Alienation. A Challenge for Citizenship Education

Resumen

Recently the alienation of modern capitalist society has again made it to the agendas of normative discussions of social philosophy. Wanting to do philosophy of education, and especially when having the ambition to educate for citizenship, one must simultaneously insist on both the fact of alienation and on possible ways of forming subjects to become political citizens in a social democracy. After a brief discussion of Hartmut Rosa's conception of alienation, emphasizing his non-speculative non-essentialism which only offers a diagnosis in terms of experienced phenomena, I turn my attention to Herbert Marcuse, initiating the conceptual discussion of capitalism, how It harms humans and how this can be overcome, reintroducing in the process the Hegelian metaphysics of human nature and historical opportunities.

What complicates the matter, however, is the difficulty determining what exactly alienation is supposed to mean, especially when considering related phenomena such as estrangement, reification and objectification. Rosa choses alienation as the overall concept, emphasizing that capitalism somehow is the at the root of the problem, but in accordance with Habermas and the post-metaphysical turn of Critical Theory, he refrains from any argument concerning human nature. Instead he discusses alienation in terms of experiences, determining alienation as the non-relation to something which is mute and deaf. However, leaving it like this, only indicating vaguely how capitalism contributes to the sorry state of affairs, is not satisfying. I therefore take one step back in the tradition, namely to the Critical Theory of Marcuse which has no problem with being blatantly metaphysical both in relation to human nature and history.

However, discussing these issues in English means first recognizing much vagueness in terminology. To overcome this, I reflect on how the idea has traveled from French to German and finally to English, so that we can make a well-founded choice as to the key terms so we can continue the discussion. Ultimately, my choice turns out to be quite traditional, making "alienation" the global term meaning a problematic relationship with the environment and thinking that the problem is constituted by the following elements: "objectification" that results from human nature, projecting itself to the environment and thus making possible the problematic relationship; "estrangement," which is what happens when the objectified object is experienced as something totally foreign, and, in the end, "reification" which is the specific type of distancing that can be said to result from capitalism, i.e. from the generalization of the commodity form to all human relations. As is well known, the young Marx sees no other solution on this problem than revolution; I will nevertheless take the reformist path and insist on the possibility of a civic education for an authentic social democracy.

Key words: Citizenship education, alienation, reification, philosophical anthropology, Critical Theory