LIVING ONE’S LIFE AS AN ALIEN LIFE: FOUR CASES
Someone lives my life. But it is not me.
—RENÉ POLLESCH
AN EVERYDAY THEME. SOMEONE SUDDENLY becomes aware that her own life has become alien to her in crucial respects. She is now indifferent to people who once meant something to her; things that once excited her now leave her cold; projects she earlier pursued with dedication now seem pointless to her. In her job she merely gets by. She lives, as it were, her own life as an alien life. When a social role forces us to behave in ways that make us feel uneasy, when we suddenly become aware that in everything we do we are only attempting to satisfy others’ demands, or when we are helplessly at the mercy of certain emotional reactions, we also sometimes speak of not being ourselves or of being alienated from ourselves. We observe with amusement the freshly styled junior editor who all too zealously imitates his boss’s polite but superficial speech and we regard him as inauthentic. With less amusement we observe the existential crisis of an acquaintance who no longer feels “at home” in his own life or believes that his life is a failure. A person who is alienated from herself has (as a psychological description of a clinical symptom would have it) lost a relation to her own feelings, desires, and experiences and can no longer—even to the point of spatiotemporal disorientation—integrate them into the way she experiences her own life. She is alien to herself in what she wills and does. Incapable of experiencing herself as an actively structuring force, she feels unable to have any influence on what happens to her, which instead she experiences as something alien. These various phenomena point to the same idea: if one can be alien to oneself, then one can apparently also be more or less oneself, and the life one leads can be, for various reasons, more or less one’s own.
But how can one become alien to oneself? Who becomes alienated here from whom? How are we to understand the claim that one can be not oneself, and in what nontrivial sense can my life be really my own?
Here the problems already encountered that are bound up with defining the human essence and the criteria of alienation critique resurface: if we speak of a false self, we are obviously presupposing a true self; if we can become alienated from ourselves, then it is also possible to be with ourselves. In each case we start from a gap or discrepancy and presuppose the possibility of eliminating it. In each case we think of the subject as internally divided, which can be interpreted in various ways: as a falling away from one’s essence, as a failure to realize one’s potential, or as falling short of one’s true calling. We assume, in other words, a criterion for true, authentic selfhood against which to diagnose various types of deviation from it.
This becomes clear if we consider some of the everyday self-interpretations we encounter in conjunction with the aforementioned existential questions. The bank employee and father who says that “he is really an artist” believes that he has fallen short of his true calling. The young dynamic editor who, in a crisis, expresses a need finally to “find his way back to himself” suggests that somewhere underneath the behaviors he has merely passively adopted his true self lies dormant. We are presumably all familiar with people who interpret their lives in these ways and with life histories that seem to call for such interpretations. Nevertheless, it is not easy to understand what exactly could be meant here. Even if deeply embedded in the ways individuals understand themselves, these ideas are problematic. Where has the editor lost himself? And, when he searches, is he himself or not himself? How could the unlived life of the aspiring artist be his more real or more authentic life?
It is not that the idea of self-alienation merely has many meanings, but that it seems to be paradoxical at its core. The concept of alienation shares in the paradox of every essence-based critique: something that does not correspond to its own essence simultaneously partakes of it and does not partake of it.1 The bank employee is really an artist, even if he is not currently one; and the junior editor, too, claims precisely not to be what he is.
The conception that underlies these ways of speaking seems to rest on several characteristic assumptions: the authentic or true self is something located somewhere inside. It exists independently of whether it is expressed, of whether it is realized in actions or externally manifested in other ways. The self we are capable of falling away from somehow has a substantial essence that exists prior to, and remains the same independently of, what it does. The thought that it must be possible to distinguish a true self from a false or alienated self, in the same way that we distinguish an inner core from its outer husk, is the metaphorical idea around which these everyday notions revolve. The true self is thought of as a kind of “proto-self” that can be distinguished from its falsified forms. We are, on this picture, “with ourselves” when we exist in conformity with this essential inner core and we are alienated or inauthentic, in contrast, when this core has been falsified by external factors or when we have distanced ourselves from it. Thus the authentic self—according to what is common to these ideas—would correspond to something that we can search for and find, but that we can also fall short of.2
This picture—which I treat for now as an idea of common sense—can be criticized from various perspectives, two of which are of crucial importance for my problem: on the one hand, one can point out the reifying consequences that go along with such a definition of essence; on the other hand, one can criticize the conception of inwardness bound up with the inner-outer metaphor, which Frederic Jameson refers to somewhat irreverently as “the container model of self.”3
First, to make the criticism that this view relies on an essentialist and reifying conception of the self means, very briefly: it is not merely that the idea of an essential core hypostatizes the authentic self into a kind of person inside the person, where it remains unclear how the relation between these two creatures is to be conceived. It is also that this idea misrepresents the structure of human existence. For on this view we are forced to imagine a person as we do any object in the world, as a thing we can investigate in order to find out what essential properties it has, how it is constituted, and how it functions. But how am I to find out (with regard to myself) who I am beyond the things I will and do? It is well known that I am already on shaky ground if I say, of the object that I use to hammer a nail, it is “really only a block of wood” and therefore not a hammer.4 But when I say of the upstanding father that he is “really” a wild bohemian and artist, I fail to do justice to the fact that humans are beings that lead their lives and that become what they are only in doing so.
