Social alienation
Alienation refers to an individual or social condition in which an originally natural relationship is canceled ( between people, people and work, people and the product of their labor and of man to himself ), reversed or destroyed.
Term
The term in philosophy
Originally called " alienation " on the one hand, the legal and economic dispose of something, for example, of ownership and freedom, and on the other hand the release from only the mundane, in preparation for the Divine. In this sense, the term was marked positive, and it remained so until the 19th century, to the Romantic and thanks oriented to classical antiquity. Man was filed by the gods in the universal finiteness of the cosmos. The enthusiasm of the romance of the Middle Ages brought the negative connotations with alienation as the flip side of freedom.
Alienation but also could mean being alienated from God, to be involved in the physical and the Paranormal, and thus demonstrate the principle need of salvation condition of human existence. For Martin Luther ( 1545 ) and later Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1841 ) is the life of the nations " God's absence ", " disbelief ", " ignorance " and " blindness " the alienated life. In the Bible, in the Epistle to the Ephesians ( 4:18 ) states:
" Darkened in their understanding, being alienated from the life that comes from God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. "
In the 17th century Blaise Pascal refers to the people as in the infinite universe alienated cosmic. He stands in the middle between nothing and everything, between infinite extremes that would be united in God. Since you could not come to one of these extremes, one should remain in the middle and think about these chasms. How long before Augustine and Kierkegaard later pleaded Blaise Pascal for a Christian life, in order to meet standards set by the state of original sin alienated world best.
In its original legal- economic sense, Jean -Jacques Rousseau uses the term " alienation." The human individual went about in freedom itself given laws of nature state of solitary freedom. This social relationship now obstructed the natural and organic relationship between man and his nature, to external nature and to his fellow man. This process was inevitable after Rousseau and is irreversible.
End of the 18th century Wilhelm von Humboldt builds a different approach to: The man is in a conflict "with the claim of his inner being to create the content of the concept of humanity in person ", and by its nature, " by itself to the objects except for him to move. " It was now a matter of, " that he does not lose himself in this alienation " ( Reinhart Maurer, 1973). All non-ego, the alien, is only the material and instruments that used the human to its unfolding, with which he seeks to fulfill the endless task of making the world habitable. Man has infinite freedom in an infinite to finite, tangible way world in which he can be quite at home as a free subject never and nowhere.
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1800 alienation is self-alienation, as knowledge is equal to self-knowledge - a process in which the self realizes its reality as made by his activity and appropriates this his reality. So there is a higher consciousness of self, the mind is in human consciousness, the subject of his own case subject appear as self-awareness and object, as the external world apart. Alienation is the movement of reality itself -giving subject, so self-alienation. This leads to a successively higher is evolving interpenetration of subject and object.
The abolition of alienation, Hegel sees in the " truly religious reconciliation with reality, which understands the philosophy [ ... ] but not in the belief that escape out of the kingdoms of the present ' is. "
"What does the Spirit is his own term reach ( the place at which it is theoretically and practically in harmony with the whole ); but he himself concealed in the same position, is proud and full of enjoyment in this alienation of himself "
Similarly, - only turned Christian - sees the romantics Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling 1827 alienation: " the people themselves in the subconscious and to Come. " Above all, it is Schelling but also the alienation from God. This is pointed back to the state of the world in need of reconciliation after the completion of creation. Schelling sees occurred through human consciousness a cosmologically catastrophic event in the world. For Schelling, there is a romantic - historicist linking doctrine of creation, philosophy of consciousness and theological philosophy of history.
For Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, religion is only the projection of the human being to an outward him, strange thing. So God is the alienated essence of man. Feuerbach's goal was to resolve the theology into anthropology. For religion is merely an otherworldly compensation of this world alienation.
Karl Marx finally uses the term in a very "worldly" manner: the worker who sells his labor-power, produce not only for himself and was, according to the division of labor is only one link in the production chain. The work product will alienate him, and so he also alienated from his fellow man. In the money to see the alienated nature of existence, the dominant people, the this to make things worse, even worshiped. Output from this situation there is, for Marx, only under different ownership and production relations. This use according to Marx has largely prevailed. But not to be neglected is the meant by Marx painful feeling of a lack of self-realization, is adjusted for alienated labor.
Ideologically goes on for the " existential experience to have a forever home not found " (Peter Ehlen, 1976). It is a psychological state of dissociation, the other point of reference seems to be a state of familiarity, of Heimischseins, harmony and love. Since the 19th century there is the concept of alienation as a medical- psychiatric term for mental illness - or a (partial) symptom Selbiger.
Expression of two currents took the concept of alienation in the 20th century by the French poet and philosopher Jean -Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Both state a sense of alienation due from the absurdity of human life. This absurdity arises at them from the contradiction between the desired meaningful action and the inaccessibility of this goal. Due to the revolt against the absurdity of the world and of life, and by consciously accepting the absurdity of these could be overcome. While Sartre seeks a social revolution in the sense of Marxism, Camus starts with the individual, which can only reach by its own internal revolt to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-realization in the sense of an enlightened humanism.
The central theme in the thoughts of the philosopher André Gorz is always the question of equitable distribution of work, which enables participation. Would counteract the alienation thus self-determined, meaningful and fulfilling activities.
