Self-appropriation vs. self-constitution: Social philosophical reflections on the self-relation

Introduction

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism (1996, 2009) and Richard Moran’s commitment view (2001), have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the mainstream literature away from metaphysics and epistemology towards ethics and moral psychology. As such, both approaches can be understood as providing a critique of the reifying and alienating consequences of understanding the self-relation as a theoretical object of inquiry.^[1]

What is largely missing from mainstream debates, however—with the exception of recent work in Critical Theory by Axel Honneth (2008), Hans-Herbert Kögler (2002; forthcoming), and Rahel Jaeggi (2014), among others—is a discussion of the social dimension of selfrelation, i.e. the way in which our self-understanding is fundamentally shaped through our interactions with the world and others in it. It has thus been taken for granted that an ontology of the self-relation can be developed based entirely on individualist premises or on what Jaeggi (2014) has called “container model” model of the self. This assumption, however, is questionable especially in light of the current pervasiveness of social practices, institutions, and environments that promote problematic relations to self (e.g. racism, sexism, commodification, etc.), phenomena which have, at least in part, motivated the recent revival of ‘reification’ and ‘alienation’ as core concepts of social and political philosophy.

In spite of the important progress Korsgaard and Moran make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian constitutivist paradigm^[2] is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism^[3] makes it incapable of accounting for the constitutive nature of the social for the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy.^[4] In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative Heideggerian approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation” (the “appropriative view”)^[5] that is capable of making such phenomena visible and criticizable. I will conclude by distinguishing this Heideggerian notion of ‘appropriation’ from Rahel Jaeggi’s (2014) use of the term in her recent critique of alienation and casting some doubt as to whether this approach provides a suitable basis for social criticism.

Korsgaard’s constitutivism

A fundamental commitment of constitutivism, and of practical approaches to the self-relation in general, that distinguishes it from epistemic approaches, is that a person’s psychology alone cannot determine her qua agent: one’s beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., are significant only to the extent that they provide material for deliberation and decision. Hence, Korsgaard as notes, “beliefs and desires you have actively arrived at are more truly your own than those that have simply arisen in you” (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 327; italics added). Normative problems thus arise from the fact that human beings are naturally endowed with the capacity for self-reflection. The thought here is that once our desires, inclinations, etc. are subjected to reflective scrutiny, they no longer have a hold on us anymore such that we are forced to consider whether they really are reasons for acting in one way or another, which in turn, makes choice—whether tacit or explicit—unavoidable (Korsgaard, 1996, pp. 89, 93).

According to this picture, the subject actively “constructs” its identity and value: they are the products of a process of self-reflection, understood as a higher-order activity that “reifies” our mental states into a kind of “mental item” (Korsgaard, 2009, p. 121). What makes a course of action valuable and genuinely “mine”, therefore, is that it is “reflectively endorsed”, not the other way around. This process of self-reflection, in turn, forces us to consider what Korsgaard calls the “normative question” viz. “Why should I be moral (act on the basis of obligation)?” (Korsgaard, 1996, pp. 9-10). As a result, self-reflection plays the role of the “source” of normativity as such. The foundationalist aim of Korsgaard’s constitutivism is thus to provide an account of how we can get normativity out of the non-normative, i.e., to derive normativity from animality. In this context, it is worth noting that this retreat to the inner confines of the will and self-consciousness as the ground of normativity is motivated by Korsgaard’s deeper metaphysical commitments, viz. to what Bernard Williams calls an “absolute conception of world”, one whose reality is exhausted by natural science; once we surrender the world to this picture, the only way to account for value and normativity is turn them into projections of the subject onto an otherwise meaningless world. Korsgaard inherits this move from Kant viz. that because the external world is construed as the heteronomous “realm of (causal) law”, we can account for freedom only by positing a form of self-legislation/causality.

The self-relation is accordingly defined in terms of the reflective activity of self-constitution, a process of self-legislation, of subsuming oneself under universalizable laws. In fact, Korsgaard holds that reflective self-consciousness is what establishes a relation to self in the first place, a view that presupposes a bifurcated conception of subject divided between a “thinking self” and an “acting self”:

We might say that the acting self concedes to the thinking self its right to government. And the thinking self, in turn, tries to govern as well as it can. So the reflective structure of human consciousness establishes a relation here, a relation which we have to ourselves (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 104).

This, in turn, implies—rather ironically for a view that is supposed to capture the “essence” of ethical subjectivity—that the constitutivist self-relation is a contingent rather than a necessary feature of selfhood because one has a relation to oneself only to the extent one engages in deliberate, self-reflective activity, whereas on the appropriative view I defend, we always already have a relation to self whether or not we are adopting a second-order attitude towards it.

