“AS IF THROUGH A WALL OF GLASS”: INDIFFERENCE AND SELF-ALIENATION
I, say I. Unbelieving.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, THE UNNAMABLE
THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT INDIFFERENCE as a kind of self-alienation and loss of self—hence about phenomena of alienation in which one perceives the entire world as alien and indifferent, in which one loses one’s relation to the world and “withdraws one’s feelers” from it. To what extent, though, is indifference alienation, if the capacity to distance oneself from certain involvements in the world can also be understood as freedom? At issue here is the relation between self and world as well as the thesis that it is not possible to understand self-realization outside a successful relation to the world. Again, I organize my discussion around (1) an example that I then (2) interpret with an eye to the concept of self-alienation. In doing so I (3) distinguish two aspects of alienation: detachment from one’s practical involvement in the world and the loss of identification. Then, with the help of ideas from Harry Frankfurt and Hegel, I (4) elaborate the problem of indifference—the ambivalence between freedom and loss of self—in order, finally, (5) to be able to determine the relation between freedom, indifference, and alienation.
(1) THE INDIFFERENT MAN
The character of Perlmann in Pascal Mercier’s novel Perlmann’s Silence illustrates a case of self-alienation as indifference. Perlmann is a once ambitious and still generally respected professor of linguistics, who—in Mercier’s description—has “lost his faith in the importance of academic work” and who ever since looks “upon academic work as if through a wall of glass.”1 The previously ambitious academic now reacts with indifference to critiques of his work. As if under “a local anesthetic,”2 he experiences the positions he once defended as though they were no longer his; his identification with them has dissolved. This condition of complete indifference, not only to his discipline but also to the entire way of life bound up with it, at first sets in for him almost unnoticed and without apparent reason. It is not, for instance, because his interest in linguistics has been replaced by other beliefs or passions. Nor is the distance that becomes increasingly noticeable during the three-week conference he has organized due to a critical view he has of the factory-like nature of contemporary academia. Perlmann is not a rebel. The opposite seems rather to be the case: once he has distanced himself, everything that was meaningful to him before appears as mere busywork. The world as a whole has submerged—without apparent cause—into the haze of indifference and become unreal. The projects he previously participated in with interest have suddenly receded into a distant region. It is not only, though, that the world becomes alien to him; in this condition he also becomes alien to himself. One has the impression that with the fading of the world Perlmann himself becomes diffuse and unreal; having become a “man without opinions,” his own identity becomes strangely ephemeral.
(2) DEMARCATING THE PHENOMENON AND DEFINING ITS CHARACTERISTICS
Several features of this example suggest that Perlmann’s situation can be understood as a case of self-alienation.3
1. The course of events described is not merely the manifestation of a process of self-transformation and the displacement of interests that accompanies it. There is at first nothing else that occupies the center of Perlmann’s attention in place of his work. What occurs is more radical: his interest in the world in general dissolves. In the one case, metaphorically speaking, the spotlight of interest moves from one place to another, whereas here the spotlight fades altogether. In contrast to a change of orientations, no new points of reference come on the scene to replace the old ones; no new interests and projects replace the earlier ones. As difficult as it might be in the case of a radical transformation to balance out the discontinuity between an earlier and a later self, this problem differs from a condition of radical indifference in that in the former one is still entangled in, or tied into, the world, whereas in the case of indifference one seems to be completely disconnected from it. Thus the problem to be understood in what follows is not discontinuity but radical detachment (and the problem of meaninglessness that accompanies it).4
2. Why, though, is Perlmann’s indifference alienation? The metaphor of being under local anesthesia makes it clear that Perlmann must have previously understood his work and position as part of himself: he identified with it. Part of the process described here is that things he previously understood as integral parts of himself suddenly appear to him external and distant. (One could characterize this process in psychoanalytic terms as a withdrawal of libidinal cathexis.) We can recognize here the feature of processes of alienation discussed previously: that we can be alienated only from things we were previously connected to. Of course, one can always separate oneself from earlier interests and projects. They do not necessarily remain a (now “anesthetized”) part of myself simply because I once had them. What must be explained (in accordance with the structural characteristics of alienation set out in chapter 3) is to what extent in this case, too, detachment still represents a relation.
