Alienation and Affect

Warren TenHouten, Warren D. TenHouten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138777705
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678526
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alienation has objective, social-structural determinants, yet is experienced subjectively as a psychological state involving both emotion and cognition. Part I considers conceptualizations of alienation and affect in historical context, emphasizing Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. Part II develops a theory of the affective bases of Seeman's original five varieties of alienation – normlessness, meaninglessness, self-estrangement, cultural estrangement, and powerlessness. The book argues that both normlessness and cultural estrangement manifest in two distinct forms and involve distinct emotions. Thus it develops the affective bases of seven distinct varieties of alienation. This work synthesizes classical and contemporary alienation theory and the sociology of emotions. It contributes to political sociology, and finds application in social psychiatry and related health and social-service fields that treat traumatized and highly alienated individuals.

Part I
Alienation and affect in historical context

1
Alienation and affect, from the ancient world to early modernity

The history of man could very well be written as a history of the alienation of man.

– Erich Kahler (1957:43)

Alienation was the problem of the 1840s, and it is the problem of today.

– Morse Peckham (1976:138)

Alienation in the ancient world

The concept of alienation has a long and colorful history. As its full accounting would require many volumes, we review only the most general trends. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates considered the brave and wise soul as least disturbed by external circumstances (ἀλλοιώσειεν, later rendered as the Latin alienatio). For Plato and Platonists, the soul that liberates itself from the known world’s contingencies and external realities achieves a positive state of alienation from everyday living as it apprehends the Ideal, or the Divine.

In ancient Roman society, the term alienatio had three meanings. (i) Dominion ad alium transferimus referred to the lawful transferring of possession or ownership of something of value from one individual to another. Through this act, the item becomes alien to its former owner upon becoming another’s possession. In ancient Rome’s atomistic social life, individuals were legally regarded as either property owners or property, and disposition of property was the law’s main concern. (ii) Adding a psychological dimension to the concept, alienatio mentis denoted one who is absent-minded, lacking in concentration, or lacking sanity, as when one is separated from one’s reason, out of one’s mind, or ‘insane’.¹ (iii) Alienatio also meant aversion, dislike, and the withdrawal of the feeling of goodwill, friendship, or love; if one’s significant other is ‘stolen’ by a third person, an alienation of affection follows. In all three cases, alienation is a separation, or an estrangement, from one’s possessions, from one’s own mind, or from one’s love-object. These three meanings have been brought forward to the Medieval English alienacioun and to the Modern French alienation.

In the Old Testament, prophets of monotheism considered practitioners of heathen and pagan religions self-alienating because they expended energy and artistic capacities building idols which were simply human artifacts. Worship of man-made things, prophets argued, transforms men into things; rather than experiencing oneself as creator, one becomes “estranged from his own life force, from the wealth of his own potentialities and is in touch with himself only in the direct way of submission to life frozen in the idols.” This self-estrangement is no less than “man’s relinquishment of himself” (Fromm 1961:44, 46).²

In early Christianity, the concept of alienation acquired another, opposite, meaning, namely the separation or estrangement of the individual from the divine. According to Gregory ([c. 578–95 CE] 2015:xii, 36), in his Moralia in Job and in numerous other texts, Satan, the fallen angel, is alienus, the alien or stranger par excellence. Satan was first among the beings alienated from God, for (i) not experiencing love of God, and (ii) refusing to adhere to His divine order, rather competing with God. In the Bible, Paul, speaking of the Gentiles, said: “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” ³ This lament, of being ‘alienated from God’ or having ‘fallen from Grace’, informs Judeo-Christian mythology and has motivated the “messianic mission of rescuing man from this state of self-alienation which he had brought upon himself” (Mészáros 1970:28).

Ancient Christianity contributed to an apocalyptic tradition, providing accounts of alienation as historical processes that change incrementally from an original condition of domination and oppression to the eventual attainment of total salvation in a perfect community. Christian theology’s narrative had a four-stage structure, which Luther, the Lutheran philosopher Hegel, and Hegel’s erstwhile disciple, Marx (Rotstein 1982), elaborated. In the narrative’s initial stage, an antithesis obtains between the tyrannical oppressor, the lord, and those subjected to bondage. The Old Testament represented this as bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt, the New Testament as bondage to the sinful, mortal body. In stage two, an inversion occurs, as the oppressor is vanquished and those in slavery attain an exalted position of bondage: Yahweh defeats Pharaoh in the Old Testament, and Christ defeats death in the New Testament. In the third stage, slaves’ status is inverted, as they become the chosen lords: in the Old Testament they become “the head, and not the tail” (Deuteronomy 28:10, 13), and in the New Testament there is an advancement from being slaves of Christ (douloi Christou) to becoming “joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17), a royal priesthood that attains liberty and equality. In the fourth stage, oppression itself is transcended by a new kind of ‘community’: this is a “kingdom of priests and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) in the Old Testament, or the “Kingdom of God” in the New Testament. This new community is characterized as a total identity of the new lords and the Supreme Lord, who holds all power (Colossians 2:8). Here, the original antithesis has been totally resolved, and the initial alienation of the bondsman is overcome.

