Philosophy 102 2nd LT, notes
From Notebook:
The Question Concerning Technology
- 1/5/2010: Erlebnis – to live (as though in a reality show; live experience)
- Erfahren – to travel (to experience, danas, to walk)
o Experiencing everything before we die is not the point; we must cherish everyday, since this is where da-sien resides
- Nietzsche: what is it that you experienced?
- Technology – what is it?
Science and Technology – the coupling of which is not coincidental
Science and Technology – the coupling of which is not coincidental
o Technology – applied science
o Convenience, elimination of work – this is what we see it as, yet this only stays at the instrumental level of the understanding of technology
- Technē – “kalikasan,” “tao,”
- Common intepretation of technology
o Instrumental
o Anthropological – man-made, for humanity, or within the sphere of human activity
§ Question on this: we make it, but are we its masters?
- We are in control, and thus we are responsible
- Managerial interpretation of nature (and thus still stuck at enframing. We are not letting Nature be, since we still deem it as quantifiable.)
- This age of convenience brings us many inconveniences, as modern man is harassed from all sides – everyday one becomes more spent despite the alleged convenience technology can offer (even though there are spas, etc.).
o This is an age of neurosis, wellness centers, fitness spas, and the like, and this is not coincidental
- On the instrumental and anthropological interpretation of technology: correct, but not necessarily true. Correctness vs truth.
o Heidegger: we shall push the correctness to its limit to get to truth
§ instrumentation: that which causes, and this leads us to the greek term to causation aition, which means to cause, but also means to be indebted to
§ instrumentation: an instrument causes, brings forth a desired effect
§ 4 causes of Aristotle
· Material
· Formal
· Final
· Efficient
- Alétheia – unconcealment, revealing
o The Greek experience of Technē was alétheia.
o “What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: Everything. For it every bringing forth is grounded in revealing ”
o “The essence of technology: a way of revealing.”
- Technē belongs to bringing forth, to poeisis; it is something poietic
- 1/7/2010: causation – Aristotle – mechanical defintions – “ai it on,” – cause or indebtedness
- Mechanical god: breaking science from philosophy
- Deconstruction: historical analysis, loosening of schlerotic tradition, loosening of what has already hardened in our thinking
- P. 7: one of the four causes – one is highlighted, the efficient cause
o Indebted to: one gives thanks to
o What comes last comes first – ontological
§ The telos, but this does not connote merely the endgoal. Telos is responsible for the way a thing is.
- P. 9: indebtedness is not moralistic, but merely represents a relationship, it connotes arrival
- P. 10: “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing forth.” Physis, what shows itself, is poiesis par excellence
- P. 11: bringing forth – revealing
o The coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [alétheia]
o Truth and revealing must also be unconcealment
- P. 12: essence of technology, or revealing, has to do with everything.
- What makes technology is not technological
- Technology is not a mere means; technology is a way of revealing, or truth
- Technology with poetry
- P. 14: “the revealing which rules in modern technology is challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”
o Here, it is not accepting, letting, but rather aggression, as though within the situation of a contest or a feat
- P. 16: modern technology: setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. Through the aggression of challenging-forth, man invades nature, this invading being the setting-upon. Here, nature seems mute, because, since within the setting-upon is the sense of a challenging-forth, nature cannot speak for itself because it already is responded to. In the first instance, nature cannot speak intelligibly to man, and thus man must listen. What happens in setting-upon aggressively is that man breaks himself away from nature, thereby objectifying nature. In the end, it will be man who becomes objectified, since, by the incapacity to listen to nature, man cannot listen to himself.
