Translator’s Introduction
1. Portions of this introduction are taken from a review of Jaeggi’s book that I wrote shortly after it was first published; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (http://ndpr.nd.edu), July 2, 2007.
2. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 119, 121.
3. “It is a great obstinacy—the kind of obstinacy that does honor to human beings—that they refuse to acknowledge . . . any [authority] that has not been justified by thought. This obstinacy is the distinctive characteristic of the modern age.” Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 2 (translation amended).
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, 3. Shlomo Avineri similarly notes that alienation has become the “most popular of Marx’s phrases.” Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, 2.
2. For the philosophical discussion see, among others, Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics and Radin, Contested Commodities. See also Jaeggi, “Der Markt und sein Preis.”
3. Thus in December 1999, in covering the militant protests in Seattle against economic globalization at a meeting of the “World Trade Organization,” a commentator in Newsweek noted: “There does seem to be a common sense of alienation among a surprising number of Americans. Dan Seligman, head of The Sierra Club’s trade office, defines the new mood as a feeling of ‘loss of control’ in a world of rapid change and turbocharged global capitalism.” “The New Radicals” (emphasis added).
4. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.
5. For the ambivalences of such developments see Honneth et al., Reification.
6. See Misik, Genial dagegen, which also provides an interesting synopsis of contemporary cultural phenomena that respond to the problem of alienation, from the critique of commercialization of a rock band like Wir sind Helden to the theater of René Pollesch.
7. See also Axel Honneth’s reconstruction of the idea of reification in terms of a theory of recognition: Honneth, Reification.
8. I have treated this thesis in detail in the last chapter of my study of Hannah Arendt; see Jaeggi, Welt und Person.
9. Within critical theory, alienation critique aligns itself with aspects of Hegelian social philosophy in opposition to liberal Kantian or justice-oriented theories.
10. Ursula Wolf, for example, discusses the objection that with regard to ethical questions “many humans today find life to be so meaningless, fragmented, and apathy-inducing that the question of the good life in general is no longer compelling.” Wolf, Das Problem des moralischen Sollens, 176.
11. See Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” 4, 28–29.
12. See Lohmann, Indifferenz und Gesellschaft. Lohmann impressively articulates this dimension of Marx’s position by investigating the strands of alienation critique in his work (and its transformations) against the backdrop of challenges posed by systems theory.
13. With this I do not mean phenomenology in a methodologically strict sense but rather merely a procedure that is oriented toward phenomena.
1. “A Stranger in the World”
1. Israel and Maass, Der Begriff Entfremdung.
2. Habermas, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, 48.
3. MacIntyre, Marxism, 23.
4. I borrow the expression “experiential content” from Negt and Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. It refers to concepts that make experiences possible and that, in turn, give life to those same concepts.
5. As Raymond Geuss says, all interesting philosophical concepts are “impure.” Raymond Geuss, Glück und Politik, 56.
6. See the “Translator’s Introduction.”
7. Schacht, Alienation, 116.
8. Nicolaus, Hegels Theorie der Entfremdung, 27.
9. Theunissen, Selbstverwirklichung und Allgemeinheit.
10. There is no disagreement on this among interpreters of Rousseau. Thus, Hans Barth describes Rousseau as a theoretician of alienation “avant la letter.” Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie, 105. And, according to Bronislaw Baczko: “The Hegelian-Marxian term [alienation] corresponds precisely to the condition for which Rousseau has no name but which he constantly describes.” Baczko, Rousseau, 27.
11. Rousseau, The Discourses, 124.
12. Ibid., 187.
13. Frederick Neuhouser brings this out very decisively in his interpretation of Rousseau. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, 55–81.
14. For the discussion of atomism in social philosophy, see Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” 211–229.
15. I am speaking here of Hegel’s treatment of alienation as a problem of contemporary society. His philosophical concept of alienation, on the other hand, exhibits the following structure, which informs Marx’s concept as well: alienation is the self-alienation of Spirit that is unable to recognize its own products as such. On this level the concept of alienation is not necessarily intended as pejorative or even normative. See Nicolaus, Hegels Theorie der Entfremdung regarding the various dimensions of Hegel’s theory of alienation.
16. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 135–39.
17. The 1844 Manuscripts first appeared in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe in 1932 and were enthusiastically welcomed at the time by Herbert Marcuse, who regarded them as revealing at last the philosophical foundations of Marx’s critique of political economy and theory of revolution.
18. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.
19. Lukács himself made comments to this effect in 1967: “To assess the impact of the book at that time, and also its relevance today, we must consider one problem that surpasses in its importance all questions of detail. This is the question of alienation, which, for the first time since Marx, is treated as central to the revolutionary critique of capitalism. . . . Of course the problem was in the air at the time.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxii. He explicitly points out the close connection between his view and the existentialist discussion of alienation in mentioning here both the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and the French postwar discussion, as well as in noting that “the alienation of man is a crucial problem of the age in which we live and is recognised as such by both bourgeois and proletarian thinkers, by commentators on both right and left” (ibid., xxii).
20. It is logical that Habermas’s grand-scale attempt to refound critical theory and reformulate it using the paradigm of communicative action leads to a reconstruction of the theory of reification: thus the thesis of the colonization of the life-world transforms one of the central intuitions of critical theory since Marx.
2. Marx and Heidegger
1. Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger, 31.
2. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man .
3. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” For a detailed and very instructive interpretation of these writings, cf. Wildt, Die Anthropologie des jungen Marx.
4. In discussing Marx, Charles Taylor speaks of a “Promethean expressivism,” highlighting the fact that Marx attempts to reconcile (as Taylor describes the problem) the need for expression, which constantly comes into conflict with the modern disenchantment of the world, with the modern emphasis on form-giving power. This expressivism is Promethean because it is not about expressing a (given) cosmic order or a divine will but about being able to express oneself through products created by humans; see, in this regard, Taylor, Hegel, 559 and preceding.
5. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 3:278–279.
6. I allude here to Daniel Brudney’s interpretation of the communist form of association as “structural friendship.” Brudney, “Die Rechtfertigung.”
7. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 3:276.
8. One could argue that this broadening of the Kantian prohibition against instrumentalization to include relations to self—that is, an ethical interpretation of that prohibition—is what makes the convergence of domination and meaninglessness possible.
9. “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some human being other than the worker. If his activity is a torment to him, it must be a pleasure and joy of life for someone else.” Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 3:278. Here alienation is traced back to a relation of domination, which, viewed more broadly, shows itself to be a relation of structural domination.
10. For a detailed and critical discussion of Marx’s theory of alienation and the idea of wealth employed in it, see Lohmann, Indifferenz und Gesellschaft.
11. Brudney, “Die Rechtfertigung,” 395–423.
12. Labor is understood, in Aristotelian fashion, as the distinctively human activity insofar as it is not exclusively determined by natural necessity or the call of nature. Thus it is possible to locate what Marx calls the distinctive feature of human labor not only in the fact that human labor is planned rather than guided by instinct but also in the fact that the human being “forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.” We should interpret in a similar manner his claim that in alienated labor the worker is animal in his human functions and human in his animal functions: “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 3:275.
13. To the extent that this paradigm conceives of the world only as an externalization of the self, Hannah Arendt’s critique of Marx, mentioned earlier, is not entirely unjustified. I discuss this in detail in chapter 5 of Jaeggi, Welt und Person.
