4

HAVING ONESELF AT ONE’S COMMAND: RECONSTRUCTING THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION

MY CLAIM IS THAT ALIENATION critique today cannot, but also need not be grounded in strongly essentialist or metaphysical presuppositions;¹ moreover, it cannot but also need not rely on perfectionist or paternalistic arguments. The rich social and ethical dimension of alienation critique can be made accessible without the strongly objectivistic interpretive scheme that is frequently associated with it. And it is possible to avail ourselves of the critical import of the concept of alienation without relying on the certainty of a final harmony or reconciliation, on the idea of a fully self-transparent individual, or on the illusion of having oneself and the world completely at one’s disposal or command.² The perspective from which the problem of alienation is approached ceases to be interesting precisely when it presupposes a preestablished harmony among relations or a seamless “oneness” of individuals with themselves or with the world; it becomes productive when it calls these relations into question without supposing that they can be completely free of conflict. Focusing on the sources of disturbances in living one’s life, it points out the conditions of successfully relating to self and world, which can be normatively described in relatively sparing but still contentful terms.

It could then turn out that precisely the point of the concept of alienation is to mediate between unsatisfying alternatives—between ethical subjectivism and objectivism, between refraining from and espousing substantial moral conceptions of the good life, between abandoning the idea of autonomy and holding onto illusory conceptions of subjectivity. The concept’s potential would then lie not in the possibility of providing a robustly substantial ethical theory but in being able to criticize the content of forms of life precisely without needing to appeal to ultimate, metaphysically grounded (substantial) ethical values. Its potential would also lie in the possibility of evaluating ways of relating to self and world without needing to presuppose a subject that is unified and in possession of all its powers from the outset. The unalienated life would then no longer be one that is reconciled; it would no longer be the happy life, perhaps not even the good life. Instead, not being alienated would refer to a certain way of carrying out one’s own life and a certain way of appropriating oneself—that is, a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the relationships in which one lives (relationships that condition or shape who one is).

HOW, NOT WHAT—TUGENDHAT’S CONCEPTION OF THE FUNCTIONAL CAPACITY OF WILLING

I would now like to take up Ernst Tugendhat’s reflections on the problem of grounding a modern ethical theory, which will prove to be useful for reconstructing a theory of alienation that overcomes the charges of essentialism and perfectionism.

In “The Ethics of Antiquity and Modernity” Tugendhat raises the problem of whether it is possible to reformulate antiquity’s inquiry into the nature of happiness (or the good life) under modern conditions. A modern inquiry into the good life must, on the one hand, do justice to the view that its answer cannot “deny the autonomy and thus the interpretive sovereignty of those concerned,” and its method must be such that it avoids committing itself to a “specific and unjustifiable picture of the human being.”3 On the other hand, if modern ethical theory is to recover the interpretive content of ancient ethics, it must be able to identify an objective criterion that allows us to say “whether it is going well or badly for a person independently of their actual perceptions of their present or future well-being.” What is needed, then, is a criterion that, on the one hand, is not identical with the desires or preferences a person actually has and that, on the other hand, does not call into question the interpretive sovereignty of the person and with it the modern ideal of self-determination. Tugendhat’s proposed solution is to develop a formal conception of psychological health. Starting from (what appears to him to be) an unproblematic definition of physical health in terms of “functional capacity,” he develops for psychological health a conception of the “functional capacity of willing” and its possible impairment.⁴ Tugendhat elaborates his criterion with the example of compulsive behavior: a volition that is compulsive in some sense would count as impaired and hence as being disturbed in its functional capacity. This provides a standpoint that is immanent to the subject’s will and, at the same time, not subjective in the sense in which contingent and unevaluated preferences are: “In this way we would attain precisely what is sought, a point of view that is independent of the respective subjective goals of our willing but that nevertheless derives its authority from the perspective of willing itself. As willing (freely choosing) beings, we always will to be unlimited in our free choosing.”5 With the standard of the “impairment of the functional capacity of willing,” which asks whether we have ourselves at our command in what we will, Tugendhat has achieved a middle ground between subjectivistic and objectivistic positions of the sort he was looking for. One could call such a position a “qualified subjectivism.”⁶