- Stellen – set, gestell, bestellen – order, availability
o Modern technology – “orderability”
o Essence of modern technology: gestell, enframing, setting-upon (looming over), stock piling
- P. 19: Standing reserve
- P. 21: modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable, a coherence of forces, and this blocks off the poetic kind of revealing: enframing
- 1/12/2010: p. 12: realms give heed to the way of revealing
- Technology is neutral – thus we cannot see what is at work, what is beyond human willing
- LT: write about what you understand
- P. 19: gathers man thither to order the self-revealing and standing reserve
- Unautonomous because it is standing from the ordering of the orderable; regulation through switching
- P. 18: human resources – subordinate to the reserve
- P. 19: ordering (ordered?) revealing is enframing
- P.22-3: science viz. technology
o Technology dominating science, technology being the direction of science, as seen through experimental science
- P. 25-7: “destining,” fate
- 1/14/2010: all art is poetry
- P. 34: “where danger is, grows the saving power also,” Hölderlin.
o Full of merit, yet dwelling poetically
o What makes us human is poetry
- Poetry a kind of measuring, the span between gods and men, infinity and mortality
- Questioning is the piety of thought
- Memorial address: thoughtlessness is the danger, quickest, and cheapest, “instant generation,” only to forget it just as quickly
- 1/19/2010: technology brings forth: revealing
o By way of technology, we are indebted to that which reveals [“bisa ng kalikasan viz. bisa ng tao”]
o Technē being the reciprocal and mutual correspondence between man and nature
- Modern technology: forced, as through stockpiling
o Modern science: experimental, frames object
o A challenging forth: making all readily available
- Hören – to listen, to hear, hörchen – to obey, gehören – to belong. Poets become the instrument for the bringing forth of that which needs revealing
- Concealment and unconcealment are in harmony,
- Modern technology: predominantly calculating.
o Thus, it must be open to mystery, to an uncertainty which is merely the tip of an iceberg, beyond human willing
- Man does not do the revealing in modern technology, it is being which reveals itself
- Question: how do we move forward such that the revealing, the poeitic kind of revealing, is not forgotten?
- Enframing: Calculative thinking: managerial control; it is still one-tracked
o Something happening beyond what was there; people responded to something bigger than them
o Observation: technicalization of universities (artes liberales), reversal of fortunes for the artes liberales, the free arts, as now there is a looming over of enframing against man, when firstly, artes liberales seeks to free us from practical concern [priests in Egypt]
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
- 1/26/2010: estrangement/ alienation/ estranged labor
o Alienated from:
§ Product
§ Production
§ Species being
- Labor connects nature and man
o Nature is made more human
o Humans become more natural
o Becoming one through labor
o Labor is the basis for dignity
- Marx: man is one who works
- Product of coerced labor is actively alienating/ dehumanizing
- Beruf: “calling, vocation, work” different from arbeit
- Worker is reduced to the level of animality
- 1/28/2010: revealing is addressed to human beings
- What does one mean when one says: “the world is out there?”
o A world without us still seems to be a world with us, since the world is open to interpretation
- Technology: we have to move away from the instrumental/anthropological view of technology
- The way of revealing must be let. “Gestell” is a way of revealing, yet it is not the only way.
- Marx: wealth: paper: money: fruit of labor
- Man is a species being
- Wages bare minimum, so that man would not have the energy to organize themselves, and merely stick to the routine which suffices his biological needs
The Question Concerning Technology
- technology is not the essence of technology
- essence of technology is by no means technological
o we are always chained to technology
o but we are delivered over to technology the worst when we see it as neutral, which makes us blind to the essence of technology
- ancient doctine, or tradition – essence of a things is what it is
o the status quo:
§ technology is a means to an end
§ technology is a human activity
§ both go together, and this is a contrivance (that which builds up, arranges) an instrumentum
o both definitions above can be regarded as the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology
o correct. Who would deny its correctness? Modern technology, too, is a means to an end. The instrumental definition of technology, through the manipulation of technology in the proper manner as a means, attempts to bring man into the right relation to technology.
§ We master it; having technology “spiritually in hand”
§ The will to mastery becomes more urgent as technology threatens to slip from our human control
o But what if technology were no mere means? How will we master it? Merely correct does not mean it is the truth. How is the instrumental definition of technology then? Here, we ask: what is the instrumental itself?
§ Something is effected or attained
§ Wherever ends are pursued, and means are employed, where instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality
· Material
· Formal
· Final
· Efficient
§ What does “cause” really mean? How do the four belong together?
