Alienation: where is the split, and who can heal it?

For Shore, alienation is modernity's central problem: once God is gone and nothing else binds the world together, human beings find themselves homeless in it.

Virtue needs authenticity, and society, which forces us into pretending we are someone else, rules authenticity out. Being virtuous therefore means withdrawing from society.

Put simply Rousseau: you cannot be good without being true to yourself. Society makes us pretend to be someone else, so it makes that impossible. To be virtuous, you have to withdraw from society.

Humans are social beings with a deep longing for home. Belonging to a unique, rooted community answers it and overcomes alienation. Herder hated cosmopolitanism.

Put simply Herder: people are social and long deeply for a home. Belonging to a distinct, rooted community overcomes the feeling of homelessness ("alienation"). He hated cosmopolitanism, the ideal of being a citizen of the world.

Alienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos.

Put simply Hegel: alienation means failing to see your own life as part of the whole, which he calls "Geist". The cure is to feel at one with the goal (the "telos") the universe is moving toward.

Factory work estranges workers from labor itself: hired by the hour, tending machines, performing one fragment of a process whose finished product is never theirs.

Put simply Marx: factory work cuts workers off from their own labor. Paid by the hour, they tend machines and do one small step of a process, and the finished product is never theirs.

The bourgeoisie, like the workers, are also self-alienated under capitalism; the difference is that they are content, since they are making money.

Put simply Marx: under capitalism the factory owners are alienated from themselves too, just like the workers. The difference is that they do not mind, because they are making money.

Where to read it Marx and Engels, The Holy Family (1845), ch. IV.

Kafka felt estranged from each of his several identities, German-speaking, Czechoslovak, Jewish, and from himself: his diary admits "hardly anything in common with myself."

Where Marx's worker is alienated structurally, by how labor is organized, Kafka's alienation is less structural than psychological: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up utterly alone.

Put simply Marx and Kafka both describe alienation, feeling cut off. For Marx it comes from how work is organized. For Kafka it is more a matter of inner feeling: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up completely alone.

Surrendering to the they estranges Dasein from its authentic self, yet Heidegger argues the estrangement is comforting: going along with the crowd is easier than being oneself.

Put simply Heidegger: giving in to the crowd cuts us off from our real selves. But that loss is comforting, because going along with everyone is easier than being yourself.

Enlightenment reason knows nature only as something to manipulate, and the price of the power it gains is alienation from the very nature it dominates.

Put simply Adorno: Enlightenment reason sees nature only as something to control and use. The price of that power is that we become estranged from the very nature we dominate.

In Shore's reading, Origins shares, in some ways, the course's recurring starting point: alienation as modernity's central problem, breeding a vulnerability that is necessary though not sufficient for totalitarianism.

Put simply Shore: in some ways Arendt's book starts where the course keeps starting, with alienation, the sense of not being at home in the modern world. That breeds a weakness totalitarianism needs, though it is not enough on its own.

In Arendt's analysis, victims are not the only ones made superfluous: the perpetrators, recruited from an atomized, lonely mass, trade isolation for collective organization and lose their selves.

Put simply Arendt: the victims are not the only ones made "superfluous", unneeded. The perpetrators come from lonely, isolated people who trade their isolation for belonging to a movement, and lose their selves in it.

The root of oppression, for Beauvoir, is the urge to escape oneself: we flee our own subjectivity by alienating ourselves in an Other.

Put simply Beauvoir: oppression comes, at root, from the urge to escape ourselves. We run from being a free self by losing ourselves in someone or something else, an "Other".

Humans are essentially beings of praxis: free, creative activity that remakes the world and realizes one's faculties. Alienation is the gap between that potential and what one actually is.

Put simply Marković: what makes us human is "praxis", free and creative activity through which we change the world and develop our abilities. "Alienation" is the gap between what a person could be and what they actually are.

Only socialist revolution counts as revolution "in its deepest and fullest sense," Petrović argues: not swapping one exploitation for a more progressive one, but abolishing all exploitation and self-alienation.

Put simply Petrović: a real revolution does not swap one kind of exploitation for a better one. It ends all exploitation and all the ways people are estranged from themselves. Only socialist revolution is revolution in that fullest sense.

In 1948 notes, Patočka holds that Marx, following Hegel, rightly centers alienation but misreads it: no reorganized conditions can heal it, because humans are permanently other than themselves.

Put simply Patočka, in 1948 notes: Marx, following Hegel, was right that alienation, our estrangement, is the central problem. But no change in social conditions can cure it, because humans are always other than themselves.