Renodus

Alienation

8 min read

Alienation

Alienation is the experience of being separated from something that should be part of you. The word stretches across about a hundred and fifty years of philosophy, literature, and psychology, and the same word has to mean: separated from one’s own labor (Marx), separated from one’s own will (Hegel), separated from one’s own body (Kafka), separated from the world’s intelligibility (Sartre), separated from one’s own self (Fromm). The fact that all these meanings hang together is not coincidence. They are stages of a single discovery: the modern self is not at home in the modern world it has built.

The Philosophical Origin

The word enters modern philosophy through Hegel (Entfremdung, “estrangement”) in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). For Hegel, alienation is a structural moment in the life of Spirit: consciousness produces something — labor, art, institutions, religion — and then fails to recognize the product as its own. The product stands over against consciousness as if it were external, foreign, even hostile. The cure, in Hegel’s optimistic frame, is the long historical process by which Spirit comes to recognize itself in what it has made. Alienation is real but eventually self-undoing.

Marx takes the word and refuses Hegel’s optimism. In the 1844 manuscripts he names four kinds of alienation specific to industrial labor: the worker is alienated from the product (which belongs to the capitalist), from the act of working (which is forced and external), from his own species-being (the human capacity for free creative activity), and from other workers (who become competitors rather than collaborators). The cure is no longer philosophical; it is political. Alienation will not undo itself by Hegel’s owl flying at dusk. It will only be undone by overturning the property relations that produce it.

By the time the word reaches the twentieth century it has loosened from both Hegel and Marx and become the shared diagnostic vocabulary of a much wider range of thinkers — about labor, yes, but also about bureaucracy, about modern cities, about consumer culture, about the experience of being a self at all under conditions designed for something other than selves.

The Literature

Kafka is the most concentrated literary diagnosis of alienation in the twentieth century. The Trial gives us alienation as bureaucracy: Joseph K. is being processed by a system whose rules he cannot learn, whose officers he cannot address directly, whose verdict will arrive without explanation. The alienation is not from labor; it is from the basic intelligibility of the social world. The Metamorphosis gives us alienation as bodily estrangement: Gregor Samsa wakes up an insect, and the horror is partly that nobody, including Gregor, is surprised that this is what he has been all along. A Hunger Artist gives us alienation from one’s own audience: the artist starves for attention from a public that has stopped caring about the art he was good at.

Sartre’s Nausea is alienation from the world itself, in its raw materiality. Roquentin sits in a park and the chestnut tree’s root suddenly stops being a chestnut tree’s root and becomes a pure, gratuitous, undifferentiated lump of being with no reason to exist. The alienation is metaphysical: the human demand for meaning collides with the world’s refusal to supply it, and the collision feels like nausea. Sartre’s later work in [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] then gives us alienation from oneself — the for-itself that can never coincide with the in-itself of its own facticity, and the bad faith that pretends it can.

Bulgakov writes alienation as Soviet flat-share: in The Heart of a Dog the apartment of a Moscow professor is invaded by the new Soviet citizen the revolution has produced, and the alienation cuts both ways — the professor cannot recognize the world he now lives in, and the new citizen cannot recognize that the world has any history older than yesterday’s slogan.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is the prototype: a self-conscious clerk who has thought himself out of every possible relation to the world, including the relation to his own desires. The Underground Man’s alienation is voluntary in a way Marx’s worker’s is not — he has chosen it, partly because he cannot bear the alternative — and Dostoevsky uses him to argue that modern consciousness alienates itself even when material conditions don’t.

Orwell’s Winston Smith is alienation as Party-imposed. Winston is alienated from his own past (the Ministry of Truth has rewritten it), from his own language (Newspeak is shrinking the available vocabulary so the alienating thoughts cannot be thought), from his own desire (the Two Minutes Hate redirects love and hatred onto the Party-approved targets), and finally — at the end — from his own face. “He loved Big Brother” is the moment alienation becomes total.

Huxley’s Brave New World is alienation as soft engineering. The citizens of Huxley’s London do not feel alienated; the alienation has been bred and conditioned and chemically maintained out of their conscious experience. They have been separated from the human capacities that would have made alienation noticeable — sustained love, mourning, art that hurts. The horror of the book is that Huxley’s alienation is invisible to its sufferers.

The Psychology

Freud does not use the word “alienation” much, but the structural model of [[civilization-and-its-discontents|Civilization and Its Discontents]] describes it. The ego is alienated from the id below (whose drives it has had to repress) and from the super-ego above (whose demands it can never satisfy). Civilization, the price of which is permanent low-grade guilt, is alienation institutionalized.

Fromm picks the word back up and makes it central. In [[escape-from-freedom|Escape from Freedom]] modern man is alienated from himself: he has built a pseudo-self out of the expectations of the society around him, and he cannot tell which of his thoughts and feelings are his own. The metaphor of the modern individual as “a cog in the vast economic machine — an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none — but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself” is Marx’s reading of industrial labor extended to the whole of bourgeois selfhood. Fromm’s later books — The Sane Society, To Have or to Be? — are a fifty-year argument with alienation as the central diagnosis of modernity.

Frankl’s name for the same condition is the existential vacuum — the void of pointlessness that opens up in the modern psyche when no meaning is on offer. Where Marx sees the cure in changed property relations and Fromm sees it in spontaneous love and creative work, Frankl sees it in the recovery of personally chosen meaning under whatever conditions the world supplies. Three diagnoses of one underlying ill.

The Cinema

Tarkovsky’s Stalker is alienation from the meaning of the world: the Zone is what reality looks like when it has been emptied of its capacity to answer human questions. The three pilgrims walk through it looking for a room that grants wishes, and the film keeps deferring whether the room exists, whether the journey is real, and whether the alienation can be overcome.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is alienation from the species’s own technology: the most expressive presence in the second half of the film is a computer, and the men around it have been reduced to functional placeholders inside their own ship.

Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is American urban alienation: Travis Bickle drives nights through a city that does not see him, and the film argues that the city’s not-seeing is the precondition for what he eventually does.

Bergman’s Persona is alienation from speech itself: an actress decides to stop talking, and the film traces what happens when the social mask the persona is supposed to maintain is set down on a table and refused.

Where the Concept Goes

By the late twentieth century the word “alienation” has been partly displaced in academic philosophy by other vocabularies — recognition (Honneth), care (Heidegger and after), the social (Lefebvre, Debord). But the experience the word names has not gone away. Every time a contemporary critic writes about “loneliness epidemics,” “burnout,” “scrolling,” “atomization,” “the meaning crisis,” they are writing about alienation under different names, and Marx’s worker, Kafka’s clerk, Sartre’s diner, Fromm’s automaton, and Frankl’s vacuum-stricken patient are all still in the room.

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