· Efficient cause – “aition,” indebtedness. The four causes are the ways, all belonging together at once to each other, of being responsible for soemthing else (the object). [in a way, this is indebtedness]
· The efficient cause is not the being (seiende) which brings the thing into existence. The other three causes/ways owe thanks to the pondering of the seiende for the “that” and the “how” of their coming into appearance and into play for the production of the object
· What is the source of the unity of the four causes?
o Indebtedness is not moralistic. It being responsible is to usher that which presences into completion, such that it completely arrives. It starts that which presences into its way into arrival, going forward. The four causes let it come forth into presencing. [Ver-an-lassen being an active verb due to the prefix]
o Thus, the essence of causality, going back to the Greeks, is a fuller verb “to occasion.” The four ways of occasioning let the object arrive into presencing, and thus into appearance
§ Symposium: “every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.”
§ Bringing-forth not merely physically, or artistically,
§ But also physis, the arising of something out of itself, is poiesis. (innate in physis, having its bursting to bringing-forth), unlike via artisans/artistsm since what shows itself has its bursting open belonging to bringing-forth not in itself, but from the artist.
o How does bringing forth happen, be it in nature or in art? Bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment. Bringing forth happens within the plane called revealing, and moves freely within this realm. The Greeks have alétheia as revealing, and for the Romans, veritas.
- But we have strayed. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? Everything, for every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning and rules them throughout, and within this realm belong instrumentality.
- Thus, technology is no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.
o What does the term “technology” mean?
§ Techne – activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, poiesis. It is something poietic.
§ Techne – linked with episteme (knowing), distinguished as a mode of knowing. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us.
§ Techne does not lie in making and manipulating, but in revealing, that techne is a bringing-forth.
o Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where truth happens.
- This definition of the essential domain of technology does not simply fit modern machine-powered technology. This is the disturbing thing, and this moves us to ask the question concerning technology per se, since modern technology is incomparably different from all earlier technologies.
- Science becomes dependent on technology. Of what essence is modern technology that it happens to think of exact science to use? What is modern technology?
o It, too, is a revealing, yet this revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology is not of the poietic bringing-forth.
o The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (challenging being a calling forth, a summoning into action, provokation) which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.
o This challenging is also seen in the mere windmill, yet the windmill does not unlock energy in order to store it. Tracts of land, etc., are challenged into giving resources, becoming deposits. In contrast, the work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field.
§ But the field is faced with another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon (tresspasses) nature.
§ It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. (arranges nature via provoking it), like air is set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, etc.
- The setting upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting. It expedites such that it 1) unlocks, 2) exposes
o Expediting for maximization (maximum yield, minimum expense), and is stockpiled, becomes quantified and readily orderable.
o Here, the bodies of land and water appear to be at our command and become objects for our convenience; there is aggression towards land and water bodies.
§ One can see the difference between “The Rhine,” as power supply and “The Rhine” as the art work, ekphrasized by Hölderlin.
o Challenging-forth through unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. It does not stop here, since eventually, regulating and securing become chief characteristics of this challenging revealing.
- What kind of unconcealment is this, then? Everywhere, everything is made to stand by, to be ready-to-hand, inconspicuous. Everything is ordered about such that it is an available standing-reserve. By being a standing-reserve, an alienation already occurs. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over us as object,
o but stands over us as on call, on duty, unautonomous; the machine is completely unautonomous, for it has its standing (the way it is set into order) only from the orderability of things.
- It is man who accomplishes this challenging-forth, in the sense of setting-upon, through which what we call the real is revealed as standing-reserve. How long is man capable of such a revealing? Man accomplishes the mode of revealing, yet he does not control unconcealment (in which at any time the real shows itself or withdraws)
o Only to the extent that man is challenged to exploit nature can the ordering revealing happen. By this, we infer that man belongs more to nature than to the standing-reserve.
§ The worker becomes subordinate to the product and its orderability.
§ Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than nature into the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere standing-reserve
§ Man takes part in the ordering revealing because he drives technology as expediting forward
§ But unconcealment, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork
- Where and how does this revealing happen? We need not look far; we only need to think, thank, be open, and through his man finds himself brought into the unconcealed.
o Man merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it.
o Thus, when man ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he is already claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve
- Modern technology as an ordering revealing is no mere human doing. The challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-reserve gathers (commands) man into ordering.