3. Why is this a case of self-alienation and not one of alienation from the world? Is it not the (external) world that has become alien to Perlmann? If he cuts himself off from an external world he has become indifferent to and withdraws into himself, why should he become alienated from himself in doing so? Discussing Perlmann’s crisis as a case of self-alienation, and hence as a problem he has not merely with the world but with himself, rests on a weighty assumption: his indifference in relation to the world has consequences for his relation to himself. If what he has done, what was important to him, and what he identified with have become alien and inaccessible to him, then, so my interpretation, he becomes alien to himself to the extent to which the external world becomes alien to him (and to which for that reason he can no longer relate). The condition of indifference affects a person’s relation to herself along with her relation to the world. This leads to a conjecture that I will explore further in what follows: insofar as our projects and interests connect us to the world, our relation to them is what first allows us to determine ourselves as something. The fact that we, in a certain respect, first become “real” through these relations implies a concept of self-realization whose distinctive feature is that it conceives of self-realization not in terms of an individual’s inner growth or “coming to oneself” but as a certain kind of relation to, engagement with, or involvement in the world. According to this view, one can secure an identity for oneself only via a “detour through the world”; one can realize oneself only by engaging with the world. (I take up this topic again in chapter 10 in my discussion of romantic inwardness.) In that case, self-alienation must be understandable as alienation from the world and, conversely, alienation from the world (from meaningful others and from the other in general) must manifest itself as self-alienation.
(3) INTERPRETATIONS: THE LOSS OF RELATIONS AND IDENTIFICATION
In the following sections I will discuss two interpretations of alienation: as a loss of relations (a loss of involvement in the world) and a loss of identification (a loss of affective attachments to the world). Although these two aspects of alienation are closely related, they illuminate different aspects of the problem.
INDIFFERENCE AS A RADICAL LOSS OF RELATIONS
How precisely are we to understand radically alienating detachment as a phenomenon of alienation? How are we to imagine the termination of involvement in the world we have been describing? Obviously not as a detachment from this or that particular thing: in a strange way Perlmann does not seem to be alienated from anything specific, but rather from the world in general. This peculiar condition of complete disengagement manifests itself, for example, in his astonishment at the fact that he can no longer seem to manage to have “views,” even though it is part of his profession to take positions on theoretical issues. “What had it been like when he still had opinions? Where had they come from? And why had the source dried up? Can you decide to believe something? Or do opinions just happen to you?”5 Someone who asks such questions has not grown uncertain merely about one position or another; he has lost the foundation that enables him to develop positions at all. In a certain sense he now asks his questions “from nowhere.” He has “catapulted himself” out of the processes and relations he was once part of. Even Perlmann’s astonishment points to a process of alienation. Is it not generally the case that one simply has opinions? This is not to say that we do not form, refine, and revise opinions—that we do not sometimes develop our positions as a result of prolonged learning processes. Yet it is usually not the case that we begin from a condition in which we have no opinions in order then to enter a space where we have them. Forming opinions is a process of transformation, something that is “carried out” and in the course of which new opinions develop out of existing ones, new information is added to old, and a new constellation of opinions is formed. Thus already the question where opinions come from—formulated this abstractly—points to a problem. It is difficult to see how someone who asks this question could ever come to have opinions. We can also formulate the problem more generally: what Mercier here calls opinions are the fundamental orientations and stances by means of which one finds one’s way in the world and creates order for oneself out of it. We acquire these orientations, however, only in “finding our way,” only by actually doing it. If we ask ourselves what we ought to do, we are already in the middle of doing something; if we are uncertain what opinion we should have about something, we already have an opinion, however diffuse, and we are asking about its correctness.
THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE
The phenomenon of losing one’s points of reference can be understood, following Thomas Nagel, as taking the perspective of the “view from nowhere,” a view that transcends one’s own involvements in the world and allows one to look at life and the world from the outside.6 In this sense, losing the points of reference within the world from which one acts and suspending the actions in which one is normally absorbed means no longer regarding as important what used to be important (and what presents itself as important only when one is involved in one’s life rather than observing it from the outside). One could claim that the “question of meaning” becomes a problem in precisely the moment when such a loss of relation to the world arises since from a nonsituated, external perspective one’s own life must appear objectively meaningless. It is for precisely this reason that, as Nagel acknowledges, the view from nowhere harbors a risk of alienation.7 Nagel, however, believes this alienation to be unavoidable. On the one hand, things can appear important and meaningful only “from the inside;” on the other hand, he claims, we cannot evade the possibility of taking a standpoint “from the outside.” We are in a position, then, to take both perspectives, the subjective and the objective, without, however, being able to reconcile them.
According to Nagel, it is this irreconcilable tension that inevitably produces in our lives what one could call the absurd. Thus, for him, alienation, or at least its possibility, is constitutive of how humans relate to themselves and to the world. This implies that alienation can no longer be formulated or evaluated as a problem, but only as part of the human condition. (This view, in fact, reflects an entire tradition that found expression above all in existentialist literary texts of the 1950s; it is not accidental that Nagel makes reference to the now mostly forgotten buzzword of the time: the absurd.)
