And the Industrial Revolution has alienated the worker from the product of his own labor, and has made him into a mechanical component in the productive system, as Marx has taught us.We are also estranged, say the existentialists, from human institutions-- bureaucratized government on the federal, state, and local levels, national political parties, giant business corporations, national religious organizations -- all of these appear to be vast, impersonal sources of power which have a life of their own. As individuals we neither feel that we are part of them nor can we understand their workings. We live in alienation from our own institutions. Moreover, say the existentialists, we are shut out of history. We no longer have a sense of having roots in a meaningful past nor do we see ourselves as moving toward a meaningful future. As a result, we do not belong to the past, to the present, or to the future.
And lastly, and perhaps most painfully, the existentialists point out that all of our personal human relationships are poisoned by feelings of alienation from any "other." Alienation and hostility arise within the family between parents and children, between the husband and the wife, between the children. Alienation affects all social and work relations, and most cruelly, alienation dominates the relationship of love.
These are the disturbing, provocative themes which can be found in contemporary existentialism. But now we must ask: If this is indeed the human condition, if this is a true picture of the world in which the human subject absurdly finds himself, how is it possible to go on living in it? Is there no exit from this anxiety and despair, this nothingness and absurdity, this fixation upon alienation, this hovering on the edge of the abyss? Is there any existentialist who can tell us how to live in such an absurd and hopeless world? Is there an existentialist ethics, a moral philosophy to tell us what is good, what can be said to be right or wrong, in such a meaningless world? --by T. Z. Lavine