- The challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing reserve: Enframing. It enframes in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configuration everything that it summons forth (energy, resources, etc.), through an ordering for use that it is forever restructing anew.
- Enframing as the name for the essence of modern technology. It is the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real as standing-reserve. It is nothing technological. Technological activity merely responds to the challenge of enframing, but never comprises enframing itself or brings it about.
- Stellen: way of revealing. In enframing, comes to pass in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the real as standing-reserve. This work is not of the instrumental/anthropological definition of technology, making it untenable.
- In this modern age, man is challenged forth into revealing, which concerns nature
o Modern science’s way of entraping nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Because science now enframes nature as calculable, its experiments follow from that.
- The essence of modern technology keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last, yet it remains that which precedes all: the earliest.
- Science, as displaying nature as calculable, the system of which is determined out of a causality that has changed.
o No longer of occasioning
o Now, it seems as though causality shrinks into a reporting challenged forth of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence.
- Because the essence of technology lies in enframing, modern science must employ exact physical science. Due to this, the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science. This maintains itself only so long as neither the essential origin of modern science nor the essence of modern technology is adequately found through questioning.
- Essence of modern technology is enframing, but the answer to the question concerning technology is still not found, if to answer is to correspond, and find its essence.
- Enframing is nothing technological, nothing on the order of the machine. It is the way in which the real is revealed as standing-reserve.
o Enframing as a way of revealing cannot happen beyond human doing, yet
o It is not exclusive to man or decisively through man
- As challenged, man finds himself with the realm of enframing. Thus, the question concerning the essence of technology always comes too late. But never too late comes the question as to whether we actually experience ourselves as the ones constantly confronted with enframing in our activities.
- To start upon the way, to gather, to send. The sending that gathers which first starts man man upon the way of revealing is destining.
- Enframing sends into a way of revealing, an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing. Poiesis, bringing-forth is also destining in this sense.
- Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon the way of revealing. Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man. But that destining is never a fate that compels. For man truly becomes free as long as he belongs to the realm of destining, listening and hearing, and not merely obeying.
o Essence of freedom originally not connected with the will and the causality of human willing
o Freedom governs the open, the revealed. It is with truth that freedom is most close to. All revealing goes into the open. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light
o Freedom is the realm of destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.
- The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. We are already experiencing enframing as destining of revealing before considering the essence of technology. Thus, we are already sojourning, without blindness. Let us not curse technology, since when we open to the essence of technology, we find ourselves taken into a freeing claim.
- As man is on the way of revealing, he is pursuing what is revealed in ordering and derivatives of this. Through this, other possibilities are blocked, which could possibly hinder him from experiencing as his essence his needed belonging to revealing.
o Man is in danger of being endangered out of destining.
o Man may quail the unconcealed and may misinterpret it.
o Nature as a coherence of forces may need corrections
o The destining of revealing is in itself danger
o When destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger. It attests to the danger in two ways:
§ As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man, even as object, as nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, man comes to the very brink of a fall – he will come to be taken as standing-reserve
· Delusion: man finds himself everywhere always
· Heisenberg: nowhere does man find his essence today
· Man stands decisively in attendance to the challenging-forth of enframing that man fails to see enframing as a claim, and himself as the being spoken to. Thus, he can never encounter only himself.
- As a destining, enframing banishes man into an ordering revealing.
- Enframing conceals the poietic kind of revealing, that which lets what presences come forth into appearance. Enframing, as a mode of revealing, does not even let itself appear, as well as truth.
- Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth.
- There is no demonry in technology; there is only a mystery of its essence.
- Where enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense, yet also saving power: Hölderlin passage. Enframing cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing.
o Revealing is that destining, which, ever suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and that also challenges, and which allots itself to man.
- Enframing, as a destining of revealing, is the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genus or essentia. It is technology that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood as essence. But in what way?
o In what endures
o All essencing endures
o Only what is granted endures [via etymologies]. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.