Second, implicit in the container model of the self is the idea that the self exists somewhere inside, waiting to be expressed, and that it has an existence independent of its expression. Thus, the bank employee thinks that his nature as an artist lies dormant in him, and the junior editor who has fallen into a crisis assumes that there is something there—inside—that he could fall back on if he were first freed from the falsifications the external world imposes on him. According to this model, there is a self that exists prior to and apart from its being realized, something that constitutes the innermost part of someone without it needing to be realized in any deed, activity, or other mode of expression. But this idea is highly dubious. It is unclear what the inside of a person is supposed to be such that, on the one hand, it does not require articulation but, on the other hand, it already exists as something determinate. In opposition to this, one could maintain that there is no truth of the self beyond its manifestations. What we are must be expressed and externalized in order to acquire reality. There is no self apart from its realization; it becomes determinate only as something realized.
As I have already suggested, though, it seems that we sometimes have reason to speak of losing or being untrue to ourselves or of being outside ourselves or not completely “with ourselves” in what we do. If we do not want to claim that these ways of speaking are completely empty, we must attempt to understand the problems they express. Put differently, what consequences would follow from giving up the vocabulary that such ways of speaking depend on? Are not the junior editor and the bank employee in some sense right in claiming that they are not fully identical with what they do, or how they present themselves at a particular moment, or with what is expected of them? Are not there in fact other talents lying dormant in the bank employee? Has not the editor in fact given up too many aspects of his personality? Utterances of this type, at the very least, reveal a current dissatisfaction with oneself, a hunch that something is not right with one’s own life. The question: “Am I really myself in what I am doing here?” may be wrongly put, but it points to a problem that cannot be gotten rid of so easily. Such thoughts give expression to ways individuals interpret themselves that cannot simply be criticized away by conceptual arguments. They belong to the repertoire of self-understanding and self-interpretation of (at least) modern individuality and are therefore crucially bound up with reflection and self-examination.5 In other words, they belong to the attempt to lead one’s life as one’s own.
If questions like these are bound up with a critical examination of our own lives, they have (one could claim) a critical, even emancipatory significance. The idea of a discrepancy between the authentic and inauthentic self, between the true and false self, functions as a kind of placeholder in individuals’ practical relation to self. Understood in this manner, asking oneself who one really is and whether the life one leads is really one’s own means that one does not identify with what one factically is, wills, and does or with what is demanded of one; it points to the fact that one can take up an attitude of critical distance to these things.
The reflections that follow take up the case, as it were, for these ways of thinking of oneself and one’s life in the face of the critique of substantializing and essentializing conceptions of the self referred to earlier. In accordance with the strategy for reconstructing the theory of alienation set out in the introduction, I will undertake in-depth analyses of various cases of self-alienation with the intention of showing that it is possible to give the problems depicted in these self-descriptions a meaningful, nonparadoxical formulation. At the same time, the fruitfulness of the interpretive schema employed by alienation theory will be demonstrated by showing that it brings into view connections among phenomena, the analysis of which deepens our understanding of what it means “to live one’s own life” in important ways. The various respects in which we experience our own life as an alien life, when traced back to various kinds of impediments to the appropriation of one’s own life, reveal the internal relations between freedom, authenticity, and self-realization, as I noted in my earlier discussion of the theory of alienation. The change of perspective that my investigation must undertake in relation to the “essence” and “core” models of the self follows for the most part directly from the critique of those models I have sketched previously:
1. When the reifying conception of the self falsely hypostatizes potentials and unrealized possibilities into a “more authentic” reality, it searches for an essence and in doing so hypostatizes a “doing” into a “being.” In contrast to this, I analyze the cases to follow by looking at the actions individuals find themselves performing and the ways they relate to themselves and to the world in what they do. Thus self-alienation will be conceived of—in accordance with the conception of appropriation I have sketched earlier—not as a falling away from one’s essence but as a disturbed relation to self, as a disturbed relation to our own actions, desires, projects, or beliefs.
2. Whereas the container model locates the true self somewhere inside—prior to and apart from its articulation—I start from the assumption that what constitutes us is developed and formed only in being articulated. Thus my analysis aims at distinguishing alienating from nonalienating—authentic from inauthentic—modes of articulation and finds in these distinctions the conditions for a successful appropriation of self and world.
