Against Alienation: A Comparative study on Marxs and Wojtylas Attacks on Alienation

Sem. Francis Dominic C. Vergara 3AB Philosophy

INTRODUCTION No man is an island. Man is the most studied entity in the realm of philosophy. It is so because man is the most experienced by himself. Since man has the capacity to inquire, man inquires himself. He even problematizes many things about himself, the nature around him and the others who coexist with him. The passage above, which is a title of a song, would tell us that man, metaphorically cannot be an island, cannot only be with himself. To be with others is one of his needs, in fact, one of his greatest needs. One needs the other, at least a companion in his journey in life. Man seeks for comfort; man seeks for company; man seeks belongingness. To be excluded from the community or even from whatever anything is that, it is a big disgrace. That is why man keeps on mingling with others. He is in constant interaction with other Is. With this, mingling with others, man may encounter problems. Man versus another man, man versus his community, community versus another community, man being excluded from the rest, etc. Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) and Karl Marx would give us different views regarding the problem of man, alienation in particular. Wojtyla and Marx have different points-

of-view regarding this problem of man. Alienation is a social evil, characterized by one or another type of harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation, which sunders things that belong together. KAROL WOJTYLA Karol Wojtyla attacks alienation on his book entitled The Acting Person. Wojtyla implicitly discussed the problem of alienation in a positive way, that is, he is not attacking directly the problem, he is just giving some insights on how not to be alienated, since for him, there is evil in alienation (Mejos, 76). Man Man is an individuated human nature subsistent in its being, and it subsists by virtue of the act of being (received and participated) (de Torre, Joseph, Christian Philosophy, 192). For Karol Wojtyla, man has experiences and this is one of the primary concerns of man. Man has to face himself; that is, he comes into a cognitive relation with himself (Wojtyla, Karol, The Acting Person, 3). This is the starting point of Wojtylas analysis on manExperience (i.e. knowledge). Mans object of his knowledge, experience, is himself, but others are also objects of it. Man is a social animal. He experiences other. He exists together with others, with other people. He is together in a community. A community refers to a community of persons, a group of Is co-existing and co-acting with one another (Mejos, Edward, Against Alienation: Karol Wojtylas Theory of Participation, 74). There is this I and Thou relationship, I with another I, again, one cannot live by himself. Man demands the other to exist and to interact with:

A we is many human beings, many subjects, who in some way exist and act together. Acting together (i.e. in common) does not mean engaging in a number of activities that somehow go along side by side. Rather it means that these activities, along with the existence of those many Is are related to a single to be called common good (Wojtyla. Karol, Person and Community Selected Essays, 235).

Person and Community As quoted earlier, community is the multiplicity of Is, the multiplicity of persons. This community is not just a group of people alone. It is a group of people having a common goal, that is to achieve harmony, to achieve the so called common good. Again, man cooperates with others, so that his existence would be completed, and as other philosophers would say, so that his existence would be into fulfillment since there is someone affirming his existence. Membership of any community presupposes the fact that men are neighbors, but it neither constitutes nor may abolish this fact. People are or become members of different communities; in these communities they either establish close relations or they remain strangers - the latter reflects a lack of the communal spirit - but they are all neighbors and never cease to be neighbors (Wojtyla, 196). The personal good has to be referred to the common good, since society is the means for the person to attain his perfection. The more intense good is more universal, and so, it is more noble to want to do good to the entire society than to oneself alone Therefore, the rectitude of the love for a personal good depends on its ordination to the common good (de Torre, 246).

Thus, it is proper for man to do good things not minding himself alone, but rather minding others, minding himself in a community, minding the community per se, i.e. the common good of it. The Fulfillment of the Person through Action Man fulfills himself through his actions. The performing of an action is at once the fulfillment of the person (Wojtyla, The Acting Person, ???). But this action would be
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meaningless without the others, since man always requires the other in every endeavor. Man, again, must always be with the others. Since man expresses himself through action, from there he fulfills himself as person because action is proper to him. Acting with Others As always mention in the above discussions, man acts with others. With this, is his fulfillment of himself, i.e. he finds himself being fulfilled in the presence of others. As a member of a community, man is also another man's neighbor; this brings them closer together and makes them, so to speak, "closer" neighbors. Hence with respect to the membership of the same community the circle of every man's neighbors is either closer or more distant to him. It is natural for us to be closer with our family or our compatriots than with the members of other families or other nations (Wojtyla, 196).