- As the essencing of technology, enframing is what endures. But challenging is anything but a granting. But as destining, the coming to presence of technology gives man entry into That which, of himself, he can neither invent or make.
- But YES, it is a granting. Every destining of revealing comes to pass from out of a granting and as such a granting. For granting conveys to man that share in revealing. Saving power lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence.
- It is precisely in enframing, which threatens man, thrusts man into danger, may come light provided that we pay attention to the coming to presence of technology.
- What we consider:
o The essence of technology is ambiguous.
o Enframing challenges forth into the frenzy of ordering that blocks every view into the passing of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth
o Enframing comes to pass in the granting that lets man endure, becomes safekeeper of truth
- The coming to presence of technology threatens everything, threatens that all revealing will be consumed in ordering. Human reflection can ponder on this
- There was a time that it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Poiesis, the fine arts, was called such.
- Art was techne, manifold revealing. It was pious, yielding to the holding-sway and the safekeeping of truth
- Art was called techne because it was a revealing that brough forth and hiter, and therefore belonged to poiesis.
- The poetical begins with splendor, thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence of the beautiful.
- The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes
- The closer we come to danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioningly we become
- For questioning is the piety of thought.
Memorial Address
- The greater the master, the more completely his person vanishes behind his work.
- What constitutes a memorial celebration? It means that we think back, that we think.
o Do playing and singing alone make our celebration a thoughtful one? Hardly! Since we must think back to the composer, not only as the work.
o Even in knowing his story, no thinking is required. We only allow ourselves to be entertained. No reflection is demanded on what concerns each of us immediately and continuously in his very being. Thus, even a memorial address will not give the assurance of a memorial celebration.
- We are far too easily thought-less. No reflection. Thoughtlessness is the uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere is today’s world. For nowadays, we take everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it as quickly, as instantly. Thus, commemoration and thoughtlessness are found side by side.
- We do not give up our capacity to think: in thoughtlessness, we let thinking lie fallow. We grow thought-poor and thought-less because, at his core, man has the capacity to think. We can get loose from th which we knowingly or unknowingly possess.
- Thoughtlessness: man today is in a flight from thinking. But man denies this, due to the priorities otherwise set.
o We plan, organize. We count on specific, definite results. This is calculation.
o Calculative thinking never stops, never collects (in the sense of recollection) itself. It is not a thinking that contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that it is.
o Meditative thinking. It loses touch, needs practice. It is not meant for practical affairs.
§ This is not beyond the reach of human understanding. Because man is thinking, is meditative.
§ Meditative thinking does not happen by itself, and requires much effort. It demands practice.
- It is enough that we dwell in what lies close and meditate on what is closest. Then we notice that works of art flower before us.
- Johann Hebel: man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether, the heavens, the open realm of the spirit.
- Does a meditative spirit still reign today? No. we have caught up with the turmoil of the big cities. We are chained to televisions, radios.
o Modern techniques of communication assail man, tearing him from the traditions of his native world.
o What is happening here? The rootedness, the autochtony, is threatened today at its core! The loss of rootedness springs from the spirit of the age which we are born into.
§ Today, can man reach the ether but still thrive in the fertile ground of a homeland? Or will everything fall to organization, automation?
- Today’s age, the atomic age. The atomic bomb. Energy is being garnered, as business booms. Happiness seems to be made fuller with this kind of science. No! this does not spring from reflection. We forget to ask: what is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature?
o Concepts, leading to a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world becomes the object of attack of calculative thought. nature becomes a giant gasoline station. Man’s relation to nature becomes technical.
o In what way can we tame and direct energies from nature?
- The taming of atomic energy leads to the encircling, ever more tightly, of the forces of technology around man, enchains him. These forces were not made by him, but have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrowin his capacity of decision.
- Speedy and public admiration due to communication techniques, but we must not merely take notice, and understand what we have heard and read, that is, to ponder.
o “Life is placed in the hands of the chemist,” we take notice of such a statement.
o It is not the becoming technical of the world that is uncanny. Far more is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
o Nothing can stop technology’s advancing
o Thus, meditative thinking must awaken and work unceasingly.