14. The most detailed discussion of these problems can be found in Lange’s extremely instructive study: Lange, Das Prinzip Arbeit.
15. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 14.
16. Heidegger’s own reference to the concept of reification is proof that it makes sense to bring him into the present discussion:
It has long been known that ancient ontology works with “thing-concepts” and that there is a danger of “reifying consciousness.” But what does this “reifying” signify? Where does it arise? Why does Being get “conceived” “proximally” in terms of the present-at-hand and not in terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us? Why does this reifying always keep coming back to exercise its dominion? What positive structure does the Being of “consciousness” have, if reification remains inappropriate to it?
Heidegger, Being and Time, 487.
For the points of contact between the problems of alienation and reification in Lukács and Heidegger, see Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger.
17. This implies a conception of world different from that of traditional philosophy or traditional ontology (the philosophy of consciousness), as well as a different understanding of what the tradition understands as a “subject” that relates to the world.
18. Rentsch, Martin Heidegger, 122.
19. According to Heidegger’s conception, the mode of present-at-hand characterizes both natural science’s understanding of the world and our everyday understanding, which fails to make clear the ready-to-hand character of the things with which it deals and naively posits a separation between itself and the world.
20. Heidegger is not here merely espousing the claim that the subject creates or constitutes the world. “We are simultaneously master and slave of the world,” i.e., we understand ourselves on the basis of a world that at the same time is not simply there or given.
21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 84.
22. Ibid., 57.
23. Merker, “Konversion statt Reflexion.”
24. Ibid., 217.
25. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
26. Barbara Merker conceives of this as a difference between ontic and ontological dimensions, which she understands as “two different ways in which being can go wrong that nevertheless stand in a grounding relationship to one another”: “‘ontological confusions’, such as, for example, existence’s [Existenz] interpretation of itself as substance, and ‘ontic failures,’ which are characterized by a lack of autonomy, authenticity and appropriateness.” Merker, “Konversion statt Reflexion,” 217.
27. Heidegger, Being and Time, 93.
28. Ibid., 151.
29. This is a matter of dispute in the Heidegger literature. In this regard, see the debate about the pejorative and constitutive interpretations of the “They,” carried on, among others, by John Haugeland, Robert Dreyfus, and Robert Brandom.
30. Heidegger, Being and Time, 165.
31. Ibid., 164.
32. Habermas, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik.
3. The Structure and Problems of Alienation Critique
1. Fromm, “Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,” 189.
2. See Michael Theunissen’s Hegel interpretation, according to which “relations of indifference are merely veiled relations of domination.” Theunissen, Sein und Schein, 362f. Lohmann takes up this thesis in his study of Marx: Lohmann, Indifferenz und Gesellschaft .
3. Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy, 389.
4. Wood, Karl Marx, 3.
5. See Honderich, “Alienation,” 21.
6. Richard Bernstein, for example, regards precisely this ambiguity as the strength and potential of Marx’s theory of alienation, which, following Hegel, attempts to overcome the dichotomy between “is” and “ought”: “In his own way Marx is attacking the ‘myth of the given’—the idea that we can sharply distinguish that which is immediately given to us in cognition from what is constructed, inferred, or interpreted by us.” Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 72.
7. See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Williams discusses these thick concepts in the context of his proposal for overcoming the distinction between facts and values (among other places: 129, 143, and following).
8. Furth, Phänomenologie der Enttäuschungen, 45.
9. See Althusser’s thesis of the epistemological break: Althusser, For Marx.
10. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 11.
11. Ibid., 12.
12. Tugendhat, “Antike und Moderne Ethik,” 46.
13. For an overview of the discussion of subjective and objective criteria for quality of life, see Gosepath and Jaeggi, “Standards der Lebensqualität.”
14. Martha Nussbaum is probably the most prominent exponent of such a position. See, among others, Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities.
15. Marx saw very clearly the historicity of human nature due to our ability to shape ourselves and our world. For this reason the question of whether Marx’s social philosophy is perfectionist is more difficult to answer than it at first seems.
16. I do not want to say anything conclusive here about the question—unresolved and always topical—of whether it is possible to ground a theory of human nature and thereby provide an “anthropological” foundation for social philosophy. My project pursues a different course. For the different options for grounding social philosophy, see Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” 3–48.
17. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” 282.
18. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 28.
4. Having Oneself at One’s Command
1. I use “metaphysical” here in the (admittedly limited) pejorative sense, as it has gained currency in the contemporary literature. In this sense it refers (if also sometimes vaguely) to “ultimate values” that are justified in relation to transcendental sources, as opposed to the world of appearances.
2. See the “Translator’s Introduction” for an explanation of the phrase “having oneself at one’s command.”
3. Tugendhat, “Antike und Moderne Ethik,” 50.
4. Ibid., 55.
5. Ibid.
6. As, for example, in Steinfath, Orientierung am Guten.
7. Tugendhat, “Antike und Moderne Ethik,” 55 and following.
8. In this context Steven Lukes’s way of relating the concept of alienation to Marx’s theory is instructive:
Of course, Marx attributed a number of ills to capitalism: among them class domination and exploitation, waste of resources and energies, irrationality, inefficiency, poverty, degradation, and misery. “Alienation,” however, captures those factors—particularly acute under capitalism—that constitute unfreedom, and whose abolition would constitute human emancipation. The other ills I have mentioned are, of course, not unrelated to unfreedom, but alienation captures the central obstacles to “real freedom.”
Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 80f.
9. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 131.
10. In this context see Raymond Geuss’s extremely instructive attempt to sort out this set of problems: Geuss, “Auffassungen der Freiheit.”
11. Pippin, “Naturalness and Mindedness,” 194.
12. Here, in this section, I borrow from views I have developed elsewhere. See Jaeggi, “Aneignung braucht Fremdheit.”
13. It is well known that for John Locke the process of appropriation, understood as the mixing of something with the “labor of one’s own hands,” is the basis and legitimization of property.
14. Theunissen, “Produktive Innerlichkeit,” 23.
15. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 394.
Living One’s Life as an Alien Life
1. See Anna Kusser’s account of the paradox of an “essence-based critique”: “a person who does not correspond to the human essence precisely does not exhibit the essential properties of a human being. Although she does not realize the human essence, she somehow already partakes of this essence—it is ‘her’ essence as a human being to which she does not correspond.” Kusser, Dimensionen der Kritik von Wünschen, 55.
2. In this context it is not so important whether this essential core is conceived of on the romantic model, where what is realized is a distinctively unique individual nature, or on the Aristotelian model, where what is realized is a telos of human nature.
3. Jameson, Postmodernism.
4. I am alluding here to Heidegger’s analysis of equipment (das Zeug) in Being and Time.
5. Regarding this, see Margolis’s description of the cosmic self as one of the leading cultural concepts of modernity: “This self is the essential quality of the person, the center of feeling and worth that each of us has at the core of our being. It is knowable and we approach it in an attitude of discovery. This self cries out for expression.” Margolis, The Fabric of Self, 4.
6. Baumann, Die Autonomie der Person, 12.
7. Tugendhat also emphasizes the central importance of this question. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination.
1. I am alluding here to Erich Fromm’s characterization of alienation as a “feeling of powerlessness,” “Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,” 189.
