University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Alienation, agency, and identity

Alsup, Clayton James Monck

Content Files
ALSUP-DISSERTATION-2021.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113813

Description

Title
Alienation, agency, and identity
Author(s)
Alsup, Clayton James Monck
Issue Date
2021-09-29
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Sussman, David G
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Sussman, David G
Committee Member(s)
  • Varden, Helga
  • Ben-Moshe, Nir
  • Bojanowski, Jochen
  • Sanders, Kirk
Department of Study
Philosophy
Discipline
Philosophy
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2022-04-29T21:34:07Z
Keyword(s)
  • philosophy
  • agency
  • identity
  • identification
  • alienation
  • estrangement
  • constitutivism
  • Korsgaard
  • Frankfurt
  • confidence
  • moral psychology
  • self-interpretation
  • first-person
  • first-person authority
  • philosophy of the self
  • philosophical anthropology
Abstract
The aim of this project is to provide a general philosophical account of the concept of alienation and show that such an account reveals that recent theories of agency must be altered or rejected if they are to successfully incorporate the phenomenon of alienation. By making clear what is involved in alienation and what the shortcomings of various theories of agency are, such an account helps provide criteria for any adequate theory of agency. In order to investigate the impact consideration of alienation might have on such a theory, both a Humean theory of agency (in the form of Harry Frankfurt’s work) and a Kantian theory of agency (in the form of Christine Korsgaard’s work) are considered. Frankfurt’s theory is found to be wanting due to its failure to accommodate the distinction between first- and third-personal perspectives, both of which can be adopted by human agents. Korsgaard’s theory, while considerably better equipped to accommodate alienation in virtue of its appreciation of the importance of the distinction between such perspectives, overemphasizes the opposition between agential unity and alienation. In so doing, it fails to appreciate the way in which the possibility of alienation is a necessary feature of action and, therefore, of agency itself. A theory of agency, then, will have to provide a way for agency to count as successful without the radical unity of the sort Korsgaard demands. Chapter One is a brief historical account of the development of the concept of alienation from its etymological origins, through its modern appropriation by Hugo Grotius, and culminating in the radical extension of alienation by Nietzsche. I show how alienation, initially deployed by Grotius as a concept in order to determine what is essential to humanity, comes to possess an ambivalent quality via Rousseau, who first suggests that alienation involves a loss of unity, and so is negative, but also makes possible the development of a novel harmony, and so is also positive. This developmental aspect of alienation is taken up by Hegel and Marx, providing a mechanism in both of their philosophies of how history develops toward a final, unified state via a sequence of alienating events. Relatedly, Nietzsche also treats alienation as having a developmental function, but he treats this function as an end in itself; rather than developing toward a final end state, he posits alienation as a ceaseless process that never has a natural end. This capacity for endless alienation is, in fact, what is most essential to humanity; thus, Nietzsche is one of the first to make explicit the paradoxical quality of alienation: our essence is precisely that we have no essence. Chapter Two undertakes to provide an account of alienation that will accommodate the broad array of previous historical usage of the term. This commitment to maintaining historical usage derives from a fundamentally conservative aim: While I do not want to suggest that historical usage determines the content of alienation as a concept, I am inclined to treat the various conceptions of alienation as compatible unless convinced that they are incompatible. This is not, then, a revisionary project, at least at the outset; rather, it treats the historical use of alienation as representative of a shared concept that Chapter Two attempts to unpack. This attempt begins by considering typical cases of alienation and observing their similarities. I then argue that these cases are best explained by treating alienation, not as a relation itself, but as a deficient mode of relation, possible only in a certain class of relations. This class, the members of which I call identification relations, involves those relations that are determinative of who we are, of the structure of our identities. These relations can obtain more or less deficiently; when there is incoherence between different relations, we identify deficiently: this deficient mode of identification is alienation. Because we express ourselves and our commitments in our actions, such alienation is profitably investigated by way of considering what we do when we are conflicted in the way that occurs when we have incoherent identities. I consider Harry Frankfurt’s theory of agency as a representative of Humean theories of agency more generally. Frankfurt relies on a power that we possess to carve off what is “external” to us from what is “internal” to us; the former isn’t really us, while the latter is who we really are. I argue that this power, as understood by Frankfurt, would make incomprehensible our experiences of shame and alienation. This is due partly to his voluntaristic model of agency and partly to the way in which he defines “external” and “internal.” Where Frankfurt would conclude that our inability to be held responsible for what is “external” to us shows that we can carve off parts of ourselves and treat them as separate, I claim that our ability to comprehensibly relate to those “external” parts as though they remained “internal” shows that who we really are is more expansive than merely that for which we are held responsible. Moreover, it is the fact that we can treat ourselves as both “external” and “internal” that is relevant to alienation; rather than try to show the sharp distinction between these two ways of engaging with ourselves, it is crucial to focus on the fuzzy quality of human agency, which is what allows us to adopt both first- and third-personal perspectives. In Chapter Three I examine the importance of the perspectival nature of agency. Rejecting a clear distinction between “objective” and “subjective” cases of alienation, I argue that, as in the case of Frankfurt, this distinction fails to take seriously the way in which humans can approach themselves (and parts of themselves) as both mere objects and as subjects. I then further develop my account of alienation to incorporate this insight, relying heavily on Richard Moran’s work on self-knowledge. The incoherence of identification relations described earlier in Chapter Two is experienced as an uncomfortable inability to stand firmly in either the first-personal or third-personal perspective; instead, we flip back and forth between them, attempting to understand ourselves first as subject, then as object. This explains Frankfurt’s failure to accommodate alienation: alienation is not the simple “extruding” of a part of ourselves into the world, but is the paradoxical state in which a part of myself is treated both as part of me and not as part of me, as mine but not mine. In Chapter Four I turn to Korsgaard in order to see if a Kantian theory of action, one which takes the distinction between the first- and third-person seriously, fares better than a Humean theory. Although I believe it does fare better, I raise concerns that Korsgaard shares with Frankfurt a difficulty in accounting for the cases in which this distinction breaks down and we treat ourselves alternately as object and subject, as in a case of alienation. In particular, Korsgaard’s emphasis on the unity of the soul as a criterion for agency prevents her from seeing how alienation, far from being the opposite of agency, is in fact bound up with agency itself. As a result, Korsgaard’s effort to develop a theory of agency that would require we immunize ourselves to the possibility of alienation is, in fact, self-undermining. In order to explore how a theory like Korsgaard’s might better make room for alienation, I make some initial moves — drawing especially on Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, and Richard Rorty — in the direction of developing a conception of confidence that would help moderate the dangers of alienation without removing the possibility of alienation altogether.
Graduation Semester
2021-12
Type of Resource
Thesis
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113813
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Copyright 2021 Clayton James Monck Alsup

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