"Alienation," Rahel Jaeggi

A l i e n a t i o n

Ra h e l Ja e g g i Translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith Edited by Frederick Neuhouser

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FOREWORD Axel Honneth

NO CONCEPT HAS BEEN MORE powerful in defining the character of early Critical Theory than that of alienation. For the first members of this tradition the content of the concept was taken to be so self-evident that it needed no definition or justification; it served as the more or less self-evident starting point of all social analysis and critique. Regardless of how untransparent and complicated social relations might be, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer regarded the alienated nature of social relations as a fact beyond all doubt.

Today this shared assumption strikes us as strange, for it seems as though these authors, above all Adorno, should have realized that the concept rested on premises that contradicted their own insight into the danger of overly hasty generalizations and hypostatizations. For the concept of alienation—a product of modernity through and through—presupposes, for Rousseau no less than for Marx and his heirs, a conception of the human essence: whatever is diagnosed as alienated must have become distanced from, and hence alien to, something that counts as the human being’s true nature or essence. Philosophical developments of the past decades on both sides of the Atlantic have put an end to such essentialist conceptions; we now know that even if we do not doubt the existence of certain universal features of human nature, we can no longer speak objectively of a human “essence,” of our “species powers,” or of humankind’s defining and fundamental aims. One consequence of this theoretical development is that the category of alienation has disappeared from philosophy’s lexicon. And nothing signals more clearly the danger that Critical Theory might become obsolete than the death of what was once its fundamental concept.

Yet in recent years it has seemed to more than a few philosophers that our philosophical vocabulary lacks something important if it no longer has the

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concept of alienation at its disposal. It is often the case that we can hardly avoid describing individual forms of life as alienated; not infrequently we tend to regard social conditions as failed or “false,� not because they violate principles of justice but because they conflict with the conditions of willing and of executing what we will. In such reactions to the conditions of our social world we inevitably find ourselves falling back on the concept of alienation, even if we are aware of its essentialist dangers; as antiquated as the talk of alienation may be, it apparently cannot simply be eliminated from our diagnostic and critical vocabulary. This book can be understood as a philosophical defense of the legitimacy of the category of alienation. Its aim is to revive for us today the social-philosophical content of this reviled concept.

The author, Rahel Jaeggi, is completely aware of the difficulties that such an undertaking entails. Updating the category of alienation requires not only the conceptual skills necessary for explicating its meaning in such a way that, without losing its critical force, it avoids essentialist presuppositions; beyond this, it must also be shown that it is truly indispensable for a critical diagnosis of the conditions of social life. In tackling the first task the author is helped by the fact that she is equally well versed in the classical history of the concept of alienation and in recent, analytically oriented debates concerning the nature of personhood and freedom. This familiarity with two philosophical traditions that until now have been split off from each other enables her to identify precisely those places in the classical concept of alienation where essentialist consequences can be avoided by relying on more formal accounts of human capacities. With respect to the second task, the author benefits from a considerable talent for the phenomenological description of everyday life.

This talent enables her to depict human phenomena such as rigidity, the loss of self, and indifference so vividly that the reader is virtually compelled to look for ways of recovering the concept of alienation. These two philosophical sources define the strategy and landscape of the present investigation: it begins with a historical sketch of the concept of alienation that makes clear both the conceptual strengths and the essentialist presuppositions of the concept; in its main section it brings to light, through descriptions of types of individual self-alienation, the analytic potential of recent accounts of human freedom, which it then uses to establish a concept of alienation free from the defects of essentialism.

Her historical treatment shows with masterful lucidity how clearly Rahel Jaeggi grasps the difficulties that plague the classical concept of alienation.

With precision and boldness she sketches the two traditions, deriving from

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Rousseau, that analyze the pathologies of modern life more or less explicitly in terms of processes of alienation: first, the tradition of Marx and his heirs, who, following Hegel, understand alienation primarily as a disruption in human beings’ appropriation of their species powers due to the structure, especially the economic structure, of their societies; second, the existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, who understand alienation in terms of the increasing impossibility of returning from the universal into self-chosen, authentic individuality. In both cases the conceptual core of alienation is, as Rahel Jaeggi succinctly puts it, a “relation of relationlessness,” namely, a defective, disturbed relation to that relation—whether it be cooperation with others or a relation to self—that constitutes the human being’s authentic nature. From this it is easy to see the extent to which, for both Marxist and existentialist traditions, an objectivistic conception of the human essence serves as the normative foundation of alienation critique. For both, alienation consists in a prior human relation (in the former case, a relation of labor, in the second case, a specific form of inwardness) that has been lost sight of to such an extent that it can no longer be brought back into our own life practices.

On the basis of this insight into the architectonic of the classical concept of alienation, Rahel Jaeggi develops in the main section of her study, with the help of brilliantly portrayed individual cases, an alternative model of alienation that refrains from characterizing human nature in terms of a single, distinctive aspiration. She sees the possibility for such a parsimonious foundation for the concept in elements of a conception of freedom that looks to the functional conditions of human willing and of executing what we will.

In constructing a foundation for her concept of alienation, Rahel Jaeggi appropriates the fruits of a comprehensive, in-depth discussion of freedom that has taken place in the past two decades among Harry Frankfurt, Ernst Tugendhat, Thomas Nagel, and Charles Taylor. The result of this extraordinarily productive reappropriation, which runs through this book as a second level of argumentation, is the thesis that alienation is an impairment of willing that results from a disappearance of the possibility of appropriating—of making one’s own—one’s self or the world. Once the weight of the concept of alienation has been shifted to the dimension of the individual relation to self, Rahel Jaeggi shows in the final step of her work how the necessary transition to social analysis is to be taken from here: impairments in processes of appropriation, as manifested in indifference to one’s acquired social roles or in the failure to identify with one’s own desires, often have their cause in social relationships that fail to satisfy the necessary conditions for such processes of appropriation.

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In this manner the present book marks out the paths by which it is possible to reclaim a contentful concept of alienation by formalizing the normative framework of alienation critique. Whoever follows the signposts provided will discover that future talk of alienation by social critics and diagnosticians of society need not signify a falling back into a musty essentialism. For the Institute for Social Research it is at once satisfying and encouraging to be able to receive Rahel Jaeggi’s work into its own ranks.

Frankfurt, September 1, 2005

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