Humanity’s plight is thus an ancient thesis concerning the nature of good and evil, and evokes an archetypal design by which humans have tried to confront their nature and destiny. In numerous ancient pagan cultures, there was in the Beginning a primordial unity, the One, the Good, which overflows into mind, individual souls, and the material universe. A disastrous process of splintering next created individuality, self-centeredness, division, and multiplicity. This introduced Sin into the world, and resulted in a ‘fall’ of humanity, a tragic departure from the One or the All. The human being became, as Plotinus [270 CE] (1952:iv.vii.4) stated, “a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole … [and] buffeted about by a worldful of things. … It has fallen.” The only redemption from such a falling-away-from the One, or “remoteness and a condition of alienation from the source” (Abrams 1973:151), the myth holds, is a process of reintegration, wherein human fragmentation is overcome by a return to the originary One, a spiritual journey in quest of humanity’s lost home (Plotinus [270 CE] 1952:vi.v.3). This neoplatonic myth of the ‘great circle’ requires a powerful current of supernatural energy, a sustaining force of ‘love’, which flows from the One down to remote humans. This energy hold the universe together and instills in human awareness a yearning to return to a state of earlier unity, to attain a circuitus spiritualis (Abrams 1973:152, 500–1n12).

This overall ancient theme of Oneness–Separation–Return can be seen, for example, in Homer’s tale of Odysseus, who fled the sorcery of Circe and Calypso, before eventually finding his Fatherland. This myth of circular design has had innumerable incarnations, including Gnosticism, Kabbalism, Hermeticism, and alchemy (see Abrams 1973:147–252). In this mythology, the end is its beginning, as the movement is from unity to multiplicity and back to unity, a falling from good to evil, and a final return to the good. This eternal circle was in Christianity a tale of creation, incarnation, passion, second coming, apocalypse, and a heaven on earth freed of evil and oppression. The originary One in many conceptualizations was reduced from an absolutely perfect ‘God’ to a concrete historical epoch in which humanity was less alienated; this was variously situated in imaginations of life in ancient Greece, in primitive societies, in the Middle Ages. As we enter the medieval period of human history, however, alienation was still largely a theological concept, but its economic meaning was to be elaborated in a context of social power and political life.

Alienation thus developed both positive and negative meanings in ancient times. Positively, it meant an ecstatic elevation of mental experience, wherein the mind transcends its own boundaries, categories, and limitations, not through human agency but through divine grace; mind as independent subject attains unity with a transcendental object (Rotenstreich 1963). In theology, alienation meant an apocalyptic transformation of the social order that liberated individuals from an oppressive bondage and revealed humanity’s natural existence as an external, alien force. Alienation’s negative connotations in ancient times ranged from sensing that a valued possession had been lost to being separated from the divine.

Alienation in medieval and early modern times

Situated at the boundary between the ancient and medieval worlds, St. Augustine focused on introspective conscience and an individualistic freedom of the will. From his preoccupation with the soul’s immersion in itself, and the concurrent achievement of immersion in the divine (Rotenstreich 1963), Augustine ([392–418 CE] 1956:lxvii) developed the term, alienatio mentis a sensibus corporis. This referred not to an estranged and forlorn mind, but to a spiritual elevation beyond the senses; this positive act was believed to constitute union with God, or being at home in a divine realm. Here, alienation means the separation of the individual from ordinary reality, upon experiencing an extra-ordinary, spiritual reality. The attainment of this spiritual enlightenment involved a circular journey of the kind taken in Augustine’s own life. In his vanity, Augustine had fallen away from ‘God’; he had gone to a far country where he engaged in fornication and experienced dis-unity, fragmentation, and scatteredness, whence he returned to seek purification. Augustine thus ended where he had begun, “in a marital union with the Bridegroom from, whom, in our wandering, we departed; the journey ended in the City of New Jerusalem,” and to “a person who is both male and female, a father who is also the mother, the bridegroom, and the spouse” (Augustine [397–400 CE] 2006:270, cited in Abrams 1973:167). It might perplex that a world beyond sex would be described in such terms, but in the works of Christian fiction, the individual seeks a land, or a home, “which is the dwelling of a woman of irresistible erotic charm.” Success is characterized as “betrothal or marriage,” where the female becomes the “focus of all desires, whose beauty lures the pilgrim by degree back up to the fons et origo of all love, light, and joy” (Abrams 1973:168).