Individualism and Totalism Individualism is a system that puts high emphasis on the individuality of persons. Individualism arises from a lack in the person (Wojtyla, 206). Individualism is that by which a person does not have the notion of common or refuse to have any notion for the reason that he only needs to secure himself. A man who possesses individualism are those who wants and wills their own good, disregarding the good of the community where he belongs. But this could not be since he is a part of a whole. And a whole would not be functional once a part is dysfunctional. He isolates himself from a greater good. He does not participate on activities which are available to him. In a nutshell, he shuns everything which pertains to the common good or community. Though man is free in choosing but [S]till has the freedom to determine himself towards his goals even as he is part of a community. This freedom of action within a community is not to be understood as absolute freedom but rather, as conditioned by the truth and the good (Mejos, Against Alienation, 78),

because freedom is about doing what we ought to do. Though we are free, we need still to participate to a greater good, that is, the good of the community. Being free is not doing what we want, but doing what is good for the self and the community. Participation The theory of Participation of Karol Wojtyla is the summit of his philosophy. From this proceeds all his philosophy. He said that man is an acting person. Man is determined when he acts. Every act has a moral and personalistic value.

Wojtyla introduces the word Participation to indicate the way in which, in common acting, the person protects the personalistic value of his own acting and participates together in the realization of common action and its outcomes. Participation points to the ability of the person to exist and act together with others without losing oneself as he moving towards his selffulfillment. (Mejos, 79). Wojtyla said that [the] action marks a special moment in the manifestation of the person [and it is] indeed the road which led us to an understanding of the person and has simultaneously allowed to grasp its own nature(Wojtyla, 261). That the action of man is an action in which he expresses himself. This action is not just an action done alone, but he acts together with others. Acting together with others would also mean acting in common, i.e., man acts in communion with others in his community. The community where he belongs somehow influences his acting (Wojtyla, 263). This is because man needs not to be an another in the community, an alien, a deviant, but he needs to be one of the other ones inside it. Through this, man is not being separated, instead man is in communion, and that is what Wojtyla would like to propose.

In this theory encloses two notions: the individualism and the anti-individualism. The theory of participation is not just proper to person, but it has obligations as Wojtya would tell us: [Actions, participation and acting together with others: it is not just proper to us]but it also points indirectly to certain obligations that are the consequence of the principle of participation. For if in acting "together with others" man can fulfill himself according to this principle, then, on the one hand, everyone ought to strive for that kind of participation which would allow him in acting together with others to realize the personalistic value of his own action. On the other hand, any community of acting, or any human cooperation, should be conducted so as to allow the person remaining within its orbit to realize himself through participation (Wojtyla, 271). Solidarity is another concern of Wojtylas philosophy. Solidarity means a constant readiness to accept and to realize one's share in the community because of one's membership within that particular community (Wojtyla, 285). Trough this attitude (solidarity), man makes what he supposed to do not just because he is a member of the community but he can benefit from it, and he aims always for a common good. His knowledge on the common good motivates him to do such thing for the betterment of the community and the self. Wojtyla is very precise when he said acting together with others. His philosophy really is against alienation, why? Because he always emphasize that man is a social nature and there is a need for him to participate to the society and not exclude himself from it, because this is one of the essentiality of life, that is, to be with others, to interact with them. That even the notion of neighbor opposed alienation. But he is trying to be positive on his arguments in his writings, especially on his book entitled The Acting Person.

KARL MARX Now, let me discuss Marxs attack on alienation. Marx, unlike Wojtyla, attacked the problem explicitly, making this problem the predicate of his subject labor. He expressed his being against to this problem in his writings. Man Man for Karl Marx is an economic man. His humanism would tell us that Man is the Supreme Being for man (Nery, Maria Imelda, Contemporary Philosophy, 2006, 60). Man is the part of social relationship. Man is the human World, the state and the society (Ibid), that is, man makes these, without man state, society and religion would not be possible; as Marx would say: Man makes religion; religion does not make man. Alienation of Labor Man sometimes is alienated. He is separated from something which naturally belongs to him, or he is a part of, for example, a baby without any parent, the baby is alienated from her parents since a baby demands a mother, at least, to nurture him and care for him, because one of a babys greatest needs is, at least, a parent. Marx advocated his disagreement of labor because it can alienate people the workers from what and where they must supposed to be. Thus, Marx tried to write an advocacy against this problem of labor, which soon after became a revolution to the Capitalist System. He is trying to eliminate alienation of man through alienation, that is, alienating labor. Marx said that there are four stages or aspects of alienation: from nature, from ourselves, from our species-being and from others. Alienation from Nature

Before, people used to make things for their own good, they gathered raw materials and processed it so that they can have a thing useful for them and they will utilize it since it comes from their hard-work, and they almost put themselves to the thing in making it. Needless to say, the man responsible for making the product is the man who owned and utilizes the thing, therefore the thing that he made is for his own good and not for the others, and there is belongingness for this matter. Marx would reminds us that this is not the case no more nowadays because capitalism is offering man jobs in return of money (since in a capitalist society, life would be stagnant without work, without money). Man needs more money so that his needs and wants will be satisfied; because of this longing for satisfaction, man is in constant working in a manufacturing company and so on to earn a lot to the extent that man would embodied himself to the labor, and from there man is alienated to the natural world in which he used for laboring, he labors, etc (Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond, 2008, 356). As Marx would say: The worker puts his life in to the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object [which will be owned by another human], ...the worker cannot use the things he produces to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity... The worker's needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a license to lay hands on what these same hands have produced, for all his products are the property of another (B. Ollman, Alienation, 1996,143).

