s alienation if it’s contrary to a proper unity. For instance, say that being employed causes me to feel alienated from my natural self, because for the time I’m working, I’m not doing things I would do given the freedom.

The subject and object in this case are both me, so to speak. The subject is me as I am in actuality. The object, from which I’m alienated, is an unemployed me, who doesn’t have to work, and so does whatever he wants to do.

What I’m suggesting by calling it alienation is that a proper unity has been broken. Per some vision of how things should be, my life has become fractured and problematic.

The words I will reach for to explain the issue will be along the lines of: powerlessness, meaninglessness, etc. I’m thinking now of an essay by Karel Capek, about how industrialization dehumanizes people. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on line, and I don’t remember the name. If you know what I’m talking about, shout out.

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Yes, we don’t have the type of cultures that forge subjective unities; instead, we have those in which the subject is painfully split into a socially compliant self and a fantasised uncompliant self that is fed non-compliance by proxy to keep it artificially satisfied.

Anyhow, alienation (in a general sense) is a feature not a bug when groups become so large that personal relations need to be abstracted into roles policed by implicit and explicit threats to security.

The job example is a good one because we generally carry out work that isn’t personal to us but that we feel both obligated to justify and justified as an obligation. That is, we are caught somewhere between needing to give ourselves reasons to work (in order to avoid being alienated from our working selves), and considering (alienating) work a necessity, but the former sentiment rests on a contingency the latter denies. Institutions like the workplace are essentially designed to keep us in this kind of self-contradiction.

So, alienation is one form of unfreedom structurally enforced in contemprary societies. But a unified subjectivity under the unquestioned totemic power of a traditional, isolated group is another. Almost everything becomes necessary because so little is possible outside the role. The subject very much is the role.

The question is whether we can fully assume a freedom that embraces alienation to the point where it consumes it, where we stop feeling obligated to justify an obligation the necessity of which rests on the very split it creates in us.

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In the second case are you talking about a golden ball and chain, where a person is locked into a role because their lifestyle couldn’t be supported elsewhere? For instance a corporate employee longs to be a potter, but doesn’t see that as possible because of the pay cut?

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I don’t know if this really qualifies as alienation as you’ve described it. You are describing something that you desire, or wish for, and claiming that you are alienated from it, even though it’s something you probably never had in the first place.

Notice how you say it causes you to “feel alienated”. That type of alienation is not real but is an illusion. You desire something, and to justify your claim to it you assert that you have become alienated from it, as if at some prior time you had it, and therefore you might have a right to it now.

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In the quote, I’m referring to “pre-civilized” social groups where roles were quite rigidly defined. So, for example, if you were the witch doctor of a particular tribe, that was who you were and it wasn’t so much a job as an identity, i.e. it wasn’t something that you could cleanly separate from another version of you that was doing what was involved in being in that role for some other end.

Anyhow, the corporate employee who longs to be a potter but doesn’t see that as possible because of a pay cut is an excellent example of the kind of divisive confusion contemporary ideology renders structural. Why did they lock themselves into a lifestyle that didn’t reflect their core identity, who they wanted to be and instead priotitized what they wanted to have and / or what they wanted to be seen to be?

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Apparently no one is going to mention Marx’s analysis of alienation.

In his analysis, Marx identified four key aspects of alienated labour. First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist and confronts the worker as a hostile power. Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil. Third, this leads to alienation from their own human nature, or species-being (Gattungswesen), as free, conscious activity is reduced to a mere means of survival. Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, as social relationships become reified and mediated by market exchange, fostering competition and indifference rather than community.

Since you mentioned pottery, let’s apply Marx to a pottery factory worker. Take your pick of pottery – flower pots, crockery, utility table ware, china, bone china, or toilet bowls.

Jack works for Consolidated Toilet Bowls (CTB) of Sheboygan, WI, the He is alienated from the product of his labor in this way: [First] As the toilet bowl he worked on rolls down the line, it ceases to have any connection to him. It belongs to CTB. None of the workers’ sweat that went into making this high-end toilet will be represented in the product in any way. Jack will get his wage–a small fraction of the high retail price for this high-end bathroom fixture.