2. One could object: if he is not unhappy and is even proud, how can he then be alien in his life? But these things seem to me separable. The feeling of alienness is not necessarily an expression of unhappiness, nor does it necessarily lead to it. One could claim at most that very strong feelings of happiness almost automatically go together with a degree of involvement that makes feelings of alienness improbable.
3. As Hannah Arendt formulates this point, it is “the function, however, of all action, as distinguished from mere behavior, to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably.” Arendt, On Violence, 30–31.
4. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 188.
5. For this reason, for example, adolescents whose states of mind are attributed to hormonal changes are right in feeling offended: in interpreting their behavior in this way one not only denies their individual uniqueness but also ascribes to them a certain powerlessness—and a corresponding lack of responsibility—in relation to their own reactions and feelings.
6. Transsexuals are a different case. Here it is not a matter of bodily processes and their control but of a thoroughgoing sense of being alien in one’s own body.
7. Put differently, of course events such as renting a house, entering into a marriage contract, and shopping on Saturdays are in themselves actions or chains of actions and not events. Thus it is already a metaphorical way of speaking when one says that these things appear as “events over which one has no influence” or as “a quasi-natural process.” Here, however, the contradiction lies precisely in (subjectively) experiencing an action as a mere event.
8. This does not, of course, mean that such an agent would not be responsible in a moral or legal sense.
9. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination.
10. The connection to Heidegger’s analysis of “fallenness” is obvious; see part 1, chapter 2.
11. I am presupposing here the following minimal definition of heteronomy [Fremdbestimmung]: I am heteronomous, or determined by something alien to me, when someone or something influences me in such a way that I end up following her (or its) will instead of my own. In this definition “someone or something” can be anonymous (e.g., a law or a convention), and influence admits of various degrees, up to and including outright coercion. There must always, however, be a foreign will that affects one’s own will, a “foreign law” that stands in opposition to “one’s own.” Something that has a dynamic of its own does not have in this sense a foreign will or foreign law. Perhaps one can also define heteronomy more broadly, but I think it undesirable to blur the distinction between a situation in which someone leads me to do something that she wants rather than I and the situation described earlier—that is, between a situation in which someone is (heteronomously) determined by something foreign (or alien) and one in which one is not determined at all.
12. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 371 (emphasis added).
13. It should be remembered that what is important in this example is not that conventions take the place of what is one’s own and represent, as it were, a foreign law.
14. This is not the same thing as social convention, but there is an aspect of conventions that elucidates especially well one of the crucial mechanisms that lead to this kind of rigidification, namely, a restriction of the possibilities of action, a limiting of alternatives.
15. This, too, does not from the outset have anything to do with conventions or with the fact that the guidelines for how to live come from others. What is important is not that I have the same apartment furnishings as others but that it is the furnishings themselves that prescribe how I am to live. Even if both aspects frequently occur together, unconventional forms of life can also rigidify in the sense described here without thereby becoming conventional. I treat the problem of conventionality in more detail in the following chapter in connection with a discussion of social roles and role behavior.
16. Tugendhat discusses the decentering of one’s own subjectivity as a demand that follows from precisely the fundamental “egocentricity” of our relation to the world. Tugendhat, Egozentrizität und Mystik.
17. I am speaking here only of the conditions that one can—in principle—have at one’s command. That there are also conditions under which one leads one’s life (beginning with bodily conditions) that are in principle not subject to our command is a different point.
18. Hannah Arendt, who always emphasizes our inability to control the consequences of our actions and understood this to be an essential feature of action (in contrast to the activities of producing and laboring), speaks in this context of a “web” in which our actions are always already immersed; see Arendt, Vita Activa.
19. One might think here of one aspect of the previously described situation: the child. It is improbable that parents could anticipate all the changes this new situation brings with it. Such a decision is, for this reason, also always a decision to “take things as they come.”
20. Plessner, Das Problem der Öffentlichkeit, 15.
21. This is an allusion to Heidegger’s analysis of the “They” in which it is said of most of what happens that “it was no one.” Hannah Arendt gives this phenomenon a social-critical twist, calling it “rule by nobody”; see chapter 2.
22. A penetrating example of not being present in a situation is provided by Gisela Elsner’s description of a mother who falls into a depression after the birth of her child: the screaming, demanding creature appears to her to be an incomprehensible monster; his signs of life dismay her. In dealing with the child, she is recognizably beside herself; she is too little present in her behavior for her to respond to his demands organically, as it were—to respond as though each of her actions followed “of its own” from the others. She observes herself from the outside in complete dismay; her reactions falter in every detail. She constantly does the wrong thing, which makes the situation even more difficult and menacing. This seems to me a good example because it contrasts with the picture of “happy mothers,” who master new and unexpected situations precisely because they identify with them, are present in the situations, and for that reason are able to respond from inside them. It also demonstrates that this is not an ability one can take for granted, that it is not at all instinctual. Elsner, Abseits.
23. I tend to regard posing the “question of meaning” in a fundamental way as always a symptom of crisis. This question can be answered only when it is connected back up to something concrete. Hence, as Freud already noted, it is hard to avoid a “suspicion of meaninglessness” in relation to the question of meaning.
24. I return to the problem of experimentation and a comparison of these two types of experiment in part 3, chapter 10.
25. For reasons already mentioned, accessibility seems to me to be a better concept than transparency because it emphasizes the practical character of this dimension of self-experience.
26. Hence the ethical importance of processes of self-deception for leading a life. For this, see Löw-Beer, Selbsttäuschung.
27. The normalizing effect of such horizons of experiences manifests itself not only in the fact that one cannot violate the convention but also in the fact that one must either follow it or violate it.
6. “A Pale, Incomplete, Strange, Artificial Man”
1. Plessner, Das Problem der Öffentlichkeit, 13.
2. “We are puppets, our strings pulled by unknown powers; there is nothing, nothing that we ourselves do.” Büchner, Dantons Tod, 100.
3. Regarding “Homo Sociologicus,” see Dahrendorf, Homo Sociologicus, 58.
4. Authentic in this sense means genuine, recognized, original, or unfalsified. Thus under the keyword of authenticity in subject catalogs of libraries one also finds titles such as “Testing the Authenticity of Precious Metals.”
5. The person most responsible for role theory’s prominence in sociology may have been Erving Goffman, with his analyses in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, though it was Dahrendorf’s book, cited in note 3, this chapter, that introduced role theory to Germany. The concept of a role seems to have been omnipresent, above all in the sociology of the 1950s and ’60s, such that nearly all dictionary entries for the term role theory begin with reflections on the reasons for the concept’s pervasive influence, and—whether they evaluate it positively or negatively—they trace its influence back to the concept’s intuitive plausibility and relevance to everyday life. In addition to its usage in sociology narrowly defined, the concept of a role also became, via “symbolic interactionism,” the central category of social psychology and theories of socialization. For an overview of role theory in sociology, see Claessens, Rolle und Macht and Joas, Die gegenwärtige Lage der soziologischen Rollentheorie; for the questions discussed in (early) theories of socialization, see Krappmann, Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. In what follows I am concerned with the topic of roles only insofar as it has implications for a theory of alienation.
6. Dahrendorf, Homo Sociologicus, 18.
7. Ibid., 12.
8. Of course, metaphors of the drama and of roles (still relevant today in the talk of society as a production or spectacle) have been used for a long time to describe the relation between individual and society; the idea that the world is a stage is present already in the sixteenth century, as seen in Shakespeare’s famous dictum “all the world’s a stage.” This way of speaking takes on a pejorative character, however, only against the backdrop of the ideal of authenticity described here.
