Frederick Neuhouser
RAHEL JAEGGI’S ALIENATION IS ONE of the most exciting books to have appeared on the German philosophical scene in the last decade.1 It has two significant strengths that are rarely joined in a single book: it presents a rigorous and enlightening analysis of an important but now neglected philosophical concept (alienation), and it illuminates, far better than any purely historical study could do, fundamental ideas of one of the most obscure figures in the history of philosophy (G. W. F. Hegel). That the latter is one of the book’s chief achievements may not be apparent to many of its readers, for Hegel is rarely mentioned by name, and the book does not present itself as a study of his thought. Nevertheless, the philosophical resources that Jaeggi brings to bear on the problem of alienation are thoroughly Hegelian in inspiration. Her book not only rejuvenates a lagging discourse on the topic of alienation; it also shows how an account of subjectivity elaborated two centuries ago can be employed in the service of new philosophical insights.
The main aim of Alienation is to resurrect the concept of alienation for contemporary philosophy. Renewed attention to this concept is called for, so the book’s central premise, because without it philosophers are deprived of an important resource for social critique. For the concept of justice—the main focus of liberal social philosophers—is insufficient to comprehend an array of social pathologies that are widespread in contemporary life and best understood as various forms of estrangement from self: meaninglessness, indifference to the world, the inability to identify with one’s own desires and actions, bifurcation of the self. The reason a resurrection is necessary is that traditional conceptions of alienation generally depend on substantive, essentialist pictures of human nature—accounts of “the human essence”—that are no longer compelling. Marx’s, for example, relies on a version of the Aristotelian notion of ergon—an account of the distinctive species powers of human beings—while Rousseau’s relies on the assumption of certain “truly human” ends—freedom, happiness, and the full development of human faculties—that nature supposedly sets for the human species. Jaeggi’s ambitious book aims not only at reconstructing the concept of alienation such that it is freed from its essentialist underpinnings but also at showing how such a reconstructed concept brings to light and clarifies ethically significant phenomena that liberal social theories are powerless to detect. This dual task corresponds to the two quite different levels at which the book operates so marvelously: the abstract analysis of an obscure but indispensable philosophical concept and the phenomenologically rich consideration of various forms of what, under Jaeggi’s adept analysis, reveals itself as alienation.
In part 1 Jaeggi introduces readers to the object of her study by sketching a brief history of theories of alienation that includes concise but illuminating discussions of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. The philosophical upshot of this survey is an initial formulation of what Jaeggi takes to constitute the core of alienation: “a relation of relationlessness,” a condition marked not by the absence of a relation to self and world but by a deficient relation—a lack of proper connection—to the same. More precisely, alienation is said to consist in a distorted relation to oneself and to one’s world that can be characterized as the failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world, to make oneself or the world one’s own. Alienation, then, stems from a disruption in one or more of the various processes of appropriation (of oneself or one’s world), the successful carrying out of which is the mark of a healthy, integrated, self-affirming subjectivity. The possible consequences of such failure, depending on the particular way in which the process of appropriation is interrupted, include a sense of meaninglessness or estrangement, loss of power in relation to self and world, and subjugation to the products of one’s own activity. The ways in which these various effects of failing to make oneself or one’s world “one’s own” constitute constraints on one’s will point to the ethical significance of alienation, which resides in the connection between alienation and freedom: “only a world that I can make ‘my own’—only a world that I can identify with (by appropriating it)—is a world in which I can act in a self-determined manner. Understood in this way, the concept of alienation attempts to identify the conditions under which one can understand oneself . . . as the master of one’s own actions.”
It is the centrality of appropriation to Jaeggi’s conception of alienation that accounts for its Hegelian character. For both philosophers the mark of human subjectivity is, abstractly formulated, an activity or process in which consciousness confronts what initially presents itself as given or “other” and then endeavors in some way to make it its own—to strip its object of its alien, merely given character. Moreover, it is in such interactions with its “other” that the subject constitutes both itself and its world as something determinate. Successful appropriation of this sort not only gives specific content to subject and object (and, so, makes them “real”); it is also the subject’s characteristic aim, or aspiration, and hence the source of a fundamental satisfaction, the absence of which manifests itself as alienation. For both Hegel and Jaeggi, self and world emerge out of a single activity in which the subject integrates what is first alien or “other” to it and, in doing so, transforms itself and the world.