It is also possible, however, to give a different assessment of the phenomenon, the starting point of which is suggested by Nagel’s own account. From the perspective of the broadly pragmatist thesis noted earlier—that our practical involvement and dealings with things in the world are the primary ways (both temporally and constitutively) in which we relate to self and world (and which precede the possibility of distancing and detachment)—the loss of relations and the radical detachment from the world described here can be understood as a kind of failure of apprehension. If, given this thesis, one accepts that we cannot meaningfully abstract from the practical relations that constitute the world for us, then what we have here is the loss of relation to something that we are at the same time always already related to—a relation of relationlessness. Of most importance for my argument here is that what Nagel conceives of as a dissolution of a relation turns out to be (from a Heideggerian or broadly pragmatist perspective) a failure to apprehend a relation that as such is foundational. Nagel fittingly describes the problem of the meaning of life that inevitably arises from the perspective of the absurd as “a form of skepticism at the level of motivation.”8 From the pragmatist perspective, however, these questions of meaning could turn out to be pseudoquestions, in the same sense in which pragmatists accuse epistemological skepticism of raising pseudoquestions.9 Nagel himself cites such an objection raised by Bernard Williams: “Perhaps, as Williams claims, the view sub specie aeternitatis is a very poor view of human life, and we should start and end in the middle of things.”10
INDIFFERENCE AS A LOSS OF IDENTIFICATION
I come now to the second interpretation (or second aspect) of the experience of alienation that is characterized by indifference: the loss of identification as the loss of affective attachments to oneself and the world. In order to justify the diagnosis of this phenomenon as alienation, our task here, too, is to understand how this kind of dissolution of relations remains nevertheless a relation.
I argued that relations to self and world are constitutively bound up with one another in such a way that alienation from the world necessarily leads to self-alienation. This thesis has two implications that must be further explicated. First, the self determines itself “from within the world.” It constitutes itself by identifying with projects and through an affective as well as a cognitive “investment” of things in the world; it constitutes itself through its interest in these things and its involvement with them. What we need to understand in all this is what identification means here. Second, this presupposes a claim about the boundary between inner and outer, or between myself and the world, that can be articulated with the help of William James’ Psychology.
I will briefly clarify these two implications now so that, in the fourth section of this chapter, I can explain why becoming distant from and indifferent to the world is a problem for the individual (since she obviously can distance herself from any such identifications) and hence why, to return to the opening example, Perlmann’s situation is to be understood as a loss of self and self-alienation and not as an (in his indifference) heightened independence and freedom in relation to the world.
IDENTIFICATION
The claim that what constitutes us is inseparably bound up with our identification with projects in the world points to a kind of interweaving of self and world that in the previous chapter we called identification.
What, though, does it mean to identify with something? In order to explain this I will start with the question of what it means in general to identify something. I can identify something as something (or someone as someone). I do this when I identify the sparkling thing on the floor as my earring that has fallen there or the man who is standing over there as the person who stole my handbag yesterday. I can also identify a strange tingling in my stomach as nervousness or as hunger. Identifying something as something means, then, establishing a correspondence. In order to do so I make a kind of comparison: I note that the man standing there has the same haircut and the same facial features as the one I saw yesterday in the subway just before he ran off with my handbag; I compare the earring lying there with the one that I possessed until just now. I remember that I always feel this rumbling in my stomach when I am hungry and that it stops when I eat something. I identify something as something, then, by discerning correspondences such as these.
But what does it mean to say that I identify with something or someone? What does the process of the comparison look like when someone identifies with her soccer club or her child? Clearly, what goes on in these cases cannot be a direct comparison or one that establishes a real correspondence. I cannot be identical with my soccer club nor with my child in the sense in which the two earrings prove to be identical or the same thing. Talk of identifying with something or someone can have only a figurative meaning. More precisely, I identify with the well-being or fate of someone or something. When someone identifies with her child, she identifies with the child’s well-being; when someone identifies with a soccer club, she identifies with its successes or defeats. I want my club to win; I desire happiness for my child. The identity here is not between me and the soccer club or between me and my child but rather between my child’s desires and my own or between the club’s (or club members’) hopes and my own. When the club wins, I feel that I have won. When my child is successful, I am proud. I am “identified” with the club or with my child’s well-being insofar as my own well-being and the satisfaction of my desires are bound up with my child’s well-being and the fulfillment of the club’s hopes.
What distinguishes, though, wishing something (or someone) success from identifying with something? What does the talk of identifying mean beyond wishing that things go well? When one identifies with something, one makes it a part of one’s identity or self-conception. In the one case I am satisfied with the success of something or I am pleased if someone is doing well, while in the other I tie my fate to that of the other person or thing in such a way that its fate is constitutive for my identity. In the one case I remain—despite all my goodwill—separated from the person or thing I wish well; in the other there seems to be a kind of introjection or “taking in” of something into myself. This is why we sometimes suspect an unhealthy lack of distance when we say that someone is completely identified with something.
