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The Camden Philosophical Society meets on the third Tuesday of each month for reading and discussion. Read below to learn about the topic for the meeting on July 18. If you wish to participate via Zoom, please email sarahmiller@usa.net. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the morning of the meeting, Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.
Jumping off from its June discussion of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay on how “Technological Thinking” turns nature — and the entire world as we perceive it — into a storehouse of “natural resources” that exist only for human exploitation, the Camden Philosophical Society will in July discuss readings from contemporary philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s examination of Alienation. This notion of alienation, described by Jaeggi as being “at odds with oneself” and with the social and natural worlds, was part of the philosophical backdrop of modernity from Rousseau through Hegel to Marx and his 20th Century heirs. But it has been largely out-of-use in recent years. Jaeggi’s aim is to reconstruct and revitalize the concept.
Jaeggi argues that alienation reflects a lack of meaningful relationship to oneself and others, although she rejects the essentialist idea that this means a separation from some unchangeable “true self” or one’s genuine nature. Her reconstruction of the concept finds: “Alienation is a disturbance of the relationships by which we actively appropriate the world.” Appropriation means making something one’s own: “[T]he possibility of appropriating something refers . . . to a subject’s power to act and form and to impose its own meaningful mark on the world it appropriates.”
The key to refashioning our understanding of alienation, then, lies in how we establish relations to ourselves and the world — in how we take on the task “of having oneself and the world at one’s command.” Disturbance of the process of appropriation means a failure to identify with that which we desire or do. Success means “being the author of one’s own life.”
A brief introduction can only hint: Jaeggi’s book is rich in questions, reflections and examples. It is available online at no charge here: https://cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/rahel-jaeggi-alienation-1.pdf
It is recommended that participants in the discussion read, at minimum, pages 16-21, 22-25, 32-42, 43-49, 164-165, and 175-179. Where a titled subsection begins part way down the page, the reading begins and ends with the subsection.
In addition, participants are encouraged to read one of the examples Jaeggi explores in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the second part: the gifted mathematician who, having become a suburban father, finds himself hurrying home to mow the lawn; a junior editor whose cliched speech and behaviors inauthentically mimic his boss’s mannerisms; a feminist who realizes that she persists in habits and behaviors that do not match her ideals; someone whose lost enthusiasm for life leaves him indifferent to, well, whatever.