This provides us with a starting point for overcoming the opposition between modern antipaternalism and the paternalism of a more substantial ethical theory: whether something is good for me always depends (antipaternalistically) on my personal view, on whether I in fact want it. This view, however, must be qualified in the sense that the volition it expresses must be a “true volition” and therefore not subject to internal constraints. I must be free in what I will; I must have my will at my command if it is to count as my own. This criterion is, in the first place, formal: it concerns the How, not the What, of willing. That is, I need not will anything in particular; rather, I must be able to will what I will in a free or self-determined manner. It is not necessary, then, to identify a “true object of willing,” but only a certain way of relating, in one’s willing, to oneself and to what one wills. As Tugendhat puts it, “the question of what we truly will concerns not the goals of our willing but the How of willing.”⁷ Second, this criterion is immanent: the criterion is the functional capacity of willing itself, a claim posited by the act of willing itself. When I say, “I want to be able to do what I will,” I must also mean, “I want to be able—freely—to will.”

My account of the problem of alienation can be linked up with this conception of willing in the following way: instances of alienation can be understood as obstructions of volition and thereby—formulated more generally—as obstructions in the relations individuals have to themselves and the world. With the help of Tugendhat’s conception of having oneself at one’s command, instances of alienation can be reconstructed in terms of disturbed ways of establishing relations to oneself and to the world. In this way the problem of alienation is tied to that of freedom.

FREEDOM AND ALIENATION

My thesis is that alienation can be understood as a particular form of the loss of freedom, as an obstruction of what could be called, following Isaiah Berlin, positive freedom.8 Formulating the notoriously controversial distinction as briefly as possible, freedom in this sense refers not (merely negatively) to the absence of external coercion but (positively) to the capacity to realize valuable ends. In the sense described (and criticized) by Berlin, positive freedom has a variety of implications:

The “positive” sense of the word “liberty” derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer—deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. . . . I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by references to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that it is not.⁹

As unsystematic and indeterminate the various dimensions of positive freedom might be, the important point is that conceptions of positive freedom always depict the free life as not alienated and vice versa.¹⁰ As Robert Pippin puts it, only those acts and intentions that I can “link . . . with me such that they count as due to me or count as mine” are “instances of freedom.”¹¹ Being a human being rather than a thing means, according to this view, ascribing to oneself what one wills and does, taking responsibility for it and (therefore) being able to identify with it.

Understood in this way, the concept of alienation concerns itself with the complex conditions of “linking” one’s actions and desires (or, more generally, one’s life) with oneself, “counting them as due to” oneself, or making them “one’s own.” It also concerns itself with the various obstructions and disturbances that can affect these relations. One is not always already “with oneself;” one’s actions and desires are not always one’s own from the start, and one’s relation to the surrounding natural and social world is equally constitutive and threatened. Positively formulated, clarifying the various dimensions of alienation enables us to specify the conditions for being able to understand one’s life as one’s own (and therefore to lead one’s life freely). An unalienated life, according to this view, is not one in which specific substantial values are realized but one that is lived in a specific—unalienated—manner. The belief that everyone should be able to live her own life no longer stands in opposition, then, to the project of alienation critique. Rather, the absence of alienating impediments and the possibility of appropriating self and world without such impediments is a condition of freedom and self-determination.