9. Dahrendorf, Homo Sociologicus, 58.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. See also Lionel Trilling:
We nowadays say “role” without taking thought of its original histrionic meaning: “in my professional role,” “in my paternal, or maternal role,” even “in my masculine, or feminine, role.” But the old histrionic meaning is present whether or not we let ourselves be aware of it, and it brings with it the idea that somewhere under all the roles there is Me, that poor old ultimate actuality, who, when all roles have been played, would like to murmur “Off, off your lendings!” and settle down with his own original actual self.
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 10.
12. Cited in Margolis, The Fabric of Self, 90.
13. With regard to defining authenticity as a kind of individuality and uniqueness that transcends social roles, see also Charles Taylor’s account: “As [the ideal of authenticity] emerges, for instance with Herder, it calls on me to discover my own original way of being. By definition, this cannot be socially derived but must be inwardly generated;” Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 47.
14. Wilshire, in his very interesting book Role Playing and Identity, is, to my knowledge, the only one to shed light on the problems of the concept of a role in both spheres. Against a “transcendental-pragmatic” background, he first develops a theory of the drama and then a theory of identity in order to question, finally, the application of the role metaphor to offstage identity. He criticizes, among other things, the relative shallowness of the assumptions that sociological role theory uses in its analysis of theater, which it then uses as the basis for the analogy to offstage identities.
15. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of the waiter in Being and Nothingness. What he means though (and this is how the paradox is resolved) is that “being” is to be understood here not as “essence” but as “existence.” “I am a waiter” means “I exist as a waiter and could also be something else”—in contrast to the attribution “that is a stone.”
16. This was heard from a participant in a conference on autonomy. In fact, many people spontaneously answer the question of when they are themselves with “at home.” But why should it be that, in taking off one’s street clothes, one automatically arrives at one’s authentic self? Is not the clearly engaged student, for example, deceived when she assumes that at home (in this case, at her parents’ home) she is more herself than in the university seminar, even if at her parents’ home she can talk about everything under the sun but not about philosophy, her great interest? Should we not rather suspect that there are in both places parts of her self that she can act out to different extents?
17. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 253.
18. Ibid., 252–253.
19. One can see this also in the difficulty of producing unconventional behavior outside role behavior. It is not only that, when immediacy is cultivated, it itself easily becomes a studied pattern of behavior but also that, as a whole, such attempts appear to result almost necessarily in the establishment of new conventions.
20. See also Richard Sennett, who develops Plessner’s ideas into a diagnosis of the present. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man.
21. The phrase productivity thesis points to parallels to the contemporary discussion of social constructivism inspired by poststructuralism that I referred to in part 1.
22. Plessner, “Soziale Rolle und menschliche Natur,” 238.
23. Plessner develops a critique of the idea of community based on precisely the values of distance and of mediation that are given voice to here; Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community. For a productive use of Plessner’s concept of personal identity, see Richter, Grenzen der Ordnung.
24. Plessner, Das Problem der Öffentlichkeit, 19.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Even if “romantic” here is used very loosely, Plessner understands his position in opposition to a form of alienation critique that he understands as a remnant of romanticism: the “idea of human self-alienation” is for him “a magic word of undiminished evocativeness,” a “remnant of romanticism that burdens our relation to what is public, devalues it, and turns it into an annoyance;” Plessner, Das Problem der Öffentlichkeit, 12.
28. Simmel, “Soziologie,” 144.
29. My appeal to Simmel is admittedly one-sided since he is thoroughly ambivalent with respect to this point. As Undine Eberlein argues, there is a tension in Simmel between a “sociologistic” conception of the individual as an “intersection of social circles” and his later, philosophical conception of the subject as an “individual law,” which criticizes his earlier position and opposes to it the idea of an “unsocialized remainder.” Eberlein, Einzigartigkeit, 31.
30. See Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism.
31. See Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert, who in his encyclopedia article on Geneva had proposed the establishment of a theater: “I do not like the need to occupy the heart constantly with the stage as if it were ill at ease inside of us.” Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 16.
32. This might well be the main point common to all theories of intersubjectivity from Fichte(via Hegel) to Habermas and Honneth.
33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 263.
34. Ibid., 264.
35. Honneth, “The Struggle for Recognition,” 158–167. Honneth criticizes this implication of Sartre’s analysis by reinterpreting the phenomenon of being seen. To Sartre’s reductionist account he opposes a description that is rich in content with the “internal normative warp and weft of social interaction.” Ibid., 163. On the basis of this—with a view to the more complex theory of intersubjectivity that originates in Hegel and Fichte—one can diagnose (and criticize) in Sartre a reduction of intersubjectivity to self-assertion.
36. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259.
37. That this ambiguity appears in his analysis but is not thought through to a less negativistic solution is due to the fact that in the end Sartre remains trapped in a negative conception of freedom—even in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he abandons his methodological individualism and reflects on the conditions of collective action. I cannot go into further detail here with respect to my claim that in totalizing the suspicion of reification he falls back into an ideal of authenticity that contradicts his own theory; for a discussion of Sartre as well as a number of other authors that can be classified as belonging to a negativistic strand of recognition theory, see Jaeggi, “Anerkennung und Verdinglichung.” For an orienting discussion of this negativistic strand and a critique of reconciliation-based theories of recognition from (among others) the perspective of social theory, see Celikates, “Wo bleibt der ‘Kampf’ im Kampf um Anerkennung?”
38. Heidegger’s analysis of the “They” can also be interpreted in this way. It is possible to find a way out of the tension between the “They” as a transcendental structure and its pejorative character only if we understand authenticity as something that can be pursued—gradually—only within the “They.”
39. George Herbert Mead has a similar understanding of the relation between the conventionality and originality of roles:
In a society there must be a set of common organized habits of responses found in all, but the way in which individuals act under specific circumstances gives rise to all of the individual differences which characterize the different persons. The fact that they have to act in a certain common fashion does not deprive them of originality. The common language is there, but a different use of it is made in every new contact between persons; the element of novelty in the reconstruction takes place through the reaction of the individuals to the group to which they belong.
Mead, Mind, Self and Society, 198.
40. This is the basis of Goffman’s analysis; Dreitzel has evaluated this insight in considerable detail in Dreitzel, Die gesellschaftlichen Leiden.
41. Dreitzel, Die gesellschaftlichen Leiden, 331.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid. From the account of alienation as a lack of distance from one’s roles emerges a conception of self-alienation that is compatible with Marx’s, insofar as it involves the alienation of a being that is always already social from itself as a social being: “one can say that the loss of distance from one’s roles is synonymous with what Marx described as self-alienation.” Ibid. See, in opposition to this, Jutta Matzner’s critique of role theory: “If Dahrendorf praises Marx for having the right instinct with respect to the concept of a role—and, indeed, understood as a role in a play, as something its bearers can take off—he nevertheless misses the significance of the character’s mask: the ‘personal individual’ does not lie hidden under the mask as an unalienated remainder. He transcends existing society; the mask can be taken off only with the negation of class society.” Matzner, “Der Begriff der Charaktermaske,” 136.