Despite this fundamental agreement regarding the nature of subjectivity—or, as it is called here, the structure of human existence—Jaeggi’s view diverges from Hegel’s in two important respects. First, Jaeggi attempts to avoid all suggestion that the subject’s activity of appropriation is in essence reappropriation. For her, what initially confronts the subject as a foreign reality genuinely is foreign in that it is not the product of a prior subjective act that has remained unrecognized as such: “the preconditions to which one—if not alienated—should be able to relate . . . are . . . neither invented nor made.” This implies that overcoming alienation consists not in recovering an original subject-object relation that has become obscured or forgotten—even less in recovering some primordial differenceless harmony between the two—but in taking possession of the world in a way that first establishes a mutually constituting relation between self and world. Jaeggi’s second major divergence from Hegel can be understood as a consequence of the first: if what the unalienated subject is ultimately to take itself to be is not already determined by the results of a prior but still unself-conscious act of self-expression, then a theory of unalienated selfhood will focus not on the content or results of the subject’s appropriative activity but on its process or form: the presence or absence of alienation depends not on what the self takes itself (or strives) to be but on how it determines what it is.
This largely formal analysis becomes significantly more concrete in part 2 of the book, where Jaeggi discusses in admirable detail four examples of alienation, each of which illustrates a different way in which the self’s appropriation of itself and world is disturbed or incomplete: an academic who experiences a loss of control over the course and dynamic of his life; a young professional who fails to identify with the social roles he occupies; a feminist who, because her desires and impulses conflict with her self-conception, cannot recognize them as her own; and, finally, the protagonist of Pascal Mercier’s Perlmann’s Silence, who suffers an enduring and paralyzing indifference to himself and his world. Jaeggi’s phenomenological approach in part 2 is noteworthy for several reasons. Most obviously, in its imaginative and nuanced depictions of specific cases of alienation it ascribes a much greater philosophical importance to concrete examples and narratives than philosophers typically do. Instead of constructing highly artificial cases that generate counterexamples or help to fine-tune an abstract moral principle, Jaeggi relies on compelling examples derived from (what could be) real experience that serve to bring into relief the complex and often diffuse phenomenon of alienation and to refine our conceptual grasp of it.
Yet Jaeggi’s examples serve a deeper purpose as well: they are the true starting point of her philosophical project in the strictest sense of the term. In contrast to the largely historical work of part 1, Jaeggi’s phenomenological discussion plays a crucial role in establishing the validity of the normative vision of subjectivity that her historical predecessors implicitly or explicitly presuppose. It is in part 2, in other words, that the philosophical structure of the book’s project comes into view: it begins with a consideration of examples of real-life phenomena whose pathological nature can be grasped only with the help of conceptual resources provided by the idea of self-alienation. Then, once the specific pathologies of the various examples have been identified and diagnosed, Jaeggi proceeds from the negative phenomenon (alienation) to reconstruct the positive vision of successfully realized subjectivity that implicitly underlies the diagnosis of those examples as instances of subjectivity gone awry. In taking this step, Jaeggi arrives at her own answer to a question that, at least since Fichte, has been a dominating concern of German philosophy: how are we to conceive of the essential nature (or “structure”) of human subjectivity? The method Jaeggi employs to answer this question can be summed up in the question, What must subjectivity be like—what structure must it manifest—if alienation in its various guises is a possible and not infrequent feature of human existence? In attempting to uncover what the possibility of alienation reveals about the nature of subjectivity in general, Jaeggi adopts the same method—the via negativis—that Kierkegaard famously employs in his treatment of despair.
In part 3 Jaeggi returns to more abstract philosophical terrain, where she employs the conceptual resources won through her phenomenological analyses to refine her account of alienation, to fill out and defend her “appropriation model” of the self, and to situate alienation in relation to more familiar objects of ethical reflection such as freedom, self-realization and agency. Here, too, Jaeggi shows herself to be an imaginative philosopher thoroughly at home in both the Continental and Anglo-American traditions. Indeed, one of the book’s features that makes it especially interesting to readers outside Germany is that throughout its pages it draws on and responds to the work of many contemporary English-speaking philosophers whose work is relevant to her concerns, among them Frankfurt, Nagel, MacIntyre, Williams, and Taylor.
I would be remiss in introducing Jaeggi’s book to an English-reading public if I failed to mention the one noteworthy respect in which it fails to deliver what it originally promised. The book’s original subtitle (omitted in this translation)—“A Contemporary Problem of Social Philosophy”—led its readers to expect a work that investigates the social causes of alienation rather than what one in fact finds: a philosophical account of, broadly speaking, an ethical phenomenon, together with an underlying “theory of the self” (or theory of human subjectivity). At the very beginning of the book, Jaeggi suggests a connection between her project and critical social theory: once the phenomenon of alienation has been adequately clarified, a path is opened up for criticizing institutions insofar as they fail to furnish the social conditions individuals need to live a life free of alienation. Yet this thought remains mostly undeveloped here. It would be foolish, however, to criticize Jaeggi for not having said more about this social-theoretical project; her failure to do so stems no doubt from the realization that completing this task would require (at least) a separate book-length treatment of its own (and her newest book, Kritik von Lebensformen, can be read as making important progress toward this goal). The project she has carried out in this first book is important and masterfully executed, and it is sure to reinvigorate philosophical discussion of alienation in all of its forms. Alienation is an astonishingly good representative of the work of an impressive new generation of German philosophers who, with roots in both of its major traditions, seem well positioned to reanimate Western philosophy, as well as to mend the internal cleavage that has for too long been its fate.
