Alienation
The term alienation is used in different senses and in various disciplines, such as medicine, psychology, religion, philosophy, sociology or political science. The idea common to the various concepts of alienation refers to something "alien" to himself that the subject no longer controls, a good that is sold or an "I" that is missed.
Etymology
Etymologically, it is derived from the Latin "ălĭēnātĭo, ōnis" (estrangement, deprivation), coming from the adjective "ălĭēnus" (own of another, strange to one and alien).
Definitions
The concept of alienation has changed over time.
For Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-1274) alienation is the possession of the human body by the devil and freedom is prior to its alienation by the demon possessor. In the Middle Ages, the devil is only linked to the flesh, so the fire frees the spirit from the body possessed by him. It would be a phenomenon that annuls the free will of the individual. Thomas Aquinas attributes certain mental alienations to organic injuries, from which follows an impediment to the perfect use of reason.
For theology, and more particularly for Christology, the Latin term alienatio would translate the Greek κένωσις: «emptying», kenosis or emptying of one's will to to be filled with the will of God, to be completely receptive of his will. This has to do with the same concept of religion or religation. Catholicism, in opposition to Marxism, maintains that the deep reason for alienation is not simply economic disorder, but the internal division of man by pain, disease, and the supreme manifestation of alienation, death.
For medicine, it designates mental alienation, a psychiatric pathology or "intellectual disorder, whether temporary or accidental or permanent".
For psychology, it is a mental state that is characterized "by a loss of the feeling of one's own identity", that is, of self-awareness or self-referentiality, since the identity or ego would be the faculty of considering oneself alien to the world or reality in an absolute sense.
For psychoanalysis, alienation does not necessarily presuppose mental pathology. It can occur both in apparently healthy subjects and in people affected by a mental pathology. Most individuals can reach a state of mental alienation under certain extreme conditions. Unlike psychosis in which the individual substitutes a delusion for reality, in the state of alienation the individual substitutes the lived reality for the discourse of another.
For philosophy, the concept originates in Rousseau's The Social Contract and develops in particular in the work of the German philosophers Hegel and his disciples Feuerbach and Marx, in whom the term alienation is translates by two words, Entfremdung ("estrangement", "estrangement") and Entäusserung or Entäußerung ("disappropriation", "reification" or "reification")
For sociology, according to Alain Touraine, several alienations can be distinguished, especially economic alienation and technocratic alienation, separable from bureaucratic alienation and political alienation. Different authors speak of subjective alienation (mental state) and objective alienation (work).
- Alienation as mental alienation
- Alienation as mental illness
- Alienation as madness
- Political food
- Economic food
Subjective alienation
Pinel
The Enlightenment brought with it the possibility of fighting ignorance, superstition and tyranny, in order to build a better world, and the publication, in 1800, of the “Traité médico-philosophique sur l' alienation mentale ou la manie» (Medical-philosophical treatise on mental alienation or mania), by the pioneer in mental health and, together with Alexander Crichton, in modern psychopathology, Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), famous for his « traitement moral » and for « le geste de Pinel », in which he unchained the mentally ill at the Hospital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, was instrumental in the birth of psychiatry and would also influence Hegel.
Aulagnier
For the psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier, mental alienation is a concept that can only be thought of by an external observer, while the subject who is alienated in his thoughts is totally unaware of what is happening to him.
This alteration implies a meeting of two individuals: one with the desire to alienate and the other whose thoughts are alienated or alienable, both with the desire to annihilate the thought that is present in both. The objectives are:
- Exclusion of any doubt of the intrusive conflict.
- Minimal reduction of psychic suffering that transfers to the I said conflict, to:
- Find the certainty of who the Self is
- To abolish conflicts between the identifier and the identifier.
For this reason, for psychoanalysis, alienation is a pathology of idealization and identification.
Alienation can also be social and happen because the subject is immersed in a system of social power that prevents him from thinking freely about that system or the position of the individual with respect to that power and its identifying references. The prohibition to think freely threatens "death" to the reasoning of the human being, who cannot even reflect on himself converting him into a slave at the service of power. It is about an individual objectified by another, objectified by —and instrument— of the other, without the right to thought or to speak.
All thought activity is uncathected. The individual cannot preserve identifying reference points. Then the subject cathectizes a discourse that thinks for him, decides for him and who I am, imposes his ideals on him and erases all nameable and perceptible experience of what he is living. In this way, alienation produces an idealization of the alienating force.
It is always in the name of "a good cause" that the subject alienates himself, alienates his thought. The follower, combatant or supporter of a cause attributes to the alienating force the power to guarantee the truth of said cause. A massive idealization of the alienating function is produced. For this reason it is a pathology of idealization. If thought is canceled it is for a good reason.
Alienation is the extreme limit that the Self can reach in the realization of its desire for non-suffering. It culminates in the death of one's own thought.
It often happens that the alienating or alienating force carries out its action through a theory, which can be religious, political, ideological, scientific or of any kind, whose author has been a deceased leader. The alienated individual can alienate the thought of him both by a minority party ideology, of a small group, and by a majority dominant ideology shared by society. This is achieved because a power of death circulates between the leader and the individuals.
Any neighbor can be an informer. Each individual has the power to denounce another, and therefore a power to sentence anyone who thinks differently to death. The persecuted-persecutor relationship is circular: the persecuted can become the persecutor at any time. The lurking terror imposes a rupture of the possibility of thinking or questioning power itself.
