They had managed it. There was a completely furnished apartment and they lived completely furnished together in it. On the one wall hung a large, colorful picture in a thin, white wooden frame; a modern lamp hung down from the ceiling into the room. One was now powerless against it all.
—ROLF DIETER BRINKMANN, KEINER WEIß MEHR
IN THIS CHAPTER I EXAMINE one aspect of self-alienation: the feeling of powerlessness or of loss of control over one’s own life.1 It involves the (not uncommon) impression that one’s life confronts one as an independent event over which one has no influence without, however, being able to describe oneself as determined by alien causes, or heteronomous, in any straightforward sense. What explains how it can be that someone experiences her own life as determined by an alien power if, at first glance anyway, she herself is the agent? How are we to understand the relation here between what is one’s own and what is alien? And what would it mean in the present context to be the master of one’s own actions? My claim is that we can become alien to ourselves, or our lives alien to us, when processes that take on a dynamic of their own or conditions of rigidification hinder us in understanding ourselves as agents in what we do (as the “subjects” of our actions and our lives). This structure differs from straightforward coercion or manipulation. In examining it I will first (1) sketch a situation that illustrates the phenomenon in question. Then I will (2) elaborate my account of the specific problem of this form of self-alienation by distinguishing it from other possible interpretations. In the next step (3) I will interpret the phenomenon as a specific form of not being present in one’s own actions, a condition characterized by what might be called the masking of practical questions. The discussion of objections (4) that can be brought against this interpretation will lead us finally (5) to a conception of self-alienation as a form of loss of control that does not, however, depend on an unrealistic ideal of self-mastery.
(1) A SUBURBAN EXISTENCE
A young academic takes up his first position. At the same time he and his girlfriend decide to marry. That makes sense “because of the taxes.” A short time later his wife becomes pregnant. Since large apartments in the city are expensive and hard to find, they decide to move to a suburb. After all, life outside the city will be “better for the child.” The man, a gifted mathematician, who until then has led a slightly chaotic life, oscillating between too much night life and an obsessive immersion in work, is now confronted with a completely new situation. All of a sudden, and without him having really noticed it, his life is now, as it were, “on track.” One thing seems to follow ineluctably from another. And in a creeping, almost unnoticeable process his life acquires all the attributes of a completely normal suburban existence. Would he, who earlier ate fast food most of the time and relied on convenience stores for picking up milk and toilet paper as the need arose, ever have thought that he would one day drive every Saturday morning to the shopping mall to buy supplies for the week and fill the freezer? Could he ever have imagined that he would hurry home from work on Friday because the lawn needed to be mowed before the barbecue? At first he and his wife hardly notice that their conversations are increasingly limited to their child and the organization of household chores. Sometimes, however, he is overcome by a feeling of unreality. Something is wrong here. While many envy him for the beautiful suburban house he lives in, he is not really at home in this situation. The life he leads, which, as it seems to him, has so suddenly tightened around him—one could almost say “rearranged” him—seems, in a strange way, not to be his own life. Everything is as if it could not be any other way; everything happens with a certain inevitability. And in spite of this—or perhaps precisely because of it—it remains in a crucial respect alien to him. To what extent is this life “not really” his own? To what extent is he, in this life that he leads, alienated from himself?
(2) DEMARCATING THE PHENOMENON AND DEFINING ITS CHARACTERISTICS
I will now attempt to demarcate the phenomenon in question more precisely.
First, it cannot be the change as such—the circumstance that our young academic now lives a different life from the one he was used to—that can be described as alienating in this case. The circumstances of (almost) all humans go through decisive changes throughout the course of their lives. Yet, even in cases where these changes are painful and complicated, they are not usually experienced as alienation. Life can be painful, complicated, or unfamiliar for a time without there being any reason to regard it as a life that is not “one’s own.” For this reason it is also not merely a matter of what one is accustomed to. If it could be said of the young academic, “He must simply get accustomed to the new conditions of his life,” then the problem would be a different one: not alienation but mere unfamiliarity. In our case, in contrast, the fact that his new situation becomes increasingly familiar to him has no effect on his feeling of foreignness—in fact, it is only strengthened by that familiarity. In this sense one can be completely familiar with a situation—one knows it well enough—and in spite of this feel alien in it.
