Modernity was the age of alienation and of the struggles to overcome it. Today, we don’t talk about alienation; if we do, we accept it as a fact about the human condition. Alienation, the fracture between the world and the self, was the secular version of the religious sin. Up to Kant, modern philosophers have used faith to overcome alienation. Religion was a highly abstracted solution. It offered the certainty of a given place in the metaphysical world, where the soul and the world were united. This enforced the structures of the earthly world that engender alienation, such as economic class and other forms of social inequality.
Given that alienation is still a condition of earthly lives, where dispossession and inequality are living relationships, people still think of religion as a form of salvation. Today, like the sunrise in a heliocentric world, religion remains a living relationship between people and the world.
With Kant, alienation, the fracture of world and individual, is assumed to be the modality of being in the world. Metaphysical homelessness becomes humanity's given condition. Kant split human experience between determining structures and an undetermined subjectivity. The first structure is formed by the a priori categories of understanding: time, space, causality, and motion. The a priori categories shape how we relate to the world around us. They are the research subject of science and technology. Their investigation is based on mathematical rationality. They are relationships of necessity.
The second structure, which Kant called practical reason, refers to moral imperatives. The ethical imperative acts as an a priori category, meaning that when we act in the world, we always do so under the imperative to do good, regardless of what we think good means. Of course, this did not describe everything, so Kant introduced the category of diabolical evil, when people act under the imperative to do evil for evil's sake. These are also relationships of necessity.
Kant realised that under such circumstances, the subject has no freedom; the subject is determined by either scientific truth or moral imperatives. These are not compatible with free will. People are not capable of acting independently of these given structures.
To overcome this problem, Kant proposed aesthetic judgement as the space of freedom. For Kant, the experience of beauty is entirely subjective and determined by neither a priori categories nor imperatives. In aesthetic judgement, the subject exercises free will and finds authentic expression. This is the birth of modern art, which becomes concerned with expressing an authentic individual subjectivity. The modern creative individual does not copy old masters but develops and discovers new ways of expression.
However, this means a considerable gap exists between the determining structures of understanding and morality and the subject. Therefore, Kant sought to find a way to universalise aesthetic judgement. When someone deems something beautiful or sublime, they propose that it is universal. This means that he participates not in a subjective experience in isolation from the rest of humanity but in engaging the whole world. The history of modern art has proved Kant both wrong and right. Individual artists develop new forms of expression against popular taste, which tends to resist the new. This means that artists work in isolation. Yet, artists also catalyse new popular tastes as their work eventually becomes universalised: a new public taste.
Looking back at Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgement, we realise that he proposes a theory of enjoyment and authenticity. In expressing a judgement on beauty, the individual states a relationship of enjoyment and authenticity. Only through aesthetic judgement does the individual overcome alienation and rejoin the world in enjoyment.
However, this enjoyment remains separated from truth and good. These are still determinate realms, while beauty, i.e. aesthetic pleasure, is free.
Kant seems content with the state of alienation. His motto for the Enlightenment was ‘question but obey’. In this sense, Kant describes and anticipates the structure of capitalism and bourgeois society and proposes that humanity should accept them as universal: alienation is humanity's proper state.
The romantics rebelled against this proposition. They dreamed of a world of human brotherhood, where alienation is overcome.
It is possible that Kant was unaware that he was describing the relationships and problems of capitalism and bourgeois society. Yet Kant was both sensing the emerging new relationships and providing a philosophical platform for their development.
As I stated in my previous post on Kant’s a priori categories, science, morality, and aesthetic judgment do not describe things in the world but forms of human relationships: the relationships between people and between people and the environment. Kant was part of the modern process of rearticulating these relationships.
The central problem of bourgeois society and capitalism, like any class society, is alienation, the fracture between social structures and individual freedom. On the one hand, capitalism deems the individual a free agent. At the same time, it subordinates the subject to the structures of capitalism.
Yet, things are not that simple. The way alienation is perceived is also divided. On the one hand, the romantic definition of alienation focuses on identity and rejects economic reasons. Following on from Kant, for the romantic imagination, the problem consists of the mechanistic regulatory structures of modernity, including capitalism, science and morality, leaving no room for the authentic individual soul and making an outcast of it. The capitalist and bourgeois structures exclude individuality. Expressing individual identity becomes a central ground of bourgeois political and artistic confrontation. It rejects economic reason: it is not about the money but about being human. Some romantics saw this as a progressive politics looking for a new world order; others have sought refuge in tradition to resist the cultural alienation produced by capitalism and bourgeois society.
At the same time, capitalism creates material dispossession. This leads to the second bourgeois form of overcoming alienation, capital accumulation: making money. Money is not just a means of economic transactions, but also embodies a desire to escape from alienation.
Marx turned things on their head, redefining alienation as material dispossession and individual exclusion as a material phenomenon. For him, alienation is caused by the extraction of surplus value in the capitalist mode of production, which generates two distinct alienated subjectivities: an alienated subjectivity that refuses the extraction of surplus value and capital accumulation through free artistic expression and an alienated subjectivity that wants to overcome alienation through the accumulation of capital, i.e., making money.
Marx sought to connect these two struggles. He thought that by socialising the means of production and bringing them into common ownership, he could overcome the double alienation of economic dispossession and identity exclusion and transform the mode of production and reproduction of life into a framework for a free expression of individuality.
Marx's theories were rooted in the Kantian problematic of structure and subject. As Marx put it, the object of class struggle is to seize a realm of freedom from that of necessity.
Is it possible to build a social structure that does not alienate subjectivity?
Suppose science, ethics, and capitalism are not just structures but describe genuine relationships between human beings and between human beings and the environment. How much do we have to change these structures to create a world where determining structures are not alienating but conducive to free expression?
Many contemporary thinkers have returned to the problem of alienation but have reassumed the Kantian position: alienation is humanity's proper position, and individual freedom depends on alienation. Supposedly, capitalism and bourgeois society are the End of History. This return to Kant has shaped the political conflict between ‘normality’ and ‘divergence,’ between politics that enforce the normalising structures, and the excluded subjects.