Alienation from Self After being alienated from the nature, he is then next alienated from himself. Since work, according to Marx, is external, therefore to work is not part of the nature of man. Work is not voluntary, it is imposed to us. Imposing is not by mandate but by having no choice, because

man needs to work to live in a capitalist society. Through work man feels that he is not free and from there the feelings of he is not human anymore proceeds, since freedom is proper to man. Man as worker feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions his human functions is reduced to an animal. Alienation from Species-Being As we see the earlier discussion, man is being alienated from the self. His functions is just reduced to that of an animal, and so because of this, man is alienated from his nature as man. Man must do things consciously free, but he is not (because man is not aware anymore of the significance of what he is doing, he is just doing what he used to, so that he can earn). Man is already enslaved and so he is unconsciously conscious that he is. Thus man already equates himself to his job, an equation which is proper to the animal, e.g., birds make nests, bees make honey, etc. And Marx would say that a person makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker (Marx, K., Early Writings, 1975, 325). Since, for capitalism labor is forced (Shagor, H.), man is oppressed and he cannot have time for himself to realize his own nature as man, being part of humanity, but rather, man as a maker of things not for himself but for others, because of this fact, man can no longer exclaimed that he is really a fulfilled man. ]

Alienation from Others Mans work is not dictated by their consciousness, creativeness, intelligence anymore, rather, it is the other (the capitalists, the managers even) dictates what the people should and must do. Basically, workers have no control of their job. The capitalist society limits mans ability to produce things. Since the capitalists can save more if the works or jobs are done by parts and by individual, in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labour power, dividing crafts cheapens its individual parts (Braverman, H., Labour and Monopoly Capitalism, 1974, 80). Since man is already a puppet, and the capitalists, puppeteers, man then is excluded from the others. That is, man cannot relate anymore to the others who live normally, because they are enclosed already with the things they are doing, the making of what they must produce for the capitalists. From these premises proceeds the alienation of man from the other people, especially from the people in his community. The labors of the workers are being bought and being sold; and they [the workers] cannot be considered as full member of the humanity anymore. This means that if we are alienated to ourselves, and our alienation from others follow. Conclusion Marx presented his discussion on the alienation of labor negatively. He wants to eliminate, as I understood it, the system, the capitalism. Capitalism is indeed for Marx is a no good for people, since this alienates and only the rich, the capitalist, can benefit with this kind of system; and the oppressed will be more oppresses with this system. As I was reflecting with his points, he is somehow defending the dignity of man that man could not just be reducing to any animal whatsoever.

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Indeed this one of Marx is a great contribution to reduce alienation. This is one of a kind since it has a very detailed history why this scenario of alienation in the life of man is happening. Thus, alienation is evil for him, since it deprive man from what man must supposed to be. CONCLUSION Indeed Alienation is a problem, as par presented by the two philosophers, Karol Wojtyla (Poland, 1920-2005) and Karl Marx (Germany, 1818-1883), a catholic leader and a communist, respectively. Both have different views on alienation, the former being positive in his discussion, and the latter being, in that sense, negative. Wojtyla would be presenting his being against trough an analysis of who man is, while Marx presented it in putting criteria on what must be a man. The former would argued that man must be with the community, must act with others, must have the sense of Participation because through it man can have a harmonious relationship with others and there proceed his being one with them; and so being one with others is identifying oneself. The latter on the other hand argued that man is in agony, since the system that he experience brought man away from being what he must beCapitalism brought, or rather brings man away from what he must supposed to be. Opposing Marx and agreeing with Wojtyla is what I stand for, because as I see the argument of Marx, for me personally, this can be modified and maybe most of the time his argument happens, but Wojtyla would said that it is through participation that man can achieve his being, since action is implicit for him, since the argument of Marx is that working is not the nature of man, I tend to disagree, because man as being the only who can rationally think, everything in this really is trusted to him, at least this material world that he moves and therefore, he has the faculty of working to improve things around him.

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Lastly, their arguments indeed are viable arguments. They have different points-of-view. They are credible. But since according to Gadamer, biases and prejudices cannot be taken away from people, because if we do, we cannot understand, agree or disagree with ideas. So as my biases and prejudices would dictate me, I am more on Wojtylas point. His is preventive. But I do not disregard that of Marx; his on the other hand is redemptive. Prevention is better than cure. =)

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