It is difficult, however, to explain how we are to imagine this “taking in.” Perhaps we can only recognize it by its effect, one that William James pointed out and that Harry Frankfurt, too, repeatedly emphasizes: one recognizes that one is identified with something when one feels vulnerable with respect to it. I experience the soccer club’s defeat as my own. When my child is doing poorly, I do poorly. Identifying with something, then, means more than just a greater amount of goodwill, even if it may not always be possible to define clearly the boundaries between the two phenomena. The crucial (structural) point, however, seems to be the following: in the one case there is someone who wants something and relates to something, but who also remains separate from the object of her concern. In the other case we understand the identity in each instance as constituted through this relation; it is unimaginable outside this relation and is defined by it. For this reason the identity of someone who identifies with something is “entangled” with it.
This model—this basic pattern of identification—has two implications that will concern us. First, becoming engaged on the side of something that I identify with in this sense is not an act of altruism since my own fate is interwoven with that of the thing (or person). Second, if I identify with something, that thing has more than instrumental significance for me. The sponsor who wishes the soccer club success so that her investment pays off has (at least in this respect) not identified with it. The club’s success is for her a means to the end of economic success. Their fates are interwoven with each other in a certain sense, but not in the way that identification implies. (This can be seen in the fact that the sponsor will drop the club if it continues to lose, whereas the fan who really identifies with the club remains true to it in good times and bad.)
“A FLUCTUATING MATERIAL” (WILLIAM JAMES)
With this in mind we can further articulate the thesis of the entanglement of self and world. If one accepts—as the claim that alienation from the world is self-alienation seems to presuppose—that the self constitutes itself in its identificatory relations to projects, persons, and objects in the world, then the separation between inner and outer and between self and world is called into question.
William James’s pragmatist conception of the self attempts to do justice to precisely these points. James distinguishes the empirical self (“Me”) from the “pure ego.” What is of interest here is not this distinction itself but the account he gives of the Me. James ascribes various dimensions to the Me: a material dimension (which includes the body) as well as social and spiritual dimensions. The distinctive characteristic of the Me—James understands it as the “self in its widest sense”—is a certain form of identificatory relation: “It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours or are they us?”11 What James calls the self, then, is not a fixed entity with a clear dividing line between inner and outer. Things belong to me more or less (or constitute the Me more or less) according to how strong this identificatory relation is.
We see, then, that we are dealing with a fluctuating material,12 the same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and, then again, as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.13
What is my own—what belongs to me (myself)—is not, then, somewhere inside; it constitutes itself in relating to the external world. As mentioned earlier, the world includes social relations and relations of recognition, in addition to the world of things and the property one can acquire within it; that is, it includes, in addition to the yacht, nonmaterial goods such as honor as well. Thus, if identification means understanding something as “part of myself,” I am everything I can identify with. I am not myself prior to or beyond these identifications but in them.
What does this imply for Perlmann’s indifference and for the relation between self and world it involves? Perlmann can be described as someone who can no longer identify with anything; his indifference means a loss of identification. In the novel this process of losing his identifications is vividly described: when his views are called into question—as a rival does at the conference—he no longer feels dejected and attacked as he did when he was still ambitiously pursuing his career and he no longer experiences that feeling of triumph when he wins an argument. It no longer feels to him as though it were his triumph, as though it belonged to him, even though he brought it about himself. The fact that everything has become indifferent to him produces the impression that it was not he who wrote the text or he who won the argument. (This is expressed, too, by the metaphor of local anesthesia.) But if the Me, as James suggests, is pieced together out of precisely such affective investments in the external world and such identifications in the world, then the question arises as to what exactly he, Perlmann, really is under such circumstances if so little of what constituted who he is still remains. If, according to James, the self is a “fluctuating material” that can expand or shrink and be wider or narrower, then the self is as large or wide as the circle of its identificatory relations. Perlmann’s self, then, has “shrunk” in his phase of indifference; he experiences what James calls a “shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness.”14 Against this backdrop one can claim that the indifference to the world into which Perlmann falls threatens himself as well and that his indifference to the world goes hand in hand with an indifference to himself. If nothing is important to someone any longer, then he is also no longer important to himself. Precisely this phenomenon can be understood as a process of self-alienation that is mediated by alienation from the world.
But why is a shrunken self of this kind an alienated self? Why, in order to realize oneself, must one actively take part in the world? The background assumption here is the following: it appears to be part of leading a life as a person that one pursues projects in one’s life or has aspirations for one’s life such that one is not indifferent to everything. This assumption, as one can see, implies a conception of self-realization as an active appropriation of the world, as I presented it in the introduction in connection with Hegel and Marx. One can sharpen this basic point by saying that the self must realize itself in the world in order to become real. But why is that so?
(4) THE AMBIVALENCE OF INDIFFERENCE—FREEDOM OR LOSS OF SELF?