- What could be the ground for new authochtony? It is nearest to us. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas.
- We depend on technical devices, yet unknowingly we find ourselves shackled to these and fall bondage to them. Still, we can act otherwise. We affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, yet deny them the right to dominate us.
o By recognition of this, our relation to technology would become relaxed. The comportment of which is releasement toward things. Through this, we are no longer in a technical point-of-view of things. Relaxed and not harrassed.
o Through this, we notice that our relation to the machine is not a meaningless relation. In all technical processes is a meaning beyond human willing and human activity. The meaning of pervading technology hides itself.
§ But it touches us everywhere in the world of technology
§ Mystery – thus, we must be open to the mystery
- Releasment towards things and openness to mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. Both give us a vision of a new autochtony which might recapture the old, which is rapidly disappearing today.
- Today, the approaching tide of technological revolution captivates us that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted as the only way of thinking.
o The issue is saving man’s essential nature
o The issue is keeping meditative thinking alive.
- Releasment towards things and openness to mystery happens only through persistent, courageous thinking.
- Perhaps today’s memorial prompts us to do this.
o In relation to Kreutzer, in the ground lead by releasment toward things and openness to mystery does the creativity that produces lasting roots dwell.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: Estranged Labor
- Political economy
o Work sinks to the level of the commodity
o Wretchedness inversely proportional to the power and magnitude a worker exerts into his product
- Competition – leads to the division between those who have capital (the landowners), and the propertyless workers
- Political economy comes from the concept of private property, but does not explain why.
- We proceed from an actual economic fact
o Poorer the worker becomes as production increases. Worker becomes a commodity
o Product is alien to labor, as labor’s realization is its objectification; appropriation as alienation
- Objectification = loss of reality
o More production, lesser possession for the worker
o Ultimately, worker falls under his product, capital
o Life no longer to himself, but to the object
- Worker is not what his labor is, the life he has conferred on the object turns to him as alien, himself also as something hostile
o 1. No work without nature
o 2. Nature as means for physical subsistence
- More appropriation to nature, deprivation of the means of life in the double respect
o 1. The extenal world ceases to be an object of his labor
o 2. Labor ceases to be a subsistent means of life
- World and man become “mechanized.”
- Existence: as a worker, and as a physical subject
- More production, less consumption (workers)
- The more civilized product, the more barbarous the worker becomes
- Political economy conceals estrangement in the nature of labor by not considering the relationship between labor and production
o Labor leads to the privation of workers
- Alienation also in the act of producing
o Production is an active alienation
- Alienation of labor
o Labor (coerced) does not belong to man’s essential being; mortifies his body, ruins the mind
o External labor – self-sacrifice; it is not the spontaneous activity of the worker, not freely made
- Thus, only animal functions are active; the animal becomes human, the human becomes animal
- 3rd kind of estrangement: man is a species being
o Man lives on inorganic nature
o Nature is man’s inorganic body
§ Direct means of life
§ Instrument of his life-activity
- Estranged labors estranges species from man (from species life to individual life)
o Life itself becomes a means of life
- Animal = life-activity
- Estranged labor: conscious being; his life-activity becomes his means of life
- Animal produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally (animal produces itself, man produces the whole of nature)
- Working-up of the objective world proves man a species being
- Labor: objectification of man’s species life (man duplicates himself in reality, contemplates himself in a world he has created)
- Estranged labor: tears man from his species life (inorganic body taken from him)
o Species being to being alien to man, into a means to his individual existence (estranges man’s body as well as his external nature and spiritual essence, his human being)
o Estrangement from man to man
- YET labor belongs to man himself. Only man can have this alien power over man
- Medium of estrangement is practical; just as he estranges from himself his own activity, he confers to the stranger activity which is not of his own
- Private property results from alienated labor, estranged man
o Political economy – labor as the soul of production
§ Wages = private property; a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement (labor a servant to wage)
§ Wage – direct consequence of estranged labor
o Emancipation – would only come from the workers
§ How does man come to alienate his labor?
posted by Monching at
1:31 AM
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