ALIENATION AS AN IMPEDED RELATION OF APPROPRIATION

Thus the problem domain of freedom and alienation is centrally concerned with ways of appropriating one’s own life. The concept of appropriation refers to a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the world, a way of dealing with oneself and the world and of having oneself and the world at one’s command. Alienation, as a disturbance in this relation, concerns the way these acts of relating to self and world are carried out, that is, whether processes of appropriation fail or are impeded. As in Tugendhat’s attempt to formalize the good, the analysis of the phenomena of alienation focuses on How the relating to self and world is carried out rather than on What an act of willing strives to achieve. Alienation can then be understood as an impairment of acts of appropriation (or as a deficient praxis of appropriation). If the overcoming of alienation appears as a successful relation of appropriation, we can inquire into the conditions of its success without needing to conceive of that relation as teleologically guided or fully completable. Nor must this process be understood essentialistically, as the recovery of an essence that is already defined and set prior to the process itself.

Focusing on disturbances of acts of appropriation has important implications that can be seen by returning to our initial examples. Instead of defining the potentials the “whole human being” is supposed to develop in terms of their content, the analysis of alienation looks at disturbances in the development of interests and capacities; instead of getting caught up in the confusing paradoxes bound up with distinguishing genuine from inauthentic, alienated desires, the theory of alienation analyzes the circumstances of will formation and the various ways in which desires are integrated. And instead of reconstructing social relations on the basis of a substantial model of ethical and social life (Sittlichkeit), what matters is the conditions under which social practices are carried out and structured.

The following points are important for an approach that focuses on relations of appropriation:

■ The concept of appropriation refers to a comprehensive conception of practical relations to self and world. It includes a broadly understood capacity of knowing and dealing with oneself: having access to or command over oneself and the world. This can be explicated as the capacity to make the life one leads, or what one wills and does, one’s own; as the capacity to identify with oneself and with what one does; in other words, as the ability to realize oneself in what one does.

■ The theory of alienation conceives of relations to self and world as equally primordial. Therefore an impairment of the relation to self, not having oneself at one’s command, must also always be understood as an impairment of one’s relation to the world. Whether what is at issue is appropriating one’s own personal history. the “task of becoming oneself through one’s own deed” (as in Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness), or the appropriation of one’s own activities in Marx’s sense—what is of concern is always an appropriation of the world and, at the same time, an appropriation of the (variously defined) given preconditions of one’s own actions. In this sense someone is alienated when she cannot relate to herself and (thereby) to her own preconditions, that is, when she cannot appropriate them as her own.

■ While the model of appropriation sketched here is closely related to the thick conception of appropriation found in Marx, my reconstruction does not conceive of appropriation as the reappropriation of a given essence. Instead, appropriation is productive; what is appropriated is, at the same time, a result of the process of appropriation. Therefore the preconditions to which one—if not alienated—should be able to relate and the relation that one—if not alienated—has to realize are primarily neither invented nor made.

APPROPRIATION

What does it mean to appropriate something?12 If the concept of appropriation refers to a specific relation between self and world, between individuals and objects (whether spiritual or material), what precisely does this relation look like, what are its particular character and its specific structure? Various aspects come together here, and together they account for the concept’s appeal and potential. As opposed to the mere learning of certain contents, talk of appropriation emphasizes that something is not merely passively taken up but actively worked through and independently assimilated. In contrast to merely theoretical insight into some issue, appropriation—comparable to the psychoanalytic process of “working through”—means that one can “deal with” what one knows, that it stands at one’s disposal as knowledge and that one really and practically has command over it. And appropriating a role means more than being able to fill it: one is, we could say, identified with it. Something that we appropriate does not remain external to ourselves. In making something our own, it becomes a part of ourselves in a certain respect. This suggests a kind of introjection and a mixing of oneself with the objects of appropriation. It also evokes the idea of productively and formatively interacting with what one makes one’s own. Appropriation does not leave what is appropriated unchanged. This is why the appropriation of public spaces, for example, means more than that one uses them. We make them our own by making a mark on them through what we do in and with them, by transforming them through appropriative use such that they first acquire a specific form through this use (though not necessarily in a material sense). Although it has one of its roots in an account of property relations, the concept of appropriation, in contrast to mere possession, emphasizes the particular quality of a process that first constitutes a real act of taking possession of something. Accordingly, appropriation is a particular mode of seizing possession.13 Someone who appropriates something puts her individual mark on it, inserts her own ends and qualities into it. This means that sometimes we must still make something that we already possess our own.