3. As a consequence of these two points, a further theme (already indicated) becomes important: if self-alienation is also always alienation from the world—if it is to be understood as a relation to what I will and do (in the world)—then the self cannot be investigated apart from but only in its relations to the world.
On the assumption, then, that the concept of self-alienation is not necessarily bound up with an essentialist concept of the self, my investigation follows up on the suggestion that our relations to our own desires and activities are vulnerable to being disturbed. Self-alienation, so the thesis I will defend here, is a condition in which one is unable in crucial respects to appropriate the life one is leading and in which one does not have oneself at one’s command in what one does, where the latter condition is understood such that it does not presuppose that complete transparency and command constitute the normal or ideal state of individuals.
A theory of self-alienation, then, investigates the structure of a relation that has the peculiar feature that it can also go wrong in various ways. The thought, derived from Lacan, that we are always already “strangers to ourselves” (as the title of one of Julia Kristeva’s works puts it) is valid as an objection only against an unrealistic and all too harmonious conception of a subject’s perfect self-transparency and its having itself completely at its command. Yet—contrary to its own rhetoric—this way of thinking cannot do without a certain idea of what it means to be oneself or to have oneself at one’s command. The question, however, of how one can adequately relate to oneself becomes all the more urgent the less one is able to rely on a conception of the self in which one is always already “with oneself” and in which one possesses an original familiarity with oneself.
We again confront the question concerning the normative criterion of alienation critique. If, as indicated before, alienation is both a descriptive and a normative concept, where do we find the normative criterion that allows us to diagnose certain self-relations as alienating? As we will see, such standards are implicit in each of the various phenomena of alienation to be analyzed here. Being accessible rather than alien to oneself or being able to understand oneself as the author of one’s own actions presupposes certain features of personhood. Peter Baumann’s summary of the characteristic properties of persons captures the traits most important for this project: “Persons are beings that are not passively related to their environment but that are in a position to establish a relation to their environment actively. At the same time they have a relation to themselves. Both—relation to world and relation to self—are intimately bound up together: the particular characteristic of the person’s relation to her environment lies in the fact that in that relation she at the same time relates to herself.”6 The self-conceptions of persons, according to this description, are characterized by three dimensions relevant to our undertaking here: persons develop opinions about themselves, they take up evaluative positions in relation to themselves, and they are capable of having the desire to change themselves. That is why they ask questions such as “What kind of human being am I?” and “What kind of human being do I want to be?”7 It is against the backdrop of this understanding of the nature of persons that phenomena of self-alienation come into view and can be grasped as problematic. Being alienated from oneself refers to a disturbance of precisely this relation to self and world. It means not having oneself—one’s own desires and actions—at one’s command or not being at one with oneself in them. The diagnosis of self-alienation, then, relies on an internal reconstruction of the self-conception we develop and strive to realize when we understand ourselves as persons who act. For this reason it is, as already noted, less an essence-based critique than a version of immanent critique.
If, as I have claimed, alienation is a relation of relationlessness rather than the mere absence of a relation, then giving an account of this relation will be especially complicated: as clear as it is, on the one hand, that we are somehow antecedently connected to ourselves, it is, for precisely this reason, just as unclear how it is possible for this connection to break down. (That is the source of the air of paradox that surrounds this topic on all sides.) The thesis, then, is that a relation to oneself is a relation that can be disturbed in various ways. And in this relation, too, we find the feature mentioned previously: when alienated, we are alienated from something that is simultaneously our own and alien, we are involved in relations in which we alienate ourselves, we are in a certain sense at once perpetrator and victim.
As previously announced, I will proceed in what follows to analyze phenomena in which various dimensions of self-alienation are to be unpacked and analyzed. Various aspects of the relation between what is one’s own and alien that is intrinsic to phenomena of alienation will be at the center of my discussion.
In chapter 5 the phenomenon of one’s own actions taking on an independent existence and the resultant feeling of powerlessness will be in the foreground: when our life falls into a dynamic of its own we are just as alienated from ourselves as when our own actions ossify into structures over which we no longer have command. In these cases we can no longer understand ourselves as authors of our own actions. Chapter 6 deals with behavior in social roles as a form of inauthenticity and hence with the question of under what conditions being immersed in certain social relations manifests itself as self-alienation. Chapter 7 discusses cases of internal division, in which one’s own impulses, desires, and actions appear alien to oneself and where one therefore appears to oneself as dominated by an alien power. Finally, chapter 8 addresses indifference as a case of alienation. Someone who is indifferent with respect to her (own) projects and plans, who cannot identify with anything, so the thesis goes, is not only alienated from the world but also from herself, since one “wins” oneself only through a meaningful relation to the world (and to one’s projects and plans within it).