The subject is obliged to deny both the reality of what is happening and any personal interpretation of what happened. The subject's I is imposed the exclusion of what he could see. The individual can no longer consider power as a persecutor because he needs to survive and not question it. The terror of death becomes a threat of everything that the I could think, death of the I's own thought, another thinks and decides for it. He is not even aware of it. They deny reality and the possibility of thinking about reality.
The I avoids thinking about the reality, both external and psychic, that it suffers as a consequence of terror. So he attributes a value of certainty to the discourse of the alienating force. The supremacy of the truth of the dominant argument is unquestionable, an extreme modality of idealization of the wisdom of the alienator. In psychosis, the individual substitutes reality for a fantasy, for a delusion. In the state of alienation, the individual substitutes the lived reality for the discourse of the other.
It is the leader who transmutes and defines reality, which gives the alienated subjects the feeling that they possess a shared, but unquestionable "truth", that places them among the "chosen", who "for their own good" must impose that "truth" on others.
When it comes to the dominant political power of the time and terror reigns, few individuals manage to escape this alienation.
Foucault
According to Michel Foucault, the 18th century inaugurated the idea of the possibility of the disappearance of the highest faculties of man and In the XIX century, the concept of mental illness arose. Mental alienation should not be confused with social alienation, nor should psychological conflict be identified with the historical contradictions of the environment. For him, social alienation is the condition of mental alienation, it is the very condition of mental illness. Mental alienation is a mythical consequence of social alienation. Trying to separate the alienated man from his conditions of existence is to keep him in his alienated existence. Psychology, like all human sciences, must have the purpose of discouraging man.
The alienated man feels himself to be a stranger because society does not recognize him, because society does not recognize itself in his illness and excludes him.
With the bourgeois revolution, humanity is defined by its freedom and equality. Man is no longer a serf, vassal or slave, but a free citizen with full rights. However, for the mentally ill, freedom is vain and equality is devoid of any meaning or meaning. The alienated person is living proof that, despite being a free citizen, man can find a way to lose that freedom. The man finds conditions that suppress his freedom and his equality, demonstrating that bourgeois society is not made to measure for the concrete real man, putting into conflict the unitary idea that is made of it.
If, for the Christianity of the Middle Ages, alienation was the possession of the human body by the devil, after the Renaissance alienation represented the abolition of freedom. The alienated will no longer be possessed but dispossessed: alienation is a privation.
For Foucault, alienation is synonymous with mental illness. The alienated person feels himself to be a stranger and denounces the confiscation of his will and his thought. The mentally insane is one who has lost the use of the freedoms that the bourgeois revolution has conferred on him. That is why his will can be replaced by the abusive will of a third party, that is, his will is annulled. Another can exercise his rights and enjoy his goods in his place.
For Foucault, this psychological alienation is nothing more than the consequence of the very social contradictions in which man is historically alienated. These same contradictions of bourgeois society constitute social alienation.
Objective alienation
The concept of social alienation has been present in many philosophical debates. Thus, John Locke (1632-1704) refers to "inalienable rights" as essential for the very existence of citizens and Hegel (1770-1831) formulates some brief indications in relation to the psychiatric meaning of the term but also takes into account the role of the State with respect to alienation, since the State is the mediator between the alienating civil society and the absolute spirit. Alienation is not exactly the same as alienation. Hegel exposes the constitutive moments of alienated labor in his treatise on Philosophy of Law. The state carries out a mediation that could allow it to return the concept to the spirit surprised by the alienation of civil society. His idea of alienation refers to the religious and metaphysical framework.
Hegel
For Hegel, alienation is the moment of tearing oneself apart, on the other hand, estrangement refers to the moment of beginning to get ahead of oneself. The confusion derives from the fact that Hegel and Marx translate the concept of alienation with two words, as Entfremdung, that is, estrangement, and as Entäuserung, that is, as expropriation.
Fichete
In contrast, the transcendental Self of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) goes through a moment of estrangement that is alienation. For Fichte, estrangement and alienation are synonymous.
Marx
Hegel had a great influence on the theory of alienation of Karl Marx (1818-1883), who delved into this concept, above all, in his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts (1844).
Marx is based on an anthropology of total man and has a great presence in contemporary philosophy, especially in the opposition between Being and Having.
For Marx, the capitalist buys the work of others with money and the workers exchange the labor power, that is, their merchandise, for the capitalist's merchandise, that is, the pay or salary. The labor force for the worker is the vital activity of him that assures him the necessary means to subsist. The worker is free to change his capitalist, he is free to work, but he cannot detach himself from the class of capitalists, to whom he has hired himself, without renouncing his very existence.
The worker does not collect the value of what he produces, that is, the surplus value, and this exploitation deprives him of his craft tools. Because of this division of labor he is unaware of what he is producing and that means he is alienated. This ignorance is alienation for Marx.
Marx studies the alienation of the product of labor considering that the more the worker immerses himself in his work, the stranger the world becomes to him and the less master he is of himself. The worker feels that his work does not belong to him. This is economic alienation that breeds political alienation and is the cause of religious alienation."We are slaves to jobs we hate, so we can buy things we don't really need"
Frankfurt School
With its critical thinking, the Frankfurt School, influenced by Marx, Freud and Weber, also deals extensively with the topic of alienation.
Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) is based on the alienation caused by technology, media culture and mass consumerism, through which the capitalist state manages to enslave society.
For Marcuse, the existence of man is both alienation and the process by which the subject returns to himself, understanding and dominating alienation. Marcuse argues that it is possible for repression and alienation to extend indefinitely or for an international counter-movement to explode this society. For Marcuse, man is not subject to the alienation of work but to the alienation of technical progress. Thanks to technology, society tends more and more to uniformity of criteria and unique totalitarian thought.