Relations of appropriation, then, are characterized by several features: appropriation is a form of praxis, a way of relating practically to the world. It refers to a relation of penetration, assimilation, and internalization in which what is appropriated is at the same time altered, structured, and formed. The crucial point of this model (also of great importance for Marx) is a consequence of this structure of penetration and assimilation: appropriation always means a transformation of both poles of the relation. In a process of appropriation both what is appropriated and the appropriator are transformed. In the process of incorporation (appropriative assimilation) the incorporator does not remain the same. This point can be given a constructivist turn: what is appropriated is itself constituted in the process of appropriation; by the same token, what is appropriated does not exist in the absence of appropriation. (In some cases this is obvious: there is no public space as such without its being publicly appropriated; but even social roles exist only insofar as they are constantly reappropriated.)

One now sees the potential and the peculiar character of the concept: the possibility of appropriating something refers, on the one hand, to a subject’s power to act and form and to impose its own meaningful mark on the world it appropriates. (A successful appropriation of social roles or activities and, by extension, the appropriating relation one can take to one’s life in general constitute something like self-determination and being the author of one’s own life.) On the other hand, a process of appropriation is always bound to a given, previously existing content and thereby also to an independent meaning and dynamic over which one does not have complete command. (Thus a role, for example, in order to be appropriated, must always be “found” as an already existing model and complex of rules; it can be reinterpreted but not invented from scratch. Skills that we appropriate are constrained by success conditions; leading our own life depends on circumstances over which we do not have complete command.) There is, then, an interesting tension in the idea of appropriation between what is previously given and what is formable, between taking over and creating, between the subject’s sovereignty and its dependence. The crucial relation here is that between something’s being alien and its accessibility: objects of appropriation are neither exclusively alien nor exclusively one’s own. As Michael Theunissen puts it, “I do not need to appropriate what is exclusively my own, and what is exclusively alien I am unable to appropriate.”14 In contrast to Marx, then, for whom appropriation is conceived of according to a model of reappropriation, the account of the dynamic of appropriation and alienation that I am proposing reconceives the very concept of appropriation. This involves rehabilitating what is alien in the model of appropriation and radicalizing that model in the direction of a nonessentialist conception of appropriation. Appropriation would then be a permanent process of transformation in which what is appropriated first comes to be through its appropriation, without one needing to fall back into the myth of a creatio ex nihilo. Understanding appropriation as a relation in which we are simultaneously bound to something and separated from it, and in which what is appropriated always remains both alien and our own, has important implications for the ideas of emancipation and alienation bound up with the concept of appropriation. The aspiration of a successful appropriation of self and world would be, then, to make the world one’s own without it having been already one’s own and in wanting to give structure to the world and to one’s own life without beginning from a position of already having complete command over them.

THE PROJECT AND THE METHOD OF RECONSTRUCTION

On the basis of what I have sketched thus far it is possible briefly to outline the project of reconstructing the concept of alienation as I aim to carry it out in what follows.

1. The break with objectivistic ethical theory follows from the procedural or formal orientation of my approach, namely, its focus on the How of the process of appropriation. Instead of relying on a strongly objectivistic theory of the good life, my reconstruction is based on what could be called a qualified subjectivism. Whereas the individual (her subjective states and desires) remains the final reference point for the diagnosis of alienation, it is also possible to call into question her prima facie evaluations.

2. Replacing essentialist conceptions of self and community with a focus on how acts of willing are carried out and how they can be disturbed represents a break with strong forms of essentialism that depend on the idea of realizing human nature. The objects to be examined are existential acts or human beings in what they do and will, not as they are “in essence.”

