The Logic of Estrangement

Reason in an Unreasonable Form

Julius Sensat

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137565587
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The book recasts the concept of estrangement as `reason in an unreasonable form', traces its development in writings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, supplies a game-theoretic reconstruction of it, and assesses its significance for a critical understanding of John Rawls's philosophy.

1

Introduction

In a letter to Arnold Ruge of September 1843, Marx says:

Reason has always existed, just not always in reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop from existing reality’s own forms the true reality as its ought and its ultimate purpose [Endzweck] [93, p. 143 (translation modified); 95, part 1, 2:487].

It may be tendentious, for reasons I will explain in a moment, to read this passage as concerned with estrangement and its overcoming. Tendentious perhaps, but, I would argue, fruitful. For it enables us to understand the passage as expressing two ideas traceable back through German idealism to Kant’s critical philosophy and forward through the thought of Lukács [81], the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno [63; 64], Marcuse [82]) and their successors (Habermas [42–45], Honneth [60–62]), and, I maintain here, John Rawls [110–119]. The first is that of estrangement or alienation, understood as reason in an unreasonable form, and the second is that of the potential of philosophy or critical social theory to play an integral role in overcoming it. On this reading, these thinkers do not always use the language of estrangement, but they are nonetheless concerned with it. For example, Kant does not use the term when he speaks, in a manner reminiscent of Rousseau, of ‘passions’ that wreak devastation in a self-incurred ‘dominion of evil’, in which persons act as though they were ‘instruments of evil’ [66, 6:97]. Nor does Rawls use it when he evaluates alternative conceptions of the social minimum by reference to their comparative ‘strains of commitment’ [117, §38]. In fact, he hardly uses the term at all. Even Hegel, who treats estrangement as a pivotal phenomenon, does not explicitly refer to it when he discusses the emergence of a ‘rabble’ within his system of ethical life [52, §244; 57, 7:§244.] Yet we can plausibly take it to be topically central in all of these cases. And these thinkers all attribute an important social role to philosophy or critical theory, whether it be defense or vindication of reason in public life (Kant, Hegel, Rawls), reconciliation to the social world (Hegel, Rawls), the self-consciousness of transformative social practice (Hegel, Marx, Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Habermas, Honneth), or the elaboration of ideas to form a basis of democratic social unity (Rawls).

The possibly tendentious character of these assertions lies in their treatment of estrangement as reason in an unreasonable form, since a more typical characterization—understandably, especially with respect to Marx—would refer instead to a self-induced separation of human beings from their essential nature, which then assumes a hostile or alien form, one that suppresses or distorts the realization of their freedom.¹ On this view, social criticism on grounds of estrangement consists in showing how social practices create or sustain such a separation and how social change could enable a reunification. Yet whether one (1) understands modernity to have entered a ‘post-metaphysical’ period (Habermas), (2) maintains that in a democratic society, appeals to fundamental metaphysical or philosophical-anthropological doctrines are not available within the space of public reasons (Rawls), or (3) simply insists on a strict distinction between the factual and the normative,² one can reasonably question whether there is a defensible concept of human nature or the human essence—even a historically variable one— that could fund a concept of estrangement that could serve as a basis for social understanding and critique. I do not deny that Hegel and Marx make use of essentialist language and express essentialist ideas.³ However, I believe that ideas in their writings can be extracted from this context to fashion a concept of estrangement that can support social understanding and exercise a critical function through the idea of an irrational or unreasonable embodiment of reason in the social world. As I have claimed, the same could be said, I think, of other figures standardly read as contributors to the tradition of critical social theory, though I do not argue for this claim in what follows. Moreover, once we recast the concept of estrangement in this way, there is no reason to exclude Kant and Rawls from the fold, and I do defend this claim here (Chapters 2 and 7).

When is reason in an unreasonable form? Here we can take our cue from Kant. He takes reason to be a system of principles for theoretical and practical reasoning, judgment, and action. This system itself specifies standards that assign to each of its possible uses certain interests, bounds, prerogatives, and relations of priority or subordination with respect to other possible uses. It is possible to use principles of reason in ways that violate these standards. For example, Kant views it as unreasonable to subordinate duty to inclination, pure to empirical practical reason. If such violations take place as part of a social practice, then we can speak of the practice as embodying reason in an unreasonable form.