Second, the phenomenon to be explained here is also not a simple problem of external coercion or heteronomy. No one has coerced or manipulated the young mathematician. He wanted his position, the wife, and his child. Nor is it the case that he regretted his decisions shortly after making them or wanted to reverse them and was prevented from doing so by external forces. He has therefore not simply made a wrong decision such that one could say that he is under the compulsion of his own decision, which, since he can no longer identify with it, now rules him as an alien power. Moreover, the feeling that his life is alien also does not mean that he rejects it outright and directly. He is not unhappy in his marriage; he is a proud father; and his position has brought him rewards beyond merely the advancement of his career.2 It seems as if he and his wife have stumbled into a way of life that neither of them really wanted but that they nevertheless have entered into, developed, and created. If he has fallen into a trap, it is not one that someone set for him. In spite of this he is not, in a certain sense, the “master” of his own life; he feels himself to be the object, not the subject, of the course it has taken.
The situation appears as alienating to the extent that it seems to him as if an alien power were at work in his life and, in a certain sense, working through him. Yet the problem here is manifestly not one of manipulation or even of a feeling of being manipulated. When I am manipulated (however subtly), someone other than myself is (however anonymously) controlling me. It is not merely that no alien power can be identified here; it appears, instead, as if there were no power at work at all. Put differently, while the life he leads is not his own, it is also not someone else’s. It seems to belong to no one. It is a situation, therefore, in which, to quote Robert Musil, “the like of it now happens.”
Our protagonist, in contrast to someone who is manipulated, acts himself, but he acts without really acting. It is, in a certain sense, “defective” action. One could say that he is entirely or in part not really present in what he does. And it is this nonpresence in his own actions that makes his life in a crucial respect not his own, something that has taken on an independent existence and stands opposed to him. This requires further explanation.
(3) INTERPRETATIONS: A DYNAMIC OF ITS OWN AND RIGIDIFICATION
The following remarks shed light on two different aspects of the situation depicted here and two ways in which something can take on an independent existence. The life that one leads can (a) take on a dynamic of its own or (b) “rigidify” (be lived within a set of rigid relationships). In both cases, I will argue, one can speak of not really being present in one’s life. My interpretation will trace both cases back to the fact that the aspects of actions and decisions that make one’s life one’s own have become unrecognizable.
A DYNAMIC OF ITS OWN
First, one can describe the development depicted here as a process that has a dynamic of its own and that has taken on an independent existence in which, as a result, its participants seem to be helplessly at its mercy. Things as they have developed in the life of the young couple have taken on a life of their own. The seeming ineluctability of events is part of this: both their marrying with an eye to taxes and their retreat to the suburbs seem to follow almost necessarily from the new situation created by the birth of their child. Once the lawn is there, the grass has to be mowed, and after acquaintances have been made at the playground come the first invitations that have to be reciprocated. What is of interest here is not the conventionality of this way of life but merely the fact that events appear to follow of themselves and to be already decided without anyone having made a decision about them. One stumbles, as it were, involuntarily into the life one leads. But what exactly does the metaphor of a “dynamic of its own” or of “things taking on a life of their own” mean? And to what extent can one speak of such a dynamic as a process of alienation?