44. See the “Translator’s Introduction.”
45. Dreitzel, Die gesellschaftlichen Leiden, 331.
46. Dewey, Experience and Education, 26.
47. Ibid., 36.
48. Taking the example of a computer hacker or a laboratory scientist: why should we consider someone who works on a single project with great energy and interest as limited and alienated, even if in pursuing her project she neglects many aspects of life that seem important to us? (Think of the caricature of the hacker: pimply, bleary-eyed, consuming chocolates and cola while sitting in front of the computer screen while avoiding people and light.) Even the most obvious one-sidedness of activities and capacities does not necessarily mean a restriction of experience in the sense of an inhibiting of further experiences. Whether or not very specific interests can open up further dimensions of the world is something that must be determined case by case.
49. Benn, A Theory of Freedom, 202.
50. Georg Simmel, 5. “Kapitel: Über die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise,” S. 100–116, in Über soziale Differenzierung Soziologische und psychologische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890).
51. See Goffman’s comments about the “obstinacy” that develops in the cracks and on the margins of roles: “Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.” Goffman, Asylums, 320.
52. This can be applied to Winnicott’s talk of true and false selves. The false self of someone who laughs when she thinks one ought to find something amusing, of someone who is interested in something that she thinks one ought to be interested in, and so forth, does not screen off an existent “true self” (as Winnicott misleadingly describes it at first); rather, it hinders its development. For Winnicott, the true self develops when the mother empathically “reflects” her child and thereby provides him with an image of himself. The false self, on the other hand, develops when the unempathic mother does not reflect the child but, instead, confronts him with her own defenses. The child then identifies with her defenses. “Since the child necessarily identifies with the picture that his fellow creatures construct of him in fantasy interactions, he develops an emergent self-consciousness out of a constitutive alienation that Winnicott conceives of as a ‘false self.’” This means that here, too, there are not two things, as it were, a true and a false self; rather, the false, alienated self develops in place of the true self. Thus, insofar as the false self “screens off” something, it hinders it in its development; see Mertens, Handbuch psychoanalytischer Grundbegriffe, 672.
53. Simmel, “Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers.”
54. Simmel elaborates this idea of a particular law by likening it to the moral law: “And this ideal is one whose demands are so strong, so objectively above all mood and arbitrariness—one could say: so elevated above the mere reality of the actor—that it is like a moral norm, which comes to the human being from his objective situation but can demand of him only the particular moral achievement his personality can and must yield in this situation, an achievement that would perhaps be completely different for a different personality under the same circumstances.” Simmel, “Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers,” 425.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 428.
7. “She but Not Herself”
1. This is how Harry Frankfurt describes the alienated person in “Freedom of the Will,” 22.
2. I want to speak here of the “center” or “margins” of a personality in a completely everyday and nontechnical sense. These concepts refer simply to more or less important desires and projects, things that are invested with more or less significance by the person in question and are therefore more or less central to the life of that person. This leaves open the possibility that apparently trivial things are of significance or can come to be recognized as such. This view emphatically does not decide the question of whether there is a core stock of desires or projects that makes up a person’s identity; this question will be discussed later.
3. It is possible that nearly all behaviors have an explicable meaning in the sense at issue in Freud’s account of the “psychopathology of everyday life.” I do not want to rule this out here. Our case, however, deals with a situation of explicit conflict in which the meaning is not implicit but has already become explicitly clear.
4. Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language, 15–44.
5. Psychoanalysis defines ambivalence as the “simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in the relationship to a single object—especially the coexistence of love and hate.” Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 26.
6. With regard to the relation between tragic conflicts and problems of alienation, it can be said that desires must first be one’s own in order to be able to come into a tragic conflict with each other. Someone who is indifferent knows no tragic conflicts, nor does someone who is governed by alien desires. In order to fall into tragic inner conflicts one must first identify with one’s desires. For this reason, too, abolishing alienation is not the same as resolving conflicts.
7. That an ambivalent conflict sometimes ends such that the desire that has been merely rejected is (re)interpreted into an alien desire depends on the psychological dynamic of such situations. Such instances are not cases of rationalization, nor are they the effect of a “normative power” that comes from the facticity of one’s own life history. Once someone has made the decision to deny a particular desire in favor of a competing one, further developments can lead to a situation where it appears in retrospect that no other decision was conceivable. In this sense the denied desire, which, figuratively speaking, marks a crossroads, at some point (if everything goes well) no longer belongs to one’s own life. This understandable process, however, can also become problematic: imagine someone who lives purely in her present desires and projects and retrospectively blocks out past rejections or failures completely. This represents a curious lack of depth that—like alienation from one’s own past—might be counted among the symptoms of self-alienation.
8. Geuss, “Auffassungen der Freiheit,” 6.
9. For the relation between emancipation and freedom, see Obermauer, “Freedom and Emancipation.”
10. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will,” 11–25.
11. Ibid., 12.
12. For our purposes this cannot yet be a sufficient description of the problem, if only because agreement can go in either direction, that is, by adapting first order desires to second or vice versa. I will return to this issue.
13. This marks an interesting parallel to Hegel’s theory of the will as developed in his Philosophy of Right. As in his account of the “purification of the drives” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §19), here one takes a position in relation to one’s own desires, out of which arises an evaluation of those desires that is characteristic of the structure of human freedom and personality. Just as in Hegel’s argument against the freedom of Willkür, I am not free simply when I do what I want. Rather, I am free—in a normatively more robust sense—when I am able to do what I want on the level of my second order volitions. If I can identify with one of my desires and am in a position to act effectively on it, I possess, according to Frankfurt, all the freedom I could want. However, with regard to the question as to what the process that makes a desire into my own consists in, Hegel’s and Frankfurt’s accounts diverge.
14. This should by no means be understood to mean that in general addicts are not persons. The wanton—someone who has never actually developed higher-level desires in any respect—is, empirically speaking, an extremely improbable case. Most addicts represent one or another version of the unwilling addict. One could even claim that self-reproach and self-detachment paired with denial make up a constitutive part of the symptom. Of those, on the other hand, who assertively affirm their addiction, Frankfurt’s model would have to claim that they have a second order volition to be an addict. Thus they are persons, even when we consider their stance imprudent. On the other hand—and this speaks in favor of Frankfurt’s account—it is not accidental that in some phases of addictions we say that someone is in danger of abandoning herself—that is, of losing herself as an acting, deciding, responsible person.
15. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 49.
16. Frankfurt, “Identification and Externality,” 58–68.
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Not being able to identify with oneself would mean, then, that I reject what I am because it does not correspond to the demands I place on myself or to the ideal I have of myself. To be sure, I do not want to be what I am (I do not, for example, want to be someone who always procrastinates in writing my lectures); I can, however, be easily identified (by myself as well as by others) as someone to whom, again and again, that very thing happens. It could be, then, that my ideal corresponds less to myself than my actual behavior does. If so, it would be inappropriate to say that I am alien to myself in these characteristics. There would then be behaviors and characteristics of mine that I reject that I must also, like it or not, identify with and recognize as belonging to me.
19. Frankfurt, “Identification and Externality,” 65.
20. Ibid. In this sense Frankfurt also says: “The distinction between internal and external passions is not the same as the distinction between what is and what is not ‘real’ in the sense of a person’s ideal image of himself.” Ibid., 64.
21. Ibid., 66.
22. Ibid., 68.
23. Ibid.
24. Frankfurt, “On the Necessity of Ideals,” 114.
25. Ibid., 115.
26. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 138.