Many theorists of estrangement have taken it to play at times a historically productive role. Certainly Hegel and Marx understand it in this way.⁴ It is not immediately clear how the concept of a separation of human beings from their essential nature can by itself account for this feature of estrangement. On the other hand, the view of estrangement as reason in an unreasonable form can easily accommodate it. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the social world that he calls self-alienated spirit, Hegel sees forces of development that eventually make possible an overcoming of society’s alienated condition and a realization of freedom. It is plausible to claim that for Hegel this process of sociocultural development (or Bildung as he calls it) is driven by reason in an unreasonable form.⁵ Similarly, Marx, for whom capitalism is a system of estrangement, nonetheless holds that it is responsible for the development of society’s productive powers. As we’ll see, Marx views this process as driven by reason in an unreasonable form, because it is a process in which technical or instrumental reason is put into the service of capital. Even Kant’s theory of history—as a process in which humanity’s ‘unsocial sociability’ drives human sociocultural development that eventually makes it possible to approximate the realization of an ethical community—fits into this mold, for unsocial sociability is for Kant a realization of reason in an unreasonable form. It is a matter of a socially reinforced tendency to give empirical practical reason priority over pure practical reason. Moreover, Rawls follows Hegel’s lead in understanding the idea of toleration to be made possible by the Reformation, the ensuing rise of religious pluralism, and the latter’s consequent devolution into religious war. What is religious pluralism without toleration if not a realization of reason in an unreasonable form?

Thinking about estrangement in this way also allows us to retain two important ideas from the more standard characterization. The first is that estrangement is a self-incurred condition in which agents turn their own agency into a force that blocks or distorts the realization of their freedom. The new conception construes freedom as the freedom of reason, the freedom that is realized when persons assume control over and responsibility for their judgments and actions. When agents realize their reason in an unreasonable form, they compromise their own freedom. The second idea is that the elimination of estrangement and the full realization of freedom require a social transformation. In this case we think of the transformation as establishing conditions of social unity enabling agents to hold one another to mutually acceptable standards. Since we can retain these two ideas in the new conception, I will accordingly understand estrangement to be marked by three interrelated features:

1. It is a social condition in which reason is realized in an unreasonable form.

2. It is a condition in which agents unwittingly turn their own agency into a force against itself, a force that blocks or distorts the realization of their freedom.

3. It can only be eliminated through a kind of social unity.

Besides conceiving of estrangement in these terms, my investigation restricts its purview in two ways. First, while a comprehensive study would trace the idea of estrangement back to ancient times, the focus here takes in the late eighteenth century to the present. Second, within this period, one can distinguish a concept of what might be called social estrangement—whereby agents unwittingly construct an alien social world—from one of ‘existential estrangement’—whereby agents live individual lives that are their own but are nonetheless inauthentic or alien. While the former is anticipated in Rousseau’s thought and finds expression in Hegel’s philosophy and the ideas of Marx and the subsequent tradition in critical social theory, the latter develops largely through a reaction to Hegel’s thought on the part of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, among others. Though there may indeed be important connections between the two sets of ideas,⁶ my focus is on the former.⁷ In addition, as I’ve indicated, I maintain that the tradition including them should be expanded to include Kant and Rawls.

Aside from the fact that there are anticipations of the idea of estrangement in Rousseau that influence Kant’s thinking, Kant’s critical program explicitly takes itself to be the self-critique of a reason at odds with itself and needing to put itself into reasonable form. The project concerns not only theoretical aspirations but practical endeavors as well. For example, as we’ll see in Chapter 2, Kant concerns himself with social circumstances in which moral evil bears the marks of estrangement. He also has the resources for a challenging defense against Hegel’s striking charge that morality as he characterizes it is a form of estrangement. Kant concedes that morality can appear to be an alien imposition, but he takes this appearance to be a mere semblance that provides false— we might say ‘ideological’— support for the condition of estrangement provided by systematic moral evil. We can fruitfully read much of his practical philosophy as aimed at dispelling such support. Kant’s most ambitious and significant contribution to this effort, in my judgment, is his attempt in the Critique of Practical Reason to disclose an a priori entryway into a circle of equivalences containing our status as morally responsible, our rationality (in a strong sense), our transcendental freedom, and our autonomy. For Kant this circle provides us with an indispensable self-conception linking us to morality (Section 2.2.1). He supplies a moral psychology supporting this self-conception (Section 2.2.2), an assurance that morality makes adequate room for human happiness (and thus for empirical practical reason) (Section 2.2.3), and an argument that the presuppositions of morality are compatible with the unity of reason (Section 2.2.4).