Developments that have a dynamic of their own appear—like natural or biological processes—to follow of themselves. They take a course that is determined by an inner necessity without requiring help from without. This inner necessity can consist of different types of causal chains on which we have no influence. This is what distinguishes them from processes that qualify as actions. Developments that have a dynamic of their own are processes in which nothing is genuinely done or decided, if acting or doing is understood as an intervention that steers events—as an initiating of events or as the interruption of a causal chain.3 This is how Ernst Tugendhat distinguishes happening from doing in relation to an agent’s action and volition: “We speak properly of doing in all those cases in which we demarcate intentional and deliberate events from mere occurrences. It thereby follows that where something is done or enacted we are dealing with a process whose continuation into the next respective phase depends on whether the agent wants it.”4
This opposition, between process and action, “blind” and “steered,” unintentional and willfully intended happenings, helps to locate the problem in the case just given. While doing and acting are bound up with an agent’s intention or will, something’s having a dynamic of its own refers to a happening without an agent, one that takes place behind his back or that works through him. If developments in one’s own life proceed according to the model of a dynamic of its own, this contradicts—keeping in mind the standards we have articulated in the account of persons as agents—the assumptions implicit in our talk of someone leading her life. When we speak in this way, we assume an active relation to—a “steering” of—what one does, even if some of the conditions under which one does it are not fully within one’s command. In contrast, the part of my life that can legitimately be described as a mere happening (for example, biological processes of maturation or vegetative functions of the body) is precisely not what makes it my life, a life that is “in each case one’s own”5—that is, it is not the part of life that allows me to identify it as my life in any robust sense. Being subjected to processes that have a dynamic of their own means a loss of responsibility and control that stands directly opposed to the idea that one can lead (steer and direct) one’s own life. A person will regard her life as alien in this sense when her own development stands over and against her as a process she cannot affect. Crucial for our example, and for regarding it as a case of self-alienation, is the discrepancy alluded to earlier between the presumption that one has the power to act, on the one hand, and its actual absence, on the other. To be sure, it is also possible to lament one’s powerlessness in the case of events that are not in fact subject to human discretion and control—one can, for example, experience bodily changes over which one has no control as alien to the point that one “no longer feels at home” in one’s own body.6 What is crucial for understanding processes such as these as alienating in a normative sense, however, is the discrepancy between one’s own (perhaps only apparent) powerlessness and the nature of what one at least takes to be (or to be able to be) an action.7 What is crucial, then, for the diagnosis of alienation I am developing here is that a person experiences a process that she can in principle influence (or should be able to influence) as beyond her influence—or that something that can in fact be decided on appears to her as if it could not be. If we were to take what seems here to be an automatic process beyond one’s control and unpack it into its individual components, we would discover that every individual component could have been the object of a possible decision: just as much speaks in favor of moving to the suburbs with a small child as against it; a tax break is not a sufficient argument for marriage; and one can always let one’s lawn run wild, rely on pizza delivery for food, ignore the neighbors, and satisfy one’s need for communication via the Internet. (As we will see in what follows, the problem here is not only that the agent does not actively decide but also that the situation in which he finds himself appears to him as one in which his behavior is necessary and deciding is impossible.)
One can summarize our academic’s situation as follows: that he experiences his own life as alien and does not feel “with himself” in his life is due to the fact that he is not really present in his life, where taking part in one’s own life is understood as participating in it as an agent. His lack of presence can be traced back to a lack of awareness of the possibilities of action that are open to him. Each individual aspect of his life—the consequences it has, for example, for the next decision—has not really been decided on. Thus, his situation is in fact “out of control” in a certain sense, and—this is crucial—it is a situation for which no one can genuinely be held responsible.8 This does not merely mean that he has not acted, or has not availed himself of his possibilities for acting, but that he has not even understood his situation as one in which action is called for or possible; it does not merely mean that he has not decided something for himself, or has not led his life himself, but that he has been incapable of understanding or regarding it as something he can or must lead. This is how we are to understand the sense in which someone like our academic is not the author of his life, is not the subject of what he does, even when there is no one else who acts in his stead. Thus the apparent paradox that one at once acts and does not act, that the life one leads is at once one’s own and an alien life, can be resolved as follows: to be sure, one does something here oneself, but it is not, we could say, action in a full sense; it is one’s own life, but one has not, in crucial respects, made it one’s own.