27. Frankfurt, “On the Necessity of Ideals,” 108–116.
28. It would be misleading, however, to speak here of something like a third order volition since that would suggest the possibility of further levels—and with it an infinite regress in the order of desires—which is precisely what the idea of volitional necessities is supposed to rule out.
29. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 136.
30. Ibid., 137.
31. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 137.
32. Ibid.
33. This is where one sees the important difference to Hegel’s “purification of the drives.” Charles Taylor’s critique of Frankfurt also starts from the nature of willing or choice as Frankfurt understands it: by expanding second order volitions into “strong evaluations,” Taylor introduces an element of justified evaluation. For this see also Kusser, Dimensionen der Kritik von Wünschen, who accuses Frankfurt (already at the level of first order desires) of ignoring the practical justification of desires and of ending up with a “decisionistic undermining of practical rationality.” Ibid., 149. She makes these claims against the background of her own alternative proposal for an “epistemic critique of desires,” which I cannot discuss in detail here.
34. The image of rebuilding on the high sea comes from Otto Neurath. In such a rebuilding, even if one ends up replacing every individual plank of the ship with a new one, they cannot all be replaced at once.
35. Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History.”
36. The account of optimal conditions developed by Geuss in response to the question of how false interests can be identified claims that, given the malleability of desires and interests and their dependence on the conditions of life, persons’ “‘real’ interests” are those “they would have formed in ‘optimal’ (i.e., beneficent) conditions.” Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 50. These favorable conditions exclude, at the very least, extreme privation and gross ignorance, but Geuss does not go into further detail in defining them.
37. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 50.
38. Ibid., 54.
39. Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language, 45–76.
40. Löw-Beer, “Rigidität.”
41. Glover, I, 152.
42. As we will see in chapter 10, Taylor’s use of the concept of articulation elaborates this point in an interesting way. I will also further discuss the topos of self-invention in that chapter.
43. Of course, this is far from a complete account of the complex debate about truth and interpretation; here I am concerned only in a very limited manner with parallel themes that illuminate aspects of self-conceptions relevant to the topic of alienation.
44. And this is precisely where illusions do not succeed, or only at the price of drastically diminishing or violating the basic standards of rationality.
45. I would like to thank Martin Löw-Beer very much not only for allowing me to read his manuscripts on the subject of rigidity but also for our extremely instructive discussions about both his work and mine. Löw-Beer, “Rigidität.”
46. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, 9.
47. In this respect Alexander Mitscherlich’s thesis concerning the “inability to mourn” analyzes a problem of alienation.
48. I am here following by way of analogy the reflections Charles Taylor has made in connection with the critique of needs. For this see Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Human Agency and Language, 2:223–224, and following.
8. “As If Through a Wall of Glass”
1. Mercier, Perlmann’s Silence, 10–11.
2. Ibid., 73.
3. The Perlmann I deal with here has been stylized for my purposes and is not completely identical with the character of the novel. In the novel, for example, there is in fact a new interest, a Russian manuscript, that Perlmann gradually falls under the spell of.
4. In part 3, chapter 9, I return to the other question, concerning the circumstances under which a process of radical self-transformation can also lead to forms of alienation and how much and what kind of continuity is necessary for an unalienated self-conception.
5. Mercier, Perlmann’s Silence, 73–74.
6. Nagel, The View from Nowhere.
7. Ibid., 214.
8. Ibid., 218.
9. Here I can only briefly touch on this thesis and the problem of the meaning of life without entering into the rich and complex discussion of it in the literature. The suspicion that the question of the meaning of life is meaningless does appear to match a pattern of argumentation that—from Hegel to Heidegger—is also prevalent in arguments against epistemological skepticism. See Fehige, Meggle, and Wessels, Der Sinn des Lebens, a very useful reader on the meaning of life, which includes literary texts and essays as well as classical texts from the (recent) philosophical literature.
10. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 214.
11. James, The Principles of Psychology, 279.
12. James himself provides the nicest example of how malleable the boundary between inner and outer is (and of how this malleability depends also on social and historical factors) when he claims that, presented with the choice between a body that is unsightly but perfectly dressed and a beautiful one that is carelessly neglected, everyone would, of course, make the same choice—and then immediately assumes that everyone would choose without hesitation the well-dressed but ugly body. James, The Principles of Psychology, 280. I doubt that this choice would be so obvious for everyone today.
13. Ibid., 279.
14. Ibid., 281.
15. This image of the inner citadel was used by Isaiah Berlin in his essay on negative and positive freedom. John Christman—giving it a positive twist—then used it for the title of his book, and he has precisely this dimension of withdrawal and self-determination in mind. See Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty and Christman, The Inner Citadel.
16. Thus, Adorno, for example, describes the stance of indifference in the “false life” as unavoidably ambivalent: “Thinking men and artists have not infrequently described a sense of being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator. . . . ‘What does it really matter?’ is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. . . . Spellbound, the living have a choice between involuntary ataraxy—an aesthetic life due to weakness—and the bestiality of the involved.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 363–364. To be sure, the ambivalence described here is unavoidable, a forced ambivalence due to a necessary dilemma in a world that as a whole is taken to be a “false state of things.” Ibid., 11.
17. For an encyclopedic account of the various forms of indifference in the cultural history of the West, see Geier, Das Glück der Gleichgültigen. Geier explicitly carries out his study under the assumption that indifference is a phenomenon of ambivalence.
18. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II, 290.
19. Löw-Beer, “Rigidität.”
20. Frankfurt, “On the Usefulness of FinalEnds,” 88.
21. At this point Frankfurt makes an interesting objection to his own position: are there not practices of indifference that do not lead to an obliteration of the person?
Is it self-evident that caring about nothing means having a bad life? Certain Eastern systems of thought actually appear to recommend it. Their adherents are encouraged to strive toward a condition in which the will is annihilated—in which one no longer exists as a volitional agent. They acknowledge, however, that annihilating the will requires a sustained program of rigorously disciplined effort. . . . Thus, even for those to whom the most important thing is that nothing should be important to them, caring about that involves extensive volition and action.
Frankfurt, “On the Usefulness of FinalEnds,” 88
Hence the reply to this objection is that wanting no longer to have a will is also an endeavor of the will. And in the “Eastern” practices Frankfurt alludes to, presumably the attentiveness he is concerned with is sharpened rather than dulled.
22. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II, 293.
23. As Hegel expresses it in the Phenomenology of Spirit .
24. This idea of appropriative transformation is already crucial for the constitution of the free will. In this regard the introduction to the Philosophy of Right is relevant insofar as it can be read as a kind of history of socialization in which subjects develop into persons. Subjects become persons when they “put their will into something” and in so doing are recognized as free beings. This will, however, must first achieve the status of a free will by passing from the negative freedom of Willkür (of the arbitrary, or choosing, will) to a “free will that wills the free will.” This process of formation, which Hegel calls the “purification of the drives,” consists in a process of “working away” what is alien, which includes one’s own desires as they appear prior to this appropriative transformation. The point here is that the will that is merely Willkür is not really free since it lets itself be determined by unformed desires.
25. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 45.