3. Since the diagnosis of alienation, thus conceived, starts from the sources of disturbances of successful relations to self and world, it is open-ended and not dependent on a closed, harmonistic model of reconciliation. And although it can be said that the talk of disturbances presupposes conditions of successful functioning, the (in this respect “negativistic”) approach pursued here is, in crucial respects, quite modest in its positive appeal to the idea of a successful human existence.

4. Because of its emphasis on concepts like experience and experiment, alienation critique is part of an open-ended process in the carrying out of which it is possible to identify and modify criteria for failure and success. So considered, alienation is less a “fall” from a successful, reconciled state than a breakdown and halting of experiential processes that are to be understood as experimental. Understood in this way, the concept of alienation problematizes what is “one’s own” rather than presupposing it, or, put differently, both the relation and relationlessness of alienation are always contested.

IMMANENT CRITIQUE AND CULTURAL SELF-UNDERSTANDING

In what kind of critique, though, are we engaging when we carry out alienation critique? And from where does it acquire its standards?

Alienation critique can be understood as a form of immanent critique, a critique that, put very briefly, judges the subject or form of life in question according to criteria that the objects of critique themselves have posited or that are implicit in them. Two kinds of tension between critique and the object of critique are possible here. On the level of relations to the material and social world and its institutions, alienation critique points out discrepancies between the claims of modern ideals of freedom and their actual realization or, in other words, discrepancies between the ideal of control or command and actual impotence with respect to (self-created) relations. On the level of the individual’s relations to self, on the other hand, a tension exists between the qualities we (it could be claimed necessarily) impute to subjects when we regard them—whether ourselves or others—as responsible agents and the obstructions of responsible agency that accompany alienated relations to self. To return to Berlin’s description of positive freedom: what underlies this tension is a distinction between the qualities of (responsible, acting) human beings and those of (passive, “driven”) things. This distinction does not derive from external criteria (external to an agent’s self-conception) or from criteria that rely on a certain picture of human nature; it is, rather—in the sense previously discussed—internal to what it means to understand oneself as a person in a certain sense.

These methodological reflections on the concept of alienation raise the question of the status and scope of the dimension of critique that I want to explore in this study. If, as I have claimed, a diagnosis of alienation can be understood as immanent critique, how far can such a critique extend if, as it appears, immanence always requires shared premises? How universal can alienation critique be if it proceeds immanently? If what alienation critique—regarded both historically and systematically—points out are contradictions internal to modernity (to the modern idea of freedom) or possible tensions within personhood, is it not then based on a specific ethically and culturally shaped conception of the person and a specific, culturally influenced interpretation of freedom? Alienation critique would then be an element of the critical, evaluative self-interpretation of a modern culture that has made freedom and self-determination its core values.

The objection that this conception of critique (and with it the diagnosis of alienation) is culturally relative is not without merit. In comparison to the universalistic content of a theory that takes a view of human nature as its starting point, the scope of alienation critique, as I reconstruct it, is limited. Even when it relies on methods of deep interpretation to point out internal contradictions or failings, its domain is always limited to a specific shared form of life; its reach does not extend beyond its immediate context. It is not immediately clear, though, how much weight this objection carries. One might be tempted here to follow Joseph Raz, who, untroubled by such an objection, makes the following claim about the value of personal autonomy: “The value of personal autonomy is a fact of life. Since we live in a society whose social forms are to a considerable extent based on individual choice, and since our options are limited by what is available in our society, we can prosper only if we can be successfully autonomous.”15

The validity of a critique that is oriented around such immanent values depends on how far the sphere of influence of a specific form of life in fact extends. And that will always be larger than where there is actual, explicit endorsement of those values. Thus a critique that is immanent in this sense can also be understood as laying out the implications and consequences of the practices bound up with specific forms of life, without it being the case that those who share a certain form of life are necessarily conscious of those implications, or immanent critique can also be understood as laying out contradictions internal to a form of life that point beyond the form of life in question.