The term in sociology
For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim alienation comes from the loss of social and religious traditions. For many European sociologists of the late 19th and early 20th century was a dominant theme of alienation: the alienation of man from primary social ties (eg Family) by individualization, the alienation from nature through urbanization, alienation from work by mechanization and rationalization. Ferdinand Tönnies was analyzed in 1887 " Community and Society ", modern society draw compared to the social form of community in society alienated purpose relationships ( " You go into society as in a foreign land "). Georg Simmel 1900 in the " Philosophy of Money " modern relationships analyzed and criticized.
The concept of community was referred to as romantic. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, it is the oblivion of Being. He sees the technical humanism as the basis of alienation; this is the part of human beings selbstentfremdete forces, born of the " will to power ". The technically and institutionally interwoven civilization in which everything is connected with everything obvious and obstructed the influence of the individual, Heidegger sums up in the term " frame " together.
The social mechanisms and dependencies are worked out by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer very accurate. The authors, for example, common in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the thesis that gained in civilization power over nature only at the price of alienation is to be had from this. Overcoming the alienation is not possible. Society and culture put forward alienation, they need outright. The individual can escape the alienation caused by the company to withdraw, to focusing on mind and art, staying away from gainful employment. General Horkheimer and Adorno describe as consequences of alienation processes:
As Erich Fromm say Adorno and Horkheimer that the mass is alienated not only by their working conditions, it is also in their spare time. With regard to the alienation there is no separation of work and leisure more. Leisure is inertia, pleasure, consumption, entertainment, distraction and the like. The keyword this is the culture industry.
" Culture industry can on the one hand, to subdue culture, art industry, the recovery and to keep other with exactly this industrialized culture, the individuals in the alienation, namely, to the applause of the audience. "
In Adorno's aesthetic theory, the idea developed that there would be no art without alienation and without art it would to total alienation. Thus, art is a product of alienation and a place of liberation from it at the same time. The general impotence of art have, however, proved most clearly in fascism and still proving to be in the universality of commodity production that is through work and money result and cause of alienation. Art is therefore powerless because it frees itself from the empiricism and so it also has no power, empirical rather lets the supremacy. The less the art of society faces and the more they can be integrated, is affirmative, the more likely exaggerating Art alienation even ahead. Art must be amenable to aporia, after which they degenerate into affirmation when the company opens, but harmless and without influence remains when it eludes society and closes. So nothing can be further be stated, as that society and art go to the alienation in their own particular disaster. Art had to abolish itself either be abolished or "desperate to continue ".
So art can not be power against alienation, but could be " consciousness of others, his selbstverdinglichte, product coagulated reality. " ( Trebeß 2001, p 162) you can be a design of a life without alienation without being in range to practice be realized. Art constitutes the suffering of alienation and enables an individual and natural Realize. The realizing of individuals and also the nature is suppressed in society, on the other hand protesting the art and is thus draft better, of happiness, the truth of the useless. Art is the most enduring of alienation.
For the sociologist and philosopher Arnold Gehlen, modern art compensates for the loads that are applied to people in the modern society durchbürokratisierten. However, not every art to relieve the situation, but only art that does not consist in mere emotional affective expressions. Expressionism assessed Gehlen therefore negative.
The stamina and the resistance against alienation by the subject, as will be described in Adorno, Jean Baudrillard is again the only possibility at all to his subject and to preserve its identity. That is the other way around: " subjectivity needs alienation. " ( Trebeß 2001, p 192). So it happens that Baudrillard laments a loss of alienation in favor of fractality, fragmentation and the extinction of the individual. If the alienation still provoked an affliction to her, posed the problem of human existence, so disappear this suffering and exist in the all-encompassing networking through communication. Satisfied, but noted that ultimately remained a sense of alienation.
To 1968, ideas of the Situationists who want to counter the alienation by a repeal of the separation between art and life spread. Your concept of alienation encompasses all areas of life that are subject to a " rule of the goods ": not only the alienation of the worker from his product as with Marx, but also and primarily the alienation and separation of subjects from each other in everyday life (see also: sales Psychology ) is crucial in a time that sees society as a rational amount of cybernetic (economic) cycles. Such ideas are also a total of 68 movement, which in the rationalized life of prosperity and modernity is not open society, but rather a " technocracy " with a system of " repressive tolerance " (Herbert Marcuse ) stated.
The concept of alienation in the literature
The related term " alienation " is a term of literary theory. He once described generally the distance between the poetic language and the everyday or vernacular. By altering literary trends are identified that are deliberately trying to point out that distance and emphasis on this. In a narrower sense, the alienation is referred to as a stylistic device to confuse the reader of a text or the viewer of a play consciously and disillusion.
Especially Bertolt Brecht has developed this art in his concept of epic theater. With the alienation he wanted to ensure that the viewer does not just passively "see" and " sympathizes " but is excited to distant reflection and questioning. To him the term alienation effect decreases. In his theory of epic theater, Brecht is looking for ways to make the variability of the familiar world visible. Goal of the theater is to the viewer to show the reality as merely historical, even if it appears as self-evident and immutable in everyday life.
As techniques of alienation primarily wit, satire, parody, grotesque imagery, Hermeticism and the like are used, but other unconventional methods, such as the abrupt stopping of the action, the direct address of the audience and the like.