Even if someone who is indifferent can be diagnosed as having a “shrunken self,” what justifies thinking of this as a problematic process of self-alienation and loss of self? To be sure, “withdrawing one’s feelers from the world” and “clipping” one’s ties to others (and to everything that is “other” more generally) is not without consequences. To what extent, though, does such a withdrawal mean that an individual is alienated from herself or even threatened with regard to what constitutes her identity? How small may a shrunken self become without it amounting to a loss of self, and how far can one withdraw into an inner citadel without thereby losing oneself?15 This seems to presuppose certain assumptions about what belongs to a complete or at least to a sufficiently extended self—assumptions that are not so easy to make, precisely when one assumes that the self is malleable.
This leads to two general questions: first, why should one have to be interested in the world? What is wrong with indifference? And, second, what justifies the claim that if someone abandons her interest in the world she also loses interest in herself? Can one not take the world to be unimportant and still consider oneself important? In the end the answers to these two questions will be connected with the point that is crucial for the concept of alienation, namely, the extent to which indifference, too, is a (deficient) relation—and therefore understandable as alienation.
I want briefly to expand on the problems here. In this case, too, one is tempted to say that there is a fundamental ambivalence.16 If being detached from the world (when evaluated negatively) appears to be an instance of alienation, one could also suspect that it harbors an emancipatory potential.17
Does not the possibility of withdrawing or distancing oneself from the world also contain a potential for independence? By withdrawing from the world and pulling back from one’s identifications, the “area open to attack” in which one can be wounded becomes smaller. If, following James’s line of thought, we no longer place value on our clothes, our children, and our projects, then losing them or seeing them do poorly can no longer grieve us. One could even envy our indifferent Perlmann as someone who is suddenly free from all cares and no longer bound by anything, someone who lives in a state of complete agreement with himself. Insofar as he no longer cares about his earlier views and becomes less and less concerned with his reputation, he can no longer be wounded and no longer needs recognition. It is like Hegel’s characterization of the ancient Stoic: “He no longer counts as part of himself everything that belongs to desire and fear, and this puts him in the position of being an alien to himself.”18 The Stoic who withdraws from the world into himself is “identical with himself” inasmuch as he no longer directs himself (his will) toward what is “other” and inasmuch as he is not tied to the world by desire or fear. Someone who no longer wills and desires has nothing more to fear. This constitutes his sovereignty, the sovereignty of someone who is indifferent. On this view, complete indifference would be the height of freedom. Dependent on nothing and no one, defined as nothing and no one: indifference makes one free.
But, given what has been said previously, can I “be in agreement with myself” without being attached to things in the world? Can I be free without wanting something in and from the world? And to what extent is someone free to whom her life does not matter? As Martin Löw-Beer says, it is “doubtful that a person is autonomous if it does not matter to her how she lives.”19 But why is that so? What is ultimately at stake here are the conceptions of personal identity, freedom, and self-realization bound up with the stances I have sketched earlier.
In what follows I take up two very different approaches, both of which consider the freedom of indifference to be deficient. In examining the phenomenon of boredom, Harry Frankfurt develops the claim that the withdrawal of interest from the world leads to a loss of vitality or an emptying of life that results in the destruction of personality, a dissolution of the person (or of what constitutes a person as such). Hegel’s discussion of the ancient Stoics is also of interest in this context because it points out the deficiencies of a conception of freedom based on indifference. Whereas Frankfurt offers an argument that appeals to the implications of what it is to be a person and that is to a certain extent grounded in a view of human nature, Hegel offers an immanent form of argument directed at the self-contradictory and incomplete nature of freedom “in the citadel.” I will present both arguments and then examine to what extent they support my claim about the problematic nature of indifference and its status as a form of alienation.
“LIVELINESS” AND AVOIDING BOREDOM
For Harry Frankfurt, it is “wholeheartedness” in identifying with specific desires that constitutes the self’s unity and it is commitments and volitional necessities that define its contours. For this reason the fact that we are in general interested in something—that something is important to us—is so fundamental. Indifference, the absence of such interests and of “care” in general amounts to a dissolution of the self. This suggests that indifference—the loss of identifications, becoming indifferent to the world—can be understood as a threat to personhood. Accordingly, someone who is not interested in anything, like someone who has no ties, has no identity. A person for whom nothing is important leads “a life without meaningful activities.”20 Someone who constantly confronts life with indifference lives, as Frankfurt explains, a life in boredom precisely because nothing in such a life can be significant. What speaks against leading such a life? Frankfurt takes a very decisive position here: “I believe that the avoidance of boredom is a very fundamental human urge. It is not a matter of distaste for a rather unpleasant state of consciousness” (89). His argument is based on a certain view of human nature: a life of boredom means in a certain respect not really being alive: “It is the essence of boredom that it involves an attenuation of psychic liveliness” (89). The self, according to this view, is not alive in a real sense, not alive as a person, if it cannot actively relate to the world through identifications. Having interests and investing the world with significance are necessary conditions of being a person at all. For this reason Frankfurt also argues that the self—in an existential, not a biological sense—can be understood only as an active, expansive self. It constitutes itself in relating to the world. We are, as persons, insofar as we relate to a world through identifications that enable us to experience it as meaningful, and personhood dissolves when this is lacking.