26. This comparison comes from Geuss, “Freedom as an Ideal.”
Alienation as a Disturbed Appropriation
1. See Tugendhat, “Antike und Moderne Ethik,” as well as my detailed account in chapter 3.
9. “Like a Structure of Cotton Candy”
1. The contrast between psychological and metaphysical definitions can be found in Jonathan Glover, who, after reviewing and endorsing Derek Parfit’s rejection of a metaphysical foundation of the unity of the person in the first part of his book, inquires in the second part into the conditions and effects of identity in the psychological sense; Glover, I, 106.
2. The term core model here includes positions that from other points of view would need to be distinguished, for example, positions that posit a given essential purpose (and function) of human beings or those based on the romantic idea of an inner temperament unique to each individual. One can situate these positions historically, as before and after the loss of an “objective essential purpose” of the human being.
3. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §1.
4. Silverman and Farocki, Von Godard sprechen, 28.
5. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 45.
6. The most detailed and instructive discussion of the various sources of Taylor’s conception of expression, which harks back not only to Herder but also to Hegel and can be traced back to Augustine, can be found in Rosa, Identität und kulturelle Praxis, 149.
7. Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language, 15–44, 36.
8. Ibid., 36.
9. Rosa, Identität und kulturelle Praxis, 149.
10. Cited ibid., 152.
11. Here, however, one can see an internal inconsistency or ambivalence in Taylor’s approach, as Holmer Steinfath argues in a review of Taylor’s Sources of the Self. This ambivalence is
expressed, on the one hand, in his commitment to a teleological strain of thought that is influenced by a romantic expressive conception of human nature and still shows traces of a questionable essentialism. On the other hand, however, becoming oneself, as a process of interpretation that cannot be reduced to a process of giving objective reality to something that is latently given, is made into an in principle never-ending process of reflection that breaks open the closed character of the Aristotelian model and thereby accounts for a specifically modern experience.
Steinfath, “In den Tiefen des Selbst,” 106.
12. Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” 38.
13. Steinfath, “In den Tiefen des Selbst,” 106.
14. See here the detailed discussion of the existentialist critique of the core self in Cooper, Existentialism, especially chapter 6.
15. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 32.
16. Christman, “Autonomy and Self-Reflection,” 13.
17. I use relationality here to denote the relation to others and to what is “other” more generally; that is, it refers to sociality, on the one hand, and to relations to the world of things, on the other.
18. I borrow this expression from Carney, The Filmsof John Cassavetes.
19. Cooper summarizes the existentialist critique as follows: “If consciousness is ‘plunged into the world of objects’ and the ‘ego is . . . outside, in the world,’ then it will be there, and not in the inner recesses of a ‘soulthing’ that I find myself.” Cooper, Existentialism, 97.
20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 240.
21. Raz, The Morality of Freedom .
22. Velleman, “Identification and Identity.”
23. Bieri, “Zeiterfahrung und Personalität.”
24. Velleman, who in his previously cited paper critically examines Frankfurt’s essentialism, gives a psychological explanation of this: the idea of a volitional nature or a personal essence is attractive because of the underlying idea of wholeheartedness, the idea that we are really ourselves when we commit ourselves to something completely, unconditionally, and without ambivalence. The attractiveness of this model—for which at the same time there is not a single plausible example—rests on wishful thinking on our part. We would like to be such persons, but deny the ambivalences that far more accurately characterize our lives, and we thereby give up the possibility of productively integrating these ambivalences into our self-conceptions. I agree with the general direction of this critique, but my argument takes a different path.
25. I use the apparently outmoded example of revolution not for nostalgic reasons but in order to have an example of a strong and emotionally charged project that for once does not come from one’s personal life, as do most of Frankfurt’s examples.
26. Cooper, Existentialism.
27. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will,” 21.
28. Psychoanalysis recognizes two ways one can fail in coping with a loss: a melancholic-depressive form, marked by autoaggression, and a narcissistically disturbed form that abandons the object. Successful mourning, in contrast, is characterized by a selective introjection of the loved one in which parts of the loved one are taken over into one’s own person. The constancy of the object is, then, a precondition of successful mourning.
29. Empirically, of course, the transition will involve many vicissitudes; what one does in one moment one can regret in the next; one can still hang on to the revolution with a part of one’s soul while already betraying it at the same time. And so on.
30. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 139.
31. How exactly this tolerating of ambivalence functions would obviously need to be described more precisely. Here one can again refer to psychoanalysis (especially to the work of Melanie Klein), for which tolerating ambivalence is a criterion of maturity and a central part of growing up. Not being able to tolerate ambivalence is, on the other hand—as in borderline personality disorder—a sign of serious psychic disturbance.
32. Bieri, “Zeiterfahrung und Personalität,” 273.
33. Ibid.
34. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion,” 101.
35. Bieri, “Zeiterfahrung und Personalität,” 273.
36. Of course, one can attempt to identify characteristic stances that persons adopt with respect to changing projects (the seriousness or dogmatism with which the revolutionary pursues revolution or counterrevolution, the devotion with which the lover loves). These are then precisely no longer ground projects in Raz’s sense nor constitutive commitments without which, according to Frankfurt, we are no longer true to ourselves.
37. Here I treat inwardness (or the objection made in its name) not as a philosophical concept in a strict sense but as a cultural model that has been influential in many ways.
38. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 37.
39. MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse, 10: “This intensifying rift between the inner and the outer was characteristic of bourgeois culture. As it intensifies, there was an intensified need to express in terms of the ‘inner’ what could not longer find a place in external social life.”
40. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 29. For an understanding the concept of uniqueness in romantic individualism, see Eberlein, Einzigartigkeit. I speak here of “romantic conceptions of inwardness” in the sense intended by Trilling without being able to do justice to the multifaceted richness of the historical period called romanticism. Richard Rorty uses the term in the same way when he characterizes the “romantic intellectual.”
41. Glover, I .
42. Cooper, Existentialism, 97.
43. James, Portrait of a Lady, 187.
44. Ibid., 187.
45. Hofmann, Selbstkonzepte der New Woman, 216. Hofmann’s own interpretation, however, seems to me completely mistaken. She takes Isabel’s outlook to be a masculine conception of the self, in contrast to a reified feminine conception, represented by Merle, that sees women as unstable, dependent, and empty to such an extent that they can attain stability and permanence only through material props. On her interpretation, Isabel’s conception of inwardness is emancipatory, whereas in my view the novel deals with and brings to light precisely the dialectic of this sort of emancipation and the illusory character of the conception of self that goes with it.
46. For a systematic discussion, see Saar, “Selbstkritik.”
47. The idea of self-invention is inspired mostly by Nietzsche and has been in vogue for a long time with a wide variety of thinkers (of which Foucault, Rorty, and Alexander Nehamas are only the most well known). Dieter Thomä speaks in this context of an “inflation of concepts like ‘self-making,’ ‘self-fashioning,’ and ‘self-creation,’ the fascination with which is perhaps due to the fact that they seem to connect a sober skepticism with respect to facts with an effusive feeling of creativity.” Thomä, Erzähle dich selbst, 3.
48. On the problem of such a unity, see Pollmann, Integrität.
49. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 361.
50. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 262 (emphasis added).
51. Schmid, “Uns selbst gestalten,” 50.
52. Diedrichsen, “Supergirls biologische Hardware.”
53. It is obvious that I cannot go into this debate in as much detail as it deserves. That would involve, among other things, distinguishing various conceptions of self-invention and examining, in discussion with Foucault, the decidedly contested question of the ethical significance of an “aesthetic of existence” and the relation between the critique of power of his middle period and the “ethics” of his late period.