Thus the dynamic described here fits into the domain of phenomena that includes reification or naturalization: something made turns into something given and outside one’s command; the agent’s own actions (or their results) confront her as an alien power. This theme, applied to our example, can be translated as follows: what is at issue when one lives a life that is reified in this sense is a masking of the fact that the life one leads is not given and that it cannot be understood (from an objectifying standpoint) as something that takes place without us. In contrast, as I noted in relation to Heidegger, it is something that takes place within a context of possibilities for action to which we must relate. To use a phrase coined by Ernst Tugendhat: Leading one’s life means confronting the “practical question.”9 Practical questions are questions about what is to be done, what one ought to do, how one should act. Such questions, according to Tugendhat, can be posed at more or less fundamental levels. They can be merely instrumental questions about how to act appropriately in relation to a given goal and therefore questions about which means one should employ; however, they can also be about the final ends of one’s actions themselves (“How should I live?” “What kind of human being do I want to be?”). But posing practical questions always presupposes a domain of possibilities within which action can be taken. Practical questions concern contexts within which I can act in this way or that—situations in which I am required to take a position. Taking up Tugendhat’s account, I propose to call the structure of the reified or reifying dynamic described earlier—in which the individual steps of some development are not made the object of practical questions—a masking of practical questions. The thesis that such questions can be masked implies that it cannot be taken for granted that we generally perceive situations as the object of practical questions or that they “come into view for us” as such.10 (At the same time, the concept of masking is supposed to indicate that what is at issue is not merely a subjective misapprehension but something that can be true of a situation as well as of the agent who finds herself in it.) If the existence of a domain of practical questions, along with the capacity to pose and answer them, is a constitutive condition of a self-determined life, then a structure that leads to such a masking—a life that, as described, takes on a dynamic of its own (or is experienced as such)—undermines the conditions of self-determination and the capacity for action.
HETERONOMY AND ALIENATION
We are now in a position to begin to answer the question of what distinguishes the kinds of alienation just described from simple cases of coercion or of being determined by alien forces (heteronomy), as well as from the more complex case of manipulation. The despair that grips our academic when he looks at his life a few years later is not the despair of someone who is manipulated or deceived, of someone who discovers that for the entire time he has been led to do things he did not really want to do. His despair results, to be sure, from realizing that in a certain respect he has not really been involved in conducting his life. But it is not simply that he himself did not decide the things that determined him—that he made decisions that were influenced or even coerced by others; what is important about his decision, rather, is that in fact nothing at all was decided. As distinct from even extremely subtle forms of heteronomy,11 he does nothing contrary to his will, but instead fails to develop a will at all: there is, in a certain sense, no will at all in play. He is not forced, however subtly, to decide in one way or another or to do this or that. Nor is his will manipulated; no alien will is foisted on him. He merely does not see, or is prevented from seeing, that what he does could be the object of a decision. Of course, one can describe this as an anonymous and quasi-structural form of heteronomy. Someone who is driven by events instead of guiding them herself is not autonomous; she does not live according to her own law. Joseph Raz, in defining personal autonomy (understood in a thick sense, as being the author of one’s life), helpfully captures the distinction between autonomy and being driven in what one does: personal autonomy “contrasts with a life of no choices, or with drifting through life without ever exercising one’s capacity to choose.”12 It is important to note that, with respect to its content, this account of autonomy cannot be understood as the symmetrical opposite of most conceptions of heteronomy. When heteronomy is conceived of as the opposite of autonomy in this thick sense, its essential characteristic, namely, that a foreign law and a foreign will take the place of one’s own, no longer strictly applies.13 When “the like of it now happens,” nothing at all is “posited as a law.” Things happen in such a way that what is one’s own has not yet been differentiated from what is alien. Or, put differently, the question of how something can become my own or is not my own is precisely the problem in the phenomena examined here, a problem that the label of heteronomy masks rather than resolves. It seems to me an advantage of a theory of alienation that it brings into view the preconditions of self-determination in a more differentiated way than the simple opposition between autonomy and heteronomy does. (I revisit the relation between self-determination and alienation in chapter 10.)
RIGIDIFICATION
An iron cage. A further feature marks the life of our academic who has ended up in the suburbs: a peculiar rigidification. Not only does everything simply take its course; the relations that come about in this way seem to determine how he lives, rather than vice versa. That is a mark of the rigidity or lifelessness of the way of life he finds himself in: “One was now powerless against it all.” While it seemed as if there were no action whatsoever (drifting instead of acting), it becomes clear from this perspective that the results of actions can take on an independent existence over and against the agent who has done them. This solidifying and becoming independent of the results of our actions can also occur in relations that, at the beginning, we consciously decided to enter into. (In this respect the phenomenon of rigidification is different from things having a dynamic of their own. In our example both could be present, but these two aspects of the case should be considered independently.)