The justification Frankfurt gives for this diagnosis is interesting, as well as the implications it has for the connection between a person’s relation to self and her relation to the world. His view, not so distant from Marxist and pragmatist positions, combines two theses: first, that we develop or “come to” ourselves as persons by relating to the world; second, a thesis concerning the development of our capacities to perceive and differentiate: if nothing is important or significant in the world, then the “organs” do not develop—one can think of the development of sensory organs—that are capable of perceiving the world in its diversity.
Being bored entails a reduction of attention; our responsiveness to conscious stimuli flattens out and shrinks; distinctions are not noticed and not made, so that the conscious field becomes increasingly homogeneous. The general functioning of the mind diminishes. Its tendency is to approach a complete cessation of significant differentiation within consciousness; and this homogenization is, at the limit, tantamount to the cessation of conscious experience altogether (89).
If nothing in the world interests us, we become stunted. If nothing makes a difference anymore, we lose our capacity to differentiate.
Thus the self as something definite and differentiated develops its capacities to perceive and differentiate only through contact with a differentiated world in which things are significant. If, on the contrary, nothing in the world is important and we are not tied to it by any interests, then our organs of perception do not develop. This leads to a loss of liveliness: we are dulled and remain undifferentiated. The “active self” ceases to exist. “A substantial increase in the extent to which we are bored undermines the very continuation of psychic activity. In other words, it threatens the extinction of the active self” (88). Thus, if (radical) boredom leads to a loss of self, avoiding boredom is an imperative of self-preservation: “What is manifest by our interest in avoiding boredom is therefore not simply a resistance to discomfort but a quite elemental urge for psychic survival. It is natural to construe this as a modification of the more familiar instinct for self-preservation. It is connected to ‘self-preservation,’ however, only in an unfamiliarly literal sense—in the sense of sustaining not the life of the organism but the persistence of the self” (89). Self-preservation here is not understood in a biological sense, since clearly the natural person continues to exist even if she retreats from the world without interests. But the person, as someone who leads an active life of her own and relates to it, dissolves.
In this sense our interest in the world and the process through which we imbue it with significance represent constitutive conditions of a person’s acquiring a relation to self. We relate to ourselves and are important to ourselves to the degree to which the world is important to us. That follows conceptually from the fact that we determine ourselves—give ourselves specific properties—through the things that are important to us. Persons relate to themselves and are important to themselves in what they do.
Can something to whom its own conditions and activities do not matter in the slightest properly be regarded as a person at all? Perhaps nothing that is entirely indifferent to itself is really a person, regardless of how intelligent or emotional or in other respects similar to persons it may be (90).
And, insofar as (according to this account) taking oneself seriously—regarding oneself as important—can mean nothing more than taking oneself seriously in what one does and what one cares about, it is inseparably bound up with taking the world seriously. This is why indifference with respect to the world is tied to indifference with respect to oneself. A world that has become lifeless and insignificant goes hand in hand with a subject that has become lifeless and insignificant. This means that the question raised earlier regarding what is false or problematic about indifference can no longer be seriously posed: it is not only that someone cannot be autonomous who is indifferent to how she lives; someone who is indifferent to how she lives does not exist at all as a person.21 Applied to the example of Perlmann this means that it would not be only his intellectual capacities—his intellectual capacity to differentiate—that would fade if he continued to find nothing important and could no longer form opinions in any areas of life. In general, one could witness the emotional and cognitive “wasting away” of one’s own personality: alienation from the world would result in self-alienation.
“THE SPURNING OF EXISTENCE” (HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF STOICISM)
Hegel’s critique of ancient Stoicism (or of Stoicism as a way of conducting one’s life) is helpful for shedding further light on the relation between freedom and indifference. Stoicism, of course, is not to be equated with indifference, and Perlmann is no Stoic. Nevertheless, there is a point of contact between the two that helps to illuminate the question I have posed. On Hegel’s account, a Stoic is someone who seeks to attain “inner freedom” by becoming indifferent, by disengaging from the external world. In relation to the world, he cultivates, as Hegel puts it, “not a dull but a willed indifference.”22 What merely happens to Perlmann (becoming indifferent to the world) is for the Stoic a strategy: “He no longer counts as part of himself everything that belongs to desire and fear, and this puts him in the position of being an alien to himself” (290). Expressed in the same terms we have already used, the Stoic keeps the “area open to attack” in which the world can affect, disappoint, or enslave him as small as possible. If I do not want honor, no one can affect me by dishonoring me; if I reduce my needs to what is absolutely necessary, I do not lose my freedom when they are not met. In this sense Stoicism means a “spurning of existence” that appears to itself capable of withdrawing from social and natural sources of compulsion (294). It is crucial that this strategy is conceived of as a means for attaining freedom: the Stoic seeks to attain inner freedom through indifference to the external world. According to Hegel’s description, the Stoic’s will is “the will of the subject, who . . . firmly does not permit himself to be moved by anything other (desires, pain, and so forth), who wants only his freedom and is prepared to give up everything else—one who, if he experiences external pain or misfortune, separates this from the interiority of his consciousness” (288). In separating himself in this way he is free “in his thoughts” since he is no longer tied to the world, which could otherwise challenge his independence.