Jobs are scarce in Sheboygan. You can make bratwurst or you can make toilets. That’s it. [Second] As a result, CTB can get away with the minimum of safety measures, and doesn’t do anything to make the factory more tolerable, let alone pleasant. In fact, the factory is kind of a shit hole. There is no accommodation of human needs or desires for light, fresh air, a clean workspace, rest breaks, health care benefits, and so on. Working at CTB is tedious, boring, coercive, surveilled, and hard. Workers are haggard at the end of their shift.

[Third] The conditions of the CTB workplace suck out any joy in human existence the workers feel. They are treated like dumb animals (and not as well as expensive machines). They have little spirit left for themselves or their families. Work is too deadening. They work to survive, not “to live” and they certainly don’t look forward to the next day.

[Fourth] There is no community for these workers. There is little or no opportunity (or time and resources) for personal renewal, friendship among equals, love. The losers don’t get much. Among the people living in Sheboygan, are those who won the game: business owners, managers, professionals. They are a restless lot – constantly striving for a better car, better house, better address (even in Sheboygan), private schooling for their children. Those with the most resources are not care much about the riff-raff who make toilets and sausages, even if their low-class labor makes the profit they live off.

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“Alienation” evolved from the Latin root (alienare—to make another’s). In the 1500s, the term was applied to mental derangement. Marx’s theory of alienation, developed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, describes how capitalist wage labor estranges workers from their work, products, humanity, and each other.

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Thanks! A quick question: for Rousseau, Hegel, etc, the issue of alienation goes back to pressure on the psyche imposed by social life. For Rousseau, it’s the very presence of others that sets the proto-self on the path to becoming competitive, and this competition results in the imperative for recognition (to smush Rousseau and Hegel together).

Did Marx place the roots of alienation that deep? Or did he more or less lift the concept for use as a critique of capitalism?

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And Marx would say that the critical element in social life is the way the economy is organized. That was kind of his thing.

Question: Was there ever a time when no one was alienated–some Eden, some hunter-gatherer paradise? I tend to doubt it, but surely a hunter-gather experienced “alienation” differently than a coal-miner in the 19th century (or an office worker at this very moment).

Maybe I suffer from oppositional defiant disorder, but for me the key to alienation is hierarchy, especially the manifestation of the BOSS SYSTEM, something that has been operating – one way or another – for a long time in non-capitalist societies as well as capitalist.

An assembly line factory is restrictive by necessity – a worker must add the part before the car or computer passes down the line. Worker autonomy and authenticity is sacrificed to the inflexible machine. But a similar inflexibility often appears in service, white collar, and professional work situations where there are no assembly lines. An authority enforces the terms of work.

I don’t want to exaggerate. In my experience, a lot of work places are pretty slack. Is that good or bad? Depends. I don’t want to end up in a hospital with sloppy slackers wandering the halls. In many educational or social service settings, rigid management is a definite negative.

Two major elements of alientation–coercion and authority–are required when people are more or less forced to participate. High school is a prime example. So are prisons, armed forces, plantations, and so on. Personal autonomy and authenticity are suppressed in the interest of compliance. Of course, we want our soldiers to comply with orders. Otherwise what good are they? On the other hand, the compliance of students is convenient, but limits their development of autonomy and authenticity. Maybe that’s intentional.

Rigid control over workers is necessary if a boss (capitalist or not) is going to extract maximum output from more or less unwilling workers. It is safe to say that people would rather not work, but existence depends on the production of necessities, even if the work is done strictly for one’s self and family. Accumulating wealth through other people’s labor requires a lot more rigid control.

In sum, capitalism is not required for widespread alienation. Hierarchy long predates capitalism, and I suspect there were alienated workers building the pyramids in Egypt and Central America or the Great Wall in China.

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My theory is that alienation is an aspect of civilization. I’m thinking of the 5000 year old story of Enkidu, who identified with wild animals until he underwent an initiation that tamed him, and put him in a liminal state. It was when he ate city food, bread, that he became a city person and could no longer identify with other animals.

This disconnection from a previous primal state is the same story told in Genesis, which adds the idea of work to the myth. The Garden of Eden story is explaining why we have to work in order to live.

It’s almost as if growing out of infancy into a being capable of work is a re-enactment of the advent of civilization, when a person comes to know what it means to be tamed, to be ejected from paradise, into a harsh world that will let you starve if you don’t work.

Christianity recognizes the suffering of the workers and offers hope for a kind of return:

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Romans 8:18.