Rigidification, too, ultimately leads to what I have called the masking of practical questions. Even if someone has at some point posed such practical questions, she can at a later point stop posing them. Thus the process of rigidification described here also has the consequence that the things that determine a life no longer appear as things that can (still) be objects of decision. Ossified relations are those that are immune, or make themselves immune, to further questioning. The life one leads then consists of fixed, invariable components that one no longer has access to. Everything appears unalterable, “congealed.”14 When one’s life takes on a life of its own in this way, the result is a life devoid of life.
Why, in such circumstances, is someone alienated from herself? This can be explained by referring to the masking of practical questions: rigidified relations give answers to such questions in advance of their being posed.15 Here, too, one is no longer asked to make decisions, to act, or to pose practical questions. Everything appears as though it could not be different. Here, too, one is passive and no longer an active participant in the relations in which one lives; one is, instead, determined by them. And if everything appears as though it could not be different, then an acting subject is superfluous. The new and interesting point here is this: practical questions must be posed not just once but over and over, even with respect to familiar, longstanding practices.
Events that run their course automatically and situations that become rigidified are two examples of how a process can take on an independent existence over and against the agent involved in it, and each can be understood as an aspect of reification. In both cases a process that really ought to be a result of actions—or that by its nature is an action process—appears (or must appear) to the participants as taking place independently of human agency. In both cases breaking down this structure of reification means uncovering the possibilities for action: what is, could, as a result of actions, also have been different. It is not only a question of realizing that the relations in which one lives are in principle malleable but also of coming to see that decisions already made are fluid and open to revision. The existence of a field of possibilities for action means not merely that something could also be different from how it is; a field of possibilities for action exists precisely when something can (in principle) always again become different from how it is. That is, as we will see, not only a problem of individual agents but also one of how the relations are constituted in which individuals act (or do not).
(4) OBJECTIONS
Is it, then, that every process that takes on an independent existence or a dynamic of its own, or every state of rigidification that one’s own life can fall into, is to be described as alienation? Are there not also such processes that are not experienced as alienating and that should not, even from an external standpoint, be described as such? This question leads to two kinds of problems. The first concerns very generally the normative status of the analyses I have given here and the standard of evaluation that underlies them, according to which control or command over one’s own life—or, more generally, having an actively structuring relation to it—is to be preferred over other options. Is it so obvious that control and command over one’s life are what we should value? Why should we actively lead our life? When we do not, do we then have a false, unhappy, or bad life? What, for example, speaks against a fatalistic attitude of letting oneself drift in which one just goes along with the course of events and identifies with the direction that one’s life, for whatever reasons, happens to take? Naturally, this is a question of degrees. And it could be claimed that various degrees of activism and fatalism (“being able to let things be”) characterize something like different life styles within a form of life.16 So understood, even letting oneself drift would still be a way of leading one’s life. In determining how far one can go in this direction it will help to recall some aspects of what we have seen in reconstructing the self-conceptions we have as persons: the active, controlling model for leading one’s life is intimately bound up with the fundamental possibility of understanding oneself as a person or agent, as the subject of one’s life, which only then becomes one’s own life in a genuine sense. And only insofar as we understand ourselves as agents can we be held responsible for what we do. Moreover, this status accounts for a significant part of what it means to be able to understand oneself as an independent person and to be respected by others as such. For this reason what we have here are not arbitrary options but attitudes with regard to which it is questionable whether we at any rate are capable of abandoning them (in a radical way) without becoming entangled in contradictions. (I return to these questions in part 3.)
The second group of objections is of a different kind. They concern the internal plausibility of the underlying conceptions of personhood. Even if we cannot in principle do without those conceptions, does not my analysis rely on overly strong assumptions about our capacity to act? There are two objections here: first, do we not need to take more seriously the complexity of decisions and their consequences? and, second, do we not need to take into account the fact that a certain fixity of relations is always necessary in order to frame the setting within which we live and that therefore we cannot make transparent all the conditions under which we live and regard them always as fluid and at our command?17
THE UNFORESEEABLE NATURE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF ACTIONS
The concept of complexity points to the following problem: individual decisions not only produce consequences and effects that one failed to foresee but also consequences and effects that one could not have foreseen. (One could say that this is an inescapable consequence of the fact that the life one lives is not a life one has already lived.)