For the most part I have attempted to avoid including references to original German terms and cumbersome explanations of technical expressions. Nevertheless, three important expressions present translation problems that demand special mention. The most important of these is “having oneself at one’s command” (über sich verfügen können), an expression Jaeggi borrows from Ernst Tugendhat to capture the central feature of unalienated selfhood. To be unalienated, this terminology suggests, is to have oneself at one’s command, to have a handle on oneself, or, more literally, to have oneself at one’s disposal. Talk of having oneself at one’s “command” or “disposal” should not suggest, however, that the unalienated subject has an instrumental, objectifying, or dominating relation to itself that calls to mind self-control or self-mastery—as in “Get control of yourself (or of your feelings)!” or “Good character requires mastering one’s impulses”—or that an unalienated subject has itself at its disposal in the same way that one might have a sum of money or a set of resources at one’s disposal. Perhaps these misleading connotations—some of which are also possible misreadings of the original verfügen—can be avoided by bearing in mind that two near synonyms of über sich verfügen können are “being freely accessible to oneself,” used in chapter 7, and mit sich umgehen können, translated here by the admittedly cumbersome locution “being familiar with and able to deal with oneself.” The latter term, used less frequently in the text than “having oneself at one’s command,” makes use of the common expression mit etwas umgehen können, which means “knowing how to handle (or to deal with, or to navigate) something” or “knowing one’s way around something.” (Ich kann mit meinen Gefühlen umgehen means something like “I’m familiar with my emotional responses, and I’m adept at dealing with them in appropriate ways”). This implies that unalienated selfhood involves “knowing one’s way around oneself”—being familiar with oneself and knowing how to deal appropriately with who and what one is. Consistent with this, a principal characteristic of an alienated self is what I have translated here as “intractability” (Unverfügbarkeit).
Another term central to Jaeggi’s account of unalienated selfhood is “obstinacy” (Eigensinn). This expression initially strikes readers as strange because its most common meaning in both English and German is “stubbornness,” which is not normally regarded as a positive attribute, let alone a central feature of successfully achieved subjectivity. But Eigensinn suggests a further meaning that “obstinacy” does not. Eigen (“one’s own”), joined with Sinn (“meaning”), suggests that the obstinate person gives her own meaning to things, that she interprets them independently, rather than merely taking over customary, socially accepted interpretations of the world. Viewed in this way, obstinacy is a positive characteristic, a requirement of unalienated selfhood, although, as the term also suggests, obstinacy can slip into mere stubbornness when an individual simply rejects, for no good reason, or is completely impervious to, the meanings other individuals give to the elements of their shared world. This dual potential of obstinacy reflects the fact that unalienated selfhood, as Jaeggi construes it, requires finding the appropriate balance between individual self-assertiveness and immersion in society rather than embracing one of these poles at the expense of the other. (This use of Eigensinn originates with Hegel, who counts the capacity for it—a kind of freedom—among the subjective attributes the bondsman acquires from laboring for his lord (while noting as well that, in the absence of “absolute fear” of death, obstinacy can amount to a “servile” form of mere stubbornness).2 In The Philosophy of Right Hegel approvingly characterizes subjective freedom—the claim to be bound by no principles other than those one has rational insight into—as a form of obstinacy that does honor to the human subject.3
I have translated Verselbständigung using locutions that include the expression “independent existence,” as when I refer to something’s taking on, or having taken on, an independent existence (of its own). Verselbständigung is closely related to the idea of reification (Verdinglichung), which has played a major role in Continental philosophy since Fichteand Hegel. Given the close connection between alienation and reification, it is no surprise that Verselbständigung plays a prominent role in Jaeggi’s book. It refers to processes that are distinctive of subjectivity—knowledge, consciousness, or action—whose effects in the world come to appear as though they were not the products of subjects’ activities but instead objective, “given” conditions. An aspect of my life that is a result of some decision I am responsible for but that appears to me merely as “my lot in life” is a paradigmatic example of a subjective activity that has taken on, for the subject who is in fact responsible for it, an independent, “thinglike” existence. Many of the phenomena of alienation examined in this book exhibit some version of this property.
Both Rahel Jaeggi and I would like to express our deep gratitude to Susan Morrow, who provided invaluable assistance in preparing the footnotes, quotations, and bibliography for English readers, as well as to Mathias Böhm and Eva von Redecker, who helped track down English versions of many of the texts cited here. The translation could not have been completed without their diligence and helpful advice.
Am Kleinen Müggelsee