Further Considerations of Alienation

“Further Considerations of Alienation” attempts to expand upon an earlier essay entitled “Merleau-Ponty and a Reconsideration of Alienation.” From the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, this new essay considers modernist rationality and the postmodernist free play of language as forms of alienation. The essay attempts to show that Merleau-Ponty joins the company of Marx, Lukács, Habermas and Heidegger in order to make this case. This essay will attempt to add to and expand upon a recent publication entitled “Merleau-Ponty and a Reconsideration of Alienation.” While this earlier essay lays out Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to the modernist view of the subject as a rational interior in full possession of itself and a pre-formed rational world, as well as to the postmodernist view that the subject along with the subject’s world is primarily a construction of language, it did not go far enough in emphasizing Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the abstract reasoning of modernism as a form of alienation (at the level of epistemology/ ontology, as well as at the level of self/subject and politics). Merleau-Ponty spent much of his professional career criticizing both empiricist and rationalist forms of modernism, primarily for treating the subject and the world as already conceptually and abstractly formed, and the later part of his professional life criticizing both capitalism and communism for their acceptance of a politics based on a pre-established rationality. All modernism as the abstract construction of reality, as well as all contemporary forms of instrumentalism or operationalism as the attempt to construct reality according to a few abstract indices, are alienated forms of experience, since they do not capture the richness of the world as it is originally lived through by embodied subjects engaged in the world together. They attempt to derive or construct experience from conceptual abstractions. Rather, we should begin with experience as it is really lived through by embodied experiencers. Reason, then, comes out of this patterned and shared experience.