Not having the consequences of actions at one’s command is a characteristic feature of acting itself: actions have consequences, and these in turn have their own consequences.18 The unpredictable effects our own actions have on others, together with the repercussions their reactions in turn have on us, produces a complexity that makes it more difficult to form and pursue only predictable intentions and, so, only intentions that are (in this sense) one’s own.
This problem, however, can be discussed in relation to the conception of action itself. Even if we accept the view, as I did earlier, that acting involves pursuing intentions, this does not imply that the result of an action could “mirror” this intention in an undistorted manner or that intention and result must coincide. On the contrary, the result of an action typically contains a certain “surplus” beyond what the agent takes his intention to be.19 Helmuth Plessner even regards this phenomenon positively, referring to it as “the emancipatory power of our deeds.” In a passage criticizing Marx’s theory of alienation, he notes: “It is characteristic of human action to bring forth products that slip from its control and turn against it. This emancipatory power of our deeds (. . .) should not be understood as frustrating the realization of our intentions. On the contrary, it makes the realization of our intentions possible and develops its effect, unforeseen by intention, only on the basis of the realized product.”20 In all these respects (and for all these reasons) the life that one leads is not in all its facets the result of decisions, and it is never completely controllable or thoroughly self-chosen. A life, even a mostly not alienated “life of one’s own,” can never be attributed in its entirety to the person who leads it, as if it were nothing but the result of that person’s own decisions. One never is, and never could be, the sole author of one’s life history. This peculiar tension between making plans and pursuing intentions, on the one hand, and their effects (of which one can also always say “it was no one”),21 on the other, is obviously also a characteristic feature of the way one leads one’s life. What is important in the present context is that the presence of an independent dynamic, to some degree, and the fact that, to a certain extent, results of actions take on an independent existence are not usually experienced as alienating, and the same is true of the fact that one is affected by unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Not everything that is not at our command makes our life alien to us in the sense under discussion here; to claim otherwise would be to rely on an overblown, overly robust conception of autonomy and of our power to act.
Moreover, in many cases we welcome being overpowered by events (for example, falling in love). Even when we are confronted with circumstances we could never have imagined—circumstances we could neither have foreseen or planned and with respect to which we are powerless—we do not necessarily feel alienated from ourselves. (Think of the state of “being outside oneself” when one is in love or when one takes uninhibited delight in something.) Such circumstances produce instead an uplifting feeling of “being in accord” with oneself. One is overpowered, but, in contrast to the condition described in the example, one is intensely present in what one does and in what happens to one.
It is possible, then, to be outside oneself without being alienated from oneself. How can this be? In these cases we identify with events, even when we have not initiated them or cannot control them. Clearly, we can be present in a situation without completely being in control of it (or of ourselves in it). There must be, then, a distinction between alienating and nonalienating situations where one has lost control or where the results of our actions take on an independent existence in relation to us. This distinction can be located, on the one hand, in one’s later attitude to the events in question: one can reject or accept them; one can identify (or not) after the fact with events that had a dynamic of their own. On the other hand, we can also locate the distinction in different ways of participating in events that have taken on an independent existence. The idea of a self’s being “present” (or “present to itself”) at least hints at the relevant point here: there can be degrees of identification with events for which the self is not entirely responsible that depend not on the amount of control one has over them but on the greater or lesser extent to which one is present in them.22 (One is then “taken in” by the situation, absorbed in it; one forgets oneself in it, in contrast to the distance that characterizes the young man of our example.)
