Alienation—New Perspectives from Environmental Ethics, Social Philosophy, and Action Theory; an Introduction

Abstract

The philosophical history of the concept of alienation is unsteady, to say the least. As is well known, its heyday was in the 18th and in the 19th century. It occupied center stage in the grand philosophies of history of Rousseau, the Romantics, the German Idealists, and the early Marx. For these authors, modern life was characterized by the fact that modern man has lost some important kind of connection with some or all of the following: his own inner nature, outer nature, and other people. This state of alienation was seen either as a transitory state that will automatically be rendered obsolete as history progresses, or it was seen as a state that political, philosophical or poetic efforts should struggle to overcome. In any case, the goal of human history was to re-establish the original kind of connectedness, albeit on a higher, reflective level. This broad diagnosis fell into disrepute among philosophers in the 20th century. Not only did they lose trust in universal ideas of historical progress quite generally. Also, they came to regard the specific diagnosis of alienation and the goal of overcoming it as suspicious. To these critics, diagnoses of alienation seemed to be naive in their idealized pictures of an original state of harmony and in the envisaged goal of reconciliation. Whether or not it does justice to Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and the Romantics, the concept of alienation has come to be associated with over-simplified laments about a loss of immediacy and naturalness. Thus, many philosophers in the 20th century lost interest in the concept. In analytic philosophy, it has largely been ignored (apart from occasionally resurfacing in debates about personal autonomy or about utilitarianism and integrity). Many “continental” philosophers, however, not only lost interest but rejected the concept as an articulation of a moral view that is not only simplistic but radically wrong. Among the most outspoken critics were thinkers who actually have close intellectual ties to German Idealism and Marx. According to the influential work of Adorno and Horkheimer, modernity suffers not so much from experiences of otherness and estrangement but from a lack thereof. According to them, the image of an enlightened world in which nothing is strange to us is simply the mirror image of the dangerous and alien environment that our ancestors feared, and no less terrifying than the latter. Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:7–11 DOI 10.1007/s10677-013-9470-z