Alienation and the Emergence of Objectivity

People at times believe that they know something true, which does not change, about something that exists independently of them. But why is this the case? The present discussion addresses how this belief has come to dominate both everyday life and scholarly attitudes. A common view is that it is simply the way of the world that things seem to be separated from us by an insurmountable barrier, and even appear strange. I contend, however, that we experience such strangeness because we treat each other as alien beings—our words and deeds conceal that we live in a shared world of our own making, and a world of ostensibly independent objects mirrors us very much more than we mirror it. Reality for us is a social process, and the path on which we walk is dependent upon what we and all who have come before us have done—and perhaps only even considered doing. We nonetheless treat each other as isolated individuals in an essentially objective world because our actions have transformed things held in common into putatively pure objects that lurk in a myriad of private worlds. This fundamental form of alienation, which reflects that human creations have acquired power over their creators, both reveals and expresses the nature of hierarchies of power in society. Specific societal relations are thus a primary source of the domination of objective reason today—along with the accompanying belief in the possibility of objective knowledge and truth—insofar as reputedly pure objects that do not manifest our creative activity are constituted through the individual appropriation of things produced in common. It is as if the latter are indifferent to us and independent of us, and our actions appear to have little effect upon what they are.