What is important for our inquiry is the argument Hegel employs to criticize an inner freedom attained in this way. His critique of a freedom gained by renouncing attachments as empty and abstract leads to an alternate model of freedom that is defined positively. When the freedom that results from the “spurning of existence” fails to give itself any specific properties, a contrasting picture of freedom emerges—a positive, actually realized freedom of the individual who is capable of giving herself specific properties in the world and of understanding and realizing herself in her relations to the world.
What then is problematic about the Stoic’s inner freedom? There are several related problems to take note of. First, Stoic freedom, indeed the entire Stoic existence, is defensive. When Hegel discusses Stoicism in the form in which it was historically most influential—he focuses on late Roman rather than Hellenistic Stoicism—he draws our attention to the social and historical conditions of the Stoic’s stance: “The power of the spurning of existence is great; the strength of this negative attitude is sublime. The Stoic principle is a negative moment in the idea of absolute consciousness; it is also a necessary appearance of the time. For if the reality of the world has been lost, as in the Roman world, and real spirit or life has disappeared in the abstract universal, then consciousness, whose real universality is destroyed, must retreat into its individuality and preserve itself in its thoughts” (294). Stoicism is described here as a reaction to the loss of “real universality” and the “reality of the world” that—with all the greatness that Hegel grants it—bears the scars of this loss, a deficiency that reveals itself in the resigned and private character of this reaction. “The noble Romans therefore have demonstrated only the negative, this indifference in regard to life and to everything external. They were able to be great only in a subjective or negative manner, in the manner of a private man” (296). The Stoics’ conception of sovereignty—as a “flight from reality”23—is characterized, then, by powerlessness with respect to the external world, and it bears this as a kind of blemish. The question is then: is there freedom in the “freedom of the private man”? Or, formulated differently, is that really freedom or merely freedom in a deficient form?
Hegel’s response is that the Stoics’ “subjective or negative manner” points to a deficient form of freedom. Their freedom remains “abstract freedom” or “abstract independence” (294); the independence of Stoic consciousness exists “only in thoughts.” “Abstract” here means something like “not having become real” or not determinate in its content. “But Stoic consciousness goes no farther than concepts; it does not succeed in knowing the content, or what the work is that it should perform” (289). We have here, then, a freedom that, in Hegel’s terms, yields no “ethical [sittliche] reality,” but exists only in the individual’s subjectivity: “What matters is not that the condition of the world should be rational or just but only that the subject as such should assert his freedom in himself” (294).
This means, however, that it is questionable whether an individual can be free in a purely inner sense, whether the incapacity to materialize freedom socially or to give it “reality” must not have an effect on the individual’s freedom (and the reality of her self). One could call this the “worldlessness” of this kind of freedom: the subject that is free merely inwardly does not give itself a world; it does not externalize itself and does not realize itself in the world. “The ethical reality is not expressed as an enduring, created work that repeatedly creates itself” (288). And Hegel’s critique of this is that this freedom is merely an ideal and not a reality; it does not therefore provide the point of reference freedom needs in order to realize itself. This freedom remains “formal” and attains no “content” (290).
The underlying idea of freedom here can be understood by turning to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Formulated schematically, the basic thought is that freedom must give itself reality, must determine, concretize, or realize itself as something, and this has two aspects. On the one hand, the merely negated world, as negated, remains external to the individual, hence alien and not subject to her influence. Actual, realized freedom, in contrast, consists not in abstracting from the world but in appropriating it. The important point here is that this appropriation is a transformation. The abstract, negative freedom of withdrawing from the world, in contrast, remains, in its withdrawal, bound to what it withdraws from (or negates); it can reject it but not transform it. Realized, positive freedom in Hegel’s sense refers, then, to an appropriative transformation (or transformative appropriation) of the conditions under which it realizes itself.24 Freedom means being able to make something—namely, the conditions under which one lives—one’s own. And, conversely, an independence that preserves itself only by disregarding the actual world remains abstract. As Allen Wood puts this point:
We do not achieve true self-sufficiency in relation to an other by escaping it or separating ourselves from it—as by Stoical aloofness from our external condition, or Kantian detachment from empirical motives. Such a strategy is self-defeating, like the strategy of the neurotic personality that avoids the trauma of failure by precluding from the outset any possibility of success. True independence in relation to an other is achieved rather by struggling with otherness, overcoming it, and making it our own.25
On the other hand, the person remains unreal because she lacks all specific properties. Becoming a person for Hegel means “putting one’s will into something,” and that also means giving oneself specific properties by willing something in the world. In such a relation to the world, the person first realizes herself as a person, and in that her freedom first becomes concrete.