For Hegel, however, the appearance of Kantian morality as alien is not a mere semblance but rather reflects three genuine forms of estrangement (Section 2.3). I call two of these ‘motivational estrangement’ and ‘content estrangement’, respectively. The charge of motivational estrangement is that the Kantian structure of motivation unduly separates moral from empirical interests and puts them into unnecessary conflict with each other. The charge of content estrangement is that Kant’s so-called pure practical reason is incapable of providing moral content on its own and can do so only by presupposing the reasonableness of the background social world. Hegel roots these two forms of estrangement in a third form, which I call ‘moral individualism’ and which treats moral deliberation as fundamentally and self-sufficiently a form of individual deliberation about personal maxims for dealing with given circumstances. The mature Hegel hopes to overcome or avoid all three of these conditions by taking a new approach to the realization of freedom—one in which basic social structure is crucial—and by laying out a system of ethical life in which self-interest bears an organic relation to the general interest.

I discuss the main elements of Hegel’s theory of freedom in Chapter 3. For Hegel, the free will must will itself as its own object. This is only possible in a social world that is well-ordered by the concept of freedom. Such a world must realize three forms of practical freedom: personal freedom, moral freedom, and social freedom. Personal freedom is realized through the social recognition and exercise of rights of individuals to pursue their own interests, without interference from others. Moral freedom is realized through the power of individuals to determine through their own reflection what is right and to act on that determination. Social freedom is realized through self-conscious participation in forms of social cooperation that provide conditions for the realization of personal and moral freedom and conditions for their own existence and reproduction as well. Personal freedom must be rooted in moral freedom, which in turn must be rooted in social freedom. An attempt to provide the first without the second would realize reason in an unreasonable form, as would an attempt to provide the second without the third. Finally, a free social world must make available, through philosophy, speculative insight into the reason embodied in these forms. Such insight provides the self-consciousness essential to the full realization of the free will.

After presenting Hegel’s theory, I raise some questions concerning whether it is successful (Section 3.6). Drawing in part from the young Marx’s critique,⁸ I try to confirm what seems to be an unresolved tension between separatist and integrationist characterizations on Hegel’s part of the relation of civil society to the political state.

Next, in Chapter 4, I lay out Marx’s mature conceptions of value and capital, as they are found in Capital. I stress their nature as conceptions of economic estrangement, and I try to show how Marx understands them to provide the basis of a critique of political economy for its ideological aspects. Marx contrasts commodity production, in which the ‘value form’ (Wertform) of the products of labor is the dominant interpersonal production relation, with a possible social world in which individuals in their everyday working lives bear thoroughly ‘reasonable’ (vernünftige) relations to one another and to nature [90, p. 173; 95, part 2, 6:110]. Since he conceives of commodity producers as acting rationally in making their economic decisions, he in effect regards the value form as a realization of reason in an unreasonable form, a form in which producers are dominated by their own production process, and hence a form of estrangement. Marx regards capitalism as a form of commodity production that develops and intensifies this estrangement. In confronting capital, workers confront their own labor in an alien, hostile form, one that requires them to work at the direction of another and to perform labor and even surplus labor as a mere means of maintaining their existence, and one that generates unemployment and poverty. Moreover, this estrangement has material-technical as well as socioeconomic aspects. Workers’ social productive powers—science, technology, division of labor, and so on—are developed and applied at the expense of and in opposition to their individual productive powers. For Marx, all of these developments intensify the character of the production process as an unreasonable realization of human reason and a form of unfreedom.

After presenting Marx’s account, I consider some features of Hegel’s theory in light of it (Section 4.6). Implicit in Marx’s analysis are potential criticisms of Hegel’s views (1) on the compatibility of commodity production and freedom, (2) on the division of labor and machinery, (3) on the wage transaction as a form of freedom, and (4) on poverty and the existence of a ‘rabble’. The most surprising of these criticisms is perhaps the first: If Marx is right, then given what Hegel himself requires for the social realization of freedom, there is no room in his system of ethical life for an eco...