According to this analysis, then, not every case in which the results of actions have taken on an independent existence and not every uncontrollable dynamic of life events is alienating per se. We have seen that the question of whether a life takes on an independent existence in an alienating manner is not decided by whether it is in every respect self-structured, controlled, or predictable but rather on whether the part of it that is outside one’s command can be appropriated in a certain way. The theme of appropriation here (as set out in chapter 1) is supposed to bring out the point that having something at one’s command, “putting oneself in relation to something,” or being able to identify with something does not depend on understanding that something as—in Marx’s sense—the product of one’s own activity. Rather, it is a question of whether or not one can appropriate the events that determine our lives, especially when they are not steered or controlled by us, where they are not “placed into the world” by us. The process of externalization and reappropriation at issue here is perhaps best thought of as a process of “balancing out”: every decision, every action sets processes in motion or produces results that may at first be alien and can be made our own only by (re)appropriating them. What is one’s own, then, is not necessarily something one has produced or directed oneself; the result of an act of appropriation does not consist only of something that was previously one’s own. Having an appropriating relation to the (uncontrollable) events of one’s own life means that one must be able to bring oneself into an affirmative relation to what is alien or uncontrollable. Alienation is not the foreignness (or the becoming foreign) per se of the results of actions but rather an interruption or disturbance of the process in which actions produce (uncontrollable) results to which one then establishes a relation of reappropriation.
The concept of appropriation is well-suited for illustrating the practical character of this process. Appropriation is not a matter of making a choice from a disengaged or objective standpoint, nor is it a matter of merely rejecting or agreeing to the result of an action. What I have called balancing out does not depend on weighing things from an external perspective; it is a process in which one is involved. The process of appropriation is not made up only of cognitive elements, and it is not subject only to the will. Not everything one might like to be can actually be made one’s own. Appropriation is a process of learning and experience in which the relation between freedom and uncontrollability is negotiated. Conversely, alienation is a halting of this process.
CONSTITUTIVE RIGIDIFICATION
What about the aspect of our actions taking on an independent existence that I have discussed under the name of rigidification? Is every form of rigidification alienating per se? It is not only the idea of controllability but also the accompanying ideas of transparency and fluidity that can seem to be illusory. It is, of course, never possible to make explicit all the implicit decisions on which a life depends, but it is also the case that not everything we tacitly take as self-evident can or should be made explicit. There is something eerie about the expectation that we do so and the result would presumably be a life that was in its own way “devoid of life.” It is also unrealistic to think that one can make everything fluid in order to avoid the rigidification of one’s life; it is therefore also unrealistic to believe that one can renew or renegotiate every detail of one’s life. Routines, institutions, and rituals are not in themselves rigidified and lifeless; apart from their well-known ability to relieve us of the burdens of choice, they make us “at home” in our lives in a certain sense (as Arnold Gehlen’s theory of social institutions famously suggests). Hence we must distinguish forms of routine action and ways in which relations take on an independent existence that are constitutive for us, on the one hand, from problematic forms of rigidification that result in alienation, on the other. What is crucial here is neither complete transparency nor a constant transformation of the relations of life but rather a basic consciousness of the possibility of choice.
The talk of rigidified relationships as reifying helps us to see certain aspects of the aims of alienation critique, namely: to reveal our actions to us as something “made” (by us) and to reveal to us the implicitly decidable character of what we do. In a situation of doubt—which is to say, in a situation of conflict—this stance enables us to make explicit what is implicit and hence to examine and revise decisions that have taken on an independent existence. This does not mean that we can structure and construct our whole lives from scratch, as if at a drawing board. Practical questions pose themselves in the context of practical problems. They never pose themselves completely outside or independently of a context and they seldom pose themselves fundamentally in the sense that, once posed, one’s whole life suddenly hangs in the balance; in cases where they become fundamental in a meaningful sense, they become radical only gradually, out of the problem itself.23 Thus, a nonreifying, unalienated stance, in opposition to a rigidified one, would consist, above all, in an openness to problems—an openness to revision and experimentation.