54. Schmid, “Uns selbst gestalten,” 50–62.
55. See especially my remarks concerning the achievement of a self-conception in chapter 7, and my comments on the concept of appropriation in the first section of this chapter.
56. Undine Eberlein points out that this tension exists already in Nietzsche and can be traced through to later poststructuralist appropriations of it: the tension between a “farewell to the subject,” on the one hand, and the demiurgic character of the “paradigm of self-production,” on the other. Eberlein, Einzigartigkeit, 43.
57. Judith Butler also understands self-constitution for Foucault “as a type of poiesis.” Ibid., 26.
58. Highly simplified, Aristotle distinguishes poiesis, the creation of a product guided by technical knowledge, from praxis, action whose goal lies in the performance of the action itself and not in some external result.
59. In fact, this is a much more apt description of Foucault’s account of the self-practices of an aesthetic of existence than of the Nietzschean demiurge. Undine Eberlein (in Einzigartigkeit) distinguishes here between the demiurgic model and a “basket-weaving” model of existence.
60. See chapter 10 for the difference between a romantic-aesthetic model of experimentation and the one I use here, which borrows from the pragmatist conception of an experiment. I also criticize here the idea of the new and the lack of standards.
61. Schmid, “Uns selbst gestalten,” 50 (emphasis added).
62. This objection also holds against Foucault’s talk of dissolving the subject through experience. The claim, directed against phenomenology, that experience as he conceives of it serves to “tear the subject away from itself such that it is no longer itself or such that it is driven to its destruction and dissolution” is inconsistent. If, as Foucault emphasizes, “an experience is something you come out of changed,” then he must presuppose a bearer or a subject of this change. Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. New York: Semiotext(e), 27.
63. Turkle, Life on the Screen.
64. Sherry Turkle became known for having set up one of the first psychological “practices” in the Internet from which, in addition to her research projects conducted at MIT, the bulk of her empirical material comes.
65. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 15.
66. I cannot go into the questionable nature of this idea here, which would require a discussion of the conception of reality that underlies it. In this regard, however, see the critique articulated from a phenomenological standpoint by Lucas D. Introna: “Every cyber-traveler will eventually have to deal with the fact of being always already in the world.” Introna, “On Cyberspace and Being.”
67. One can draw interesting conclusions from this regarding the reality or unreality of such worlds that do not rely on a naive conception of reality. Interestingly enough, the criterion for reality then turns out to be something like intractability.
68. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 179.
69. Ibid., 185.
10. Living One’s Own Life
1. Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 80.
2. Raymond Geuss notes that the concept of positive freedom comprises, in a mostly unordered way, all that makes up the (positive) capacity “to be one’s own master” or “to live one’s own life.” In a kind of cartography, Geuss includes power, self-determination, authenticity, and self-realization among the elements of positive freedom. Geuss, “Auffassungen der Freiheit.”
3. In part 1 I pointed to this as the central feature of the problem of alienation in modernity.
4. One might call this phenomenon structural heteronomy; it is not clear, though, what that means without further explanation. I am less concerned here with terminology than with the structure of the phenomenon.
5. Löw-Beer, “Rigidität.”
6. Benn, A Theory of Freedom, 155.
7. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Christman, The Inner Citadel.
8. Cited in Christman, The Inner Citadel, 7.
9. Ibid., 346. See also Christman, “Liberalism and Positive Freedom.” The conditions for an autonomous development of preferences are developed in detail in Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History.”
10. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 371.
11. For example, the idea of meaningful options helps us to distinguish a genuine value pluralism from the false one that characterizes a world that, in spite of all its diversity, is “one-dimensional.”
12. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979).
13. Adorno, Critical Models, 164 (emphasis added).
14. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 242.
15. Kambartel, “Universalität als Lebensform,” 24 (emphasis added).
16. For the view that there is not an obvious connection between self-fulfillment and autonomy, see Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, 37–40.
17. Kambartel, “Universalität als Lebensform,” 22.
18. An example of meaningful activities that are not self-determined is provided by Tarkowski’s film Andrei Rublev, which describes the complicated and elaborate process of casting a bell in a village during the Middle Ages. The labor process here is nearly ritualistic: religious, meaningful, and collectively carried out. And the creator (or constructor) of the bell understands his activity not only as a kind of worship; he also requires for it, so it is suggested, something like divine, mystical inspiration. But since, at the same time, there is no free space for individuals to relate to this labor—because they do not lead self-determined lives in today’s sense—it seems inappropriate to me to call their labor an act of self-realization. What is realized in such labor is a higher idea, not the laborer.
19. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 189.
20. Kambartel, “Universalität als Lebensform,” 24.
21. Wildt, Die Anthropologie des jungen Marx.
22. Theunissen, Selbstverwirklichung und Allgemeinheit .
23. I intentionally use the general concept of worldlessness to express that what is at issue here is relations to others and to the “other” more generally, namely to the “environment” (Umwelt) and to the “with-world” (Mitwelt: Heidegger), and that in my opinion both threaten to be lost in the self-referential character of the position discussed here.
24. This is a somewhat vague use of the term romantic, but it is found in Rorty himself, who characterizes his position as that of a “romantic intellectual.”
25. Eberlein, Einzigartigkeit.
26. Rorty cites Harold Bloom, who speaks of the “the strong poet’s anxiety of influence” and of his “horror at having to acknowledge that he is only a copy or replica.” Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 24.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Rorty, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy,” 193.
30. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 261.
31. Löw-Beer, “Sind wir einzigartig? 132.
32. That originality and novelty are mere byproducts seems obvious to me in the domain of literature and art. A novel that aims first and foremost at originality will seldom be of great aesthetic quality.
33. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 17.
34. If I understand it correctly, Rorty’s model does not exclude such collective experiments since private is not synonymous with isolated; rather, the former means only that what one does makes no public claims to being intersubjectively valid or that these life projects are not universalizable.
35. The film Zusammen! by Lukas Moodysson (2000) wonderfully illustrates this in looking back at the communes of the 1970s and the various problems such experiments generate. In so doing it is extremely fair in showing the rigidifications and the potential for self-deception of both conventional and unconventional models.
36. Menke, Reflections of Equality, 136.
37. It is an odd but perhaps not accidental coincidence—and of great contemporary relevance—that liberals’ emphasis on the impossibility of grounding idiosyncratic forms of life goes hand in hand with a renewed conventionalism. This suggests that a public discussion of forms of life—in which truth claims are made—contributes more to promoting unconventional forms of life than merely fostering their coexistence alongside one another.
Conclusion
1. With respect to this question the traditions sketched—starting with Rousseau, through Hegel and Marx on the one hand, and through Kierkegaard and Heidegger on the other—take opposing positions.
2. In conjunction with his discussion of G. H. Mead’s view that the “cooperative possibilities of action marked out by roles are . . . the only possible offers of meaning,” Ernst Tugendhat develops the claim that “a critique of socially given cooperative activities from the standpoint of their meaning would always be conceivable only on the basis of a model of a better society—or in any case this is Mead’s conception. Such a critique cannot be developed from the perspective of an activity that is not socially related; the latter is not a possible source of meaning at all.” Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 244.
3. Amengual, “Gattungswesen als Solidarität,” 345–368.
4. I develop this in detail in Jaeggi, “Solidarity and Indifference.”