Alienation and Retreat

the tendency to look inwards into the self and to know and determine from within the self what is right and good appears in epochs when what is recognized as right and good in actuality and custom is unable to satisfy the better will. --Hegel PR, Remarks to §138

In the context of the rest of Hegel's Philosophy of Right up to this point, I take this to mean that the retreat into the self for guidance as to what to do occurs when the guidance provide from outside oneself breaks down, whether by the guidance being obviously wrong, or by the authoritative guides losing standing (e.g., by being found hypocritical). I have also heard it suggested that this kind of retreat occurs where the general public finds that it lacks social efficacy, that is, where people find themselves in a position where it appears that they can have no influence in the culture or state. Both of these situations are situations where the self fails to find itself represented outside itself, that is, where it is alienated from the outside world.

If these ideas are right, then the modern ideas of "finding oneself," "being true to oneself," and "not caring what others think" are a result of alienation. All three of these adages are forms of retreat, wherein we are advised to see ourselves as authorities on how to live. There is truth to these adages, but when they are absolutized they become corrosive to social cohesion. We become atomic individuals without interaction, and we deny the permissibility of exchanging moral views. What Hegel is suggesting, however, is that the social cohesion was corroded first. We take charge of our fates and souls because we are at a loss as to who else to grant authority over them.

As someone who is generally critical of the above mentioned modern ideas, this framing of the problem presents the challenge of navigating a way forward which respects the common and in many ways justified distrust of authority and lack of hope for social efficacy. In the latter vein, the rise of locally focused social movements benefits us. By focusing on smaller, low-level issues, we prove that we can change something, and can work our way up from there. With respect to our distrust of authority, however, I have not noticed any promising developments. As much as we follow leaders, we seem to trust only those leaders who are within our own groups. This is better than nothing, but is not promising for an exchange of moral views.

The challenge is compounded by the way in which our distrust of moral authority expresses itself. As MacIntyre has argued, we tend to operate with an implicitly expressivist view of moral discourse: we think of claims about good and bad as merely expressing cheers and boos for different actions. This lies behind the difficulty people have distinguishing between condemning an action and condemning an agent who acts in that manner. Because condemning the action is heard as booing, any agent who performs it seems to be booed along with it. Claims about good and bad become inherently charged with blaming and praising and cannot be heard dispassionately any more than swear words can. Because we hear moral claims in this way, we hear disagreements about moral claims as power struggles, and thus the resolution of moral disagreement is viewed, not as a rational processes, but as a processes of rhetorical, particularly emotional, persuasion. We are as suspicious of attempts to persuade us regarding moral claims as we are of advertisements, because we view both as the same kind of thing.