(5) RECAPITULATION
With respect to the aspect of self-alienation examined in this chapter—the problem of the loss of power and control—the following points have emerged: processes in which conditions of life take on an independent existence are not alienating per se, and it is not only when I have complete control over each of my actions that I can experience my life as my own. In contrast to this, I have described alienation as an interruption of the process of appropriating one’s own actions. Relationships are reified and alienating when they cannot be understood as providing a field for possible action and experimentation. And, with respect to rigidification, it can be said that alienation does not consist in the solidifying of relationships per se—what is alienating is the halting of experimentation. (Experiment, however, is not to be understood as a haphazard, aesthetic life experiment but rather in a pragmatist sense that emphasizes the necessarily experimental character of every problem-solving activity. Thus alienation or reification—the processes described here as rigidification or as things taking on an independent existence—are impediments to experimentation that come to be perceived as problematic especially when they prevent problems from being perceived and solved.)24
Finally, some further comments are necessary regarding the subjective and objective conditions of alienated or unalienated life situations. Let us return to the narrative of our example: is it that our academic has simply not paid attention, has out of carelessness failed to perceive practical questions as such? Or was his situation constituted so that it could not even come into view as one in which action was possible? Put differently, was it he who concealed the practical questions (as practical questions), or were these questions structurally concealed and therefore not even recognizable as such? The concept of alienation—and this is an advantage of this approach—allows us to address both sides of this problem. On the subjective side it is a question of the subject’s accessibility to itself; on the objective side the question concerns the accessibility of situations.
On the one hand, an awareness of fields of possible action presupposes a certain accessibility of the self.25 For example, one must be perceptive, to some extent, in order to be able to identify cases of conflict and phenomena of rigidification,26 as well as to notice when something is not quite right; moreover, one must be internally flexible, to a certain extent, in how one reacts to such observations. There must be options available; possibilities for action must be present. That means being accessible to oneself in what one experiences and does. And this suggests the diagnosis that our mathematician was not accessible to himself in the situation sketched earlier.
Alongside these subjective conditions, there are also objective conditions, those that have to do with how the circumstances of life themselves are constituted. We said of our protagonist that he was not able to see his life as a series of actions; this should lead us to ask what conditions made this impossible or, conversely, under which conditions it would be possible to grasp the situation as one that calls for the raising of practical questions. This question concerns not the (internal or external) impediments to an individual’s freedom to decide but rather the phenomenon underlying it: whether, independently of individuals’ subjective attitudes, a situation can in principle even be grasped as a field of possible action, whether it is at all accessible as such. The crucial point here concerns the opening up (or, conversely, the constitutive limitations) of the horizon of possibility that is given within a particular life situation or in a particular form of life.
My thesis is that there is a multitude of causes for the failure of situations encountered in life to appear as belonging to the sphere of possible actions or decisions. I cannot treat these causes exhaustively here, but I will briefly indicate some relevant aspects of them. Conventions, for example, can be understood as a subtle way of structuring forms of life, the essential feature of which is that they do not coerce individuals to do anything or prescribe a particular way of life for them. Of course, they do this too, but the main respect in which they limit us is that they succeed in presenting certain alternatives as unavoidable. That is, they narrow the horizon of possibility—the domain within which decisions can be made—and it is here that their effects unfold (sometimes almost unnoticed). The power of convention means not only that “everyone” has to act in some way or another; it also affects the possibility of whether certain desires and ideas, and thereby certain ways of life, are even thinkable. We understand ourselves on the basis of models given by convention; we interpret our own scope of action against their background—and we depend for this reason on those interpretations in order to understand ourselves and our lives. The idea that it is “better for the children” to live in the suburbs, or that one “will finally be a grown-up” once one leads a well-ordered married life, belongs to this type of (normalizing) influence. (Yet, and we will return to this later, the reason they are potentially alienating is not because they imply a way of life shared with others.)
Thus conventions limit the spectrum of the imaginable; they shape and limit possibilities of experience.27 Even when a life’s taking on a dynamic of its own, as already discussed, is not caused by the conventionality of a certain way of life, it could nevertheless be claimed that conventional ways of life encourage the masking of practical questions, if only because in a conventional way of life so much is taken to be self-evident (with help from the social environment) and because the pressure to engage in reflection appears to be greater in unconventional forms of life. As long as unconventional forms of life have not themselves become conventional (as may happen in a subculture), it is not so easy to regard them as self-evident or “natural.”