Hegel can be understood here as developing a dialectic of freedom and determinacy. If I identify with nothing, then nothing limits me. I can then do anything. The problem, however, is that being able to do anything also means that I elude being “grasped” and that I have no determinate contours. I am not a specific person who wants and is able to do specific things; instead, my freedom remains empty and abstract. As long as I do not put my will into anything determinate, this freedom is not real but only an indeterminate possibility. Hence the individual who locates her freedom in not identifying with anything, in not determining herself as anything and not putting her will into anything, falls prey to an erroneous idea of sovereignty and independence—erroneous, because such a position is grounded in a one-sided and formal idea of freedom or independence. (Thus Hegel and Frankfurt share the idea that a person must commit herself to and identify with something in order to make her freedom concrete.)
A will that remains indifferent to its concrete properties is therefore not free in the full sense. It is indeed free to renounce identifications, but at the price of the self’s emptiness and impoverishment. On this basis one could also argue against what Nietzsche would later call the “free spirit.”26 Freedom of choice, then, is only the formal aspect of freedom. The freedom of indifference, of distancing and renouncing identifications, is incomplete, and it becomes complete only when the will determines its content by choosing something determinate or orienting itself positively toward something.
Of course, the negative or merely formal side of freedom has for Hegel its own rightful claims (and not merely historically): the “right of indifference” consists in the requirement that in order to be able to determine oneself freely, as something, one must be able to abstract from that very quality. Raymond Geuss has pointed out that in his positive conception of freedom Hegel attempts to integrate both the act of reflection (which depends on the dissolving of attachments) and that of identification. The individual who determines herself must—in agreement with Frankfurt’s theory of identification and wholeheartedness—determine herself as something. She must do this, however, in a reflective act of free choice that presupposes the possibility of distancing herself from what she is at present. Thus for Hegel—in any case one can describe his attempt in this way—negative freedom is a constitutive condition of positive freedom; negative freedom is sublated (aufgehoben) into positive freedom. One can sharpen these thoughts even further by returning to the views of Frankfurt discussed in chapter 7: for Hegel commitment is not only (as for Frankfurt) a condition of freedom; it is also the case (in contrast to Frankfurt) that freedom is a condition of having commitments. (This same structure underlies the theme of the free appropriation of self and world that I will contrast in part 3 with the processes of alienation diagnosed here.)
(5) INDIFFERENCE, SELF-REALIZATION, AND ALIENATION
My discussion of Frankfurt and Hegel has the following implications for the question of how indifference can be understood as a phenomenon of alienation:
One can conceive of indifference as alienating insofar as it can be understood as a deficient mode of asserting one’s independence. It is deficient because in it real independence—which would consist in being able to relate to projects one has set for oneself in the world in an identificatory and appropriative manner—is not yet realized. If, as I propose, we can call this kind of relation self-realization, then indifference threatens individuals’ possibilities for realizing themselves. The aspect of freedom that is part of indifference—dissolving one’s entanglements in the world—points, in contrast, to the fact that one must realize oneself rather than some inescapable trait or commitment or some objective idea, that (therefore) individuals must make what they do in the world their own by freely appropriating it. This presupposes the possibility of distancing oneself. To the extent that indifference includes the experience that a world of established meanings can suddenly become meaningless—that one can distance oneself not only from social norms one has been subjected to but also from the entire network of meaningful relations in which one previously found one’s orientation—it is also an emancipatory, even a “dereifying” experience. It is in seeing that the world can become meaningless and that I can distance myself from it that I first experience that it is I myself who gives the world this meaning and who is actively involved, not merely passively wrapped up, in it. In this respect indifference is not only an experience of powerlessness but also of power: the world is not significant in itself but only through me; things are not important of themselves; instead, I make them so by identifying with them. This realization becomes an instance of alienation when one fails to conclude from it that one must give the world meaning oneself—that is, when indifference turns into a sense that it is impossible to be involved in the world as a being that actively shapes it. In other words, the world becomes mine when I (actively) appropriate it for myself.
Hence indifference, the possibility of distancing, and also, at times, the fading of the world, as Perlmann experiences it, can be understood as the obverse side of identificatory relations to the world. On the other hand, if indifference is total, it becomes an experience of alienation. Taking up my account of alienation as a relation of relationlessness, one can then argue that the separateness from the world that an attitude of indifference produces, or from which it arises, is illusory; even in indifference there is still a relation to the world—a defensive relation that has been shown to be deficient.