Throughout the Middle Ages, alienation from the world and from involvement with others, an other-worldly mysticism or a veritable world-alienation, had, in European civilization, been seen as desirable. Hannah Arendt (1958:209–10, 248–56; see also Arendt and Kohn [1961] 2006:25) developed the concept, “world-alienation,” to signify a turning away from the common world, a sense of otherness toward human-made things and from the sharing of experience with others. In this mentality, which persisted through the so-called Renaissance period and into the 17th century, only alienation from ‘God’ was seen as undesirable; this was exemplified in the myths of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven and of the Fall of Man. The doctrine of John (2:25) exhorted: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, … the lust of the flesh, … of the eyes, and the pride of life.” There was in the Middle Ages “a predilection for voyaging, wandering, and homelessness as expression of spiritual world-alienation” (Howard 1974:52). This notion of the homeless wanderer existed in early Christianity, according to which believers’ terrestrial lot is that of the alien or stranger, the viator or traveler, who seeks only temporary shelter on the journey through this life.

The early Christian tradition thus brought to the Middle Ages two distinct conceptualizations of alienation: estrangement from God, a purely evil condition; and estrangement from the world, considered a duty and a privilege necessitated by rebel angels’ and Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience. Had these calamities not happened, there would be no need to feel as alien or stranger in this world. Because they did occur, St. Paul could assert that, as long as the human being is embodied, he or she is an exile from the Lord (Ladner 1967:238).

In the 12th century, the meaning of purposeful alienation-from-this-world slightly changed. That century experienced a remarkable, yet poorly understood, upsurge in the production of cultural and social forms.⁴ Alongside this burst of positive energy a sense of pessimism and gloom developed and the world was condemned with “extravagant language.” Individuals were preoccupied with the notion that “worldly life is mutable and transitory, that its pleasures are vain and disappointing, that man is fallen, his nature corrupted, and his body infirm” (Howard 1974:53). A specific emotion accompanied this pessimism, namely a despising, scorn, or, more generally, contempt, for worldly things, a contemptus mundae (Howard 1966:68–75). Here, the ‘world’ refers not to the earth or to the heavens, or to the physical universe, but to all that is human, including ‘worldliness’ or engagement in spheres of actions, institutions, and carnal temptations. When we commune with nature, indwell in a God-concept, or sink deeply into our own thoughts, we are in a state of non-communication with the world, and experience “world-alienation.” This term describes the medieval and Renaissance mentality, and Arendt (1958:248–57) used it to describe “loss of the common world,” and sense of otherness with respect to man-made things, or a sense of the meaninglessness and uselessness of the world.

The world-alienation that was ‘endemic’ to the Middle Ages ushered in an irrational distrust of reason (partly as rebellion against scholastic rationalism); reason was assessed as possessing but feeble power to influence nature or the corrupted social world replete with vanity, misery, and mutability. World-alienation existed both as an ideology and as a complex of emotions. It was the sentiment that, in order to lessen one’s alienation from ‘God’, one must alienate oneself from the world. Pope Innocent III ([c. 1195] 1969), for example, in his highly influential De Miseria, articulated this belief, and claimed that “Riches lead to immorality, pleasures to shame, and honors to vanity.”

Especially in the 14th and early 15th centuries, this de contemptu tradition promoted a view of death as the great leveler, that “illustrates the mutability of all worldly things and alienates every man … from the transitory loves of this world” (Howard 1974:57). Only a few treatises upheld human dignity, and only in Italy; contempt for the world prevailed throughout Europe, until the 17th century. Indeed, “the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were obsessed with death, with the vanity of earthly pursuits, with the mutability of the world itself. The final alienation of the dying man from the world was forever in their thoughts” (Howard 1974:58; see also O’Connor 1942).

During the Middle Ages and the so-called Renaissance, this world-alienation formed the dark undertone of a gradually emerging secular spirit, for “surely fear of death goes hand in hand with love of life” (Howard 1974:59). Schisms in European civilization stimulated a 12th-century burst of cultural energy. Society was torn between the despairing demands of, and warning by, adherents of contemptus mundi, versus those who participated in the emergence of secular feelings. This age “became at once more zestful and more despairing, more worldly and more otherworldly” (Howard 1974:59). The palpable threat of a secular mentality led to “various persecutions,” and in the 14th and 15th centuries, “the alienation of man from their fellows came to its fullest potential of horrors” (Howard 1974:59). With sadistic fury, heretics, Cathars, ⁵ deviants, and witches were tortured and burned alive (Ladner 1967:255–6).

The medieval doctrine of world-alienation was not a pure condemnation of worldliness, but was rather a “special style of worldliness” (Howard 1974:61). While the human condition is largely wretched and painful, the human being is created good, and therefore possesses a certain dignity. The body, while vile, was created by God, and is therefore not evil. While our senses lead to temptations, bodily impulses can lead to good actions. In the Renaissance, the idealized sculptures of the human body make it an object of interest, of artistic appreciation, and of contemplation. The secular trend that gradually developed was an overcoming of medieval alienation from the world. There developed a veritable thirst for knowledge of the natural and historical world. An inclination to observe things developed, not as they ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Alienation and affect in historical context
• PART II Emotions basic to specific varieties of alienation: contemporary theory and research
• References
• Name index
• Subject index