It is worth underlining that the normative question arises from the structure of self-consciousness as such, not from an agent’s pre-existing evaluative outlook and embeddedness in a value-laden world that calls upon her to act in one way or another. As a result, the answer to the normative question cannot be circular, i.e. it must be possible to convince someone who has no moral commitments to act in accordance with moral obligations; circles for Korsgaard are always vicious and, therefore, to be avoided. It is precisely at this point that the foundationalism and methodological individualism of constitutivism converge: if we want to provide a foundation for morality, we need to look no further than the individual’s capacity for reflective self-legislation and, needless to say, such a foundation is pre-social. This is in spite of Korsgaard’s assertion in the prologue of Sources of Normativity that humans are social animals; the ‘social’, however, is simply an extrinsic property of our individual animal base. In other words, the social world plays no role in the original formulation of the normative problem and, therefore, in the definition of the self-relation. Hence, as Mark Okrent observes, without something like Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ [social embeddedness] and the circularity it implies, Korsgaard’s view places us “in the impossible position of having to answer [the normative] question without already being something” (Okrent, 1999, p. 72).

This, in turn, means freedom is equally an individual, rather than a social phenomenon; self-consciousness is all we need to choose and be free, rather than being parasitic upon the kind of relations with others that are possible within the social world into which we are thrown. Otherwise put, for Korsgaard freedom is in the head, whereas on the appropriative view, it is essentially social and triangular, a relation between self, other, and world. The individualist premises of constitutivism is nicely captured by Korsgaard’s claim that because the normative problem is generated from within reflective self-consciousness in the first place, that is where we should look for its solution: “If the problem springs from reflection then the solution must do so as well. If the problem is that our perceptions and desires might not withstand reflective scrutiny, then the solution is that they might” (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 93).

Situating freedom in self-consciousness, in turn, makes it difficult to envision a role for other agents and the social world in enabling autonomy.^[6] This problem is exacerbated by Korsgaard’s philosophical anthropology, which is plagued with a series of dichotomies inherited from Kant—normative/non-normative, active/passive, inside/outside, autonomy/ heteronomy, reason/nature, etc. Heidegger calls such a definition an “additive” conception of human being because it adds to the common “animal” base an ontic property (reason/self-reflection) that is supposed to account for the difference between humans and non-human animals. From this picture, it follows that we actualize our human “essence” only in selfreflection, which involves actively overcoming our passive, heteronomous animality. Thus, it is no coincidence that Korsgaard endorses Kant’s claim that a reason cannot depend on desires because they represent a “bidding from the outside” or “alien causes” (Korsgaard, 1996, pp. 94, 97; italics added).

This, in turn, leads to the question as to whether one’s identity can be adequately given through identification with the formal principle of acting according to universal maxims or with a decision-making procedure as such. It seems clear that, even from Korsgaard’s own lights, the answer is “no”: if this were not the case, she would not appeal to the notion of ‘practical identity’ to address the normative question viz. a ‘self-conception’, under which our lives worth living and actions worthwhile (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 101). In truth, Korsgaard needs to avail herself of a concept like ‘thrownness’ in order to make practical identities constitutive of the self-relation. However, since thrownness essentially implies both the essential sociality of the self-relation as well as the circularity of the normative question, its adoption would require Korsgaard to abandon not only her methodological individualism, but also the very foundationalist aims that define constitutivism. For that reason, Mark Okrent’s proposal that Korsgaard’s problem in answering the normative question could be solved by appealing to thrownness is incoherent: Korsgaard could not avail herself to Heideggerian resources without abandoning the Kantian constitutivist paradigm and its core commitments as such (foundationalism, methodological individualism, etc.) (Okrent, 1999, pp. 71, 73). In other words, the accessories proposed by Okrent to complement and enhance the constitutivist “outfit”, clash: either the accessories go or the outfit.

As a result, it should be no surprise that Korsgaard explicitly rejects such a move, manifested in her claim that it is the “reflective structure of the mind [that] forces us to have a conception of ourselves”, not our thrownness into a social world in which we inherit practical identities and social roles long before acquiring the ability to reflectively distance ourselves from them (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 100). Otherwise put, the demand to act in light of practical identities has individual rather than social origins. Given that the structure of self-consciousness alone represents the source of normative problems, practical identities can be understood only as extrinsic addenda that simply add a new set of normative problems, conflicts, etc. which the agent must confront. The introduction of the social, therefore, arrives too late for Korsgaard’s constitutivism to account for normative problems of an essentially social nature, as will be shown in the cases of the phenomenology of race/racism and the phenomenon of cultural collapse.

As previously mentioned, practical identities make life worth living and give our existence integrity (unity) such that failing to live up with the obligations that stem from them may result in a loss of identity. In fact, an obligation for Korsgaard “always takes the form of a reaction against a threat of a loss of identity”, which means that consistent failure to live up to one’s obligations leads to a disintegration of one’s identity (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 102). A primary threat to the stability of practical identities, therefore, is to backslide on our obligations by making ourselves an exception to the maxims we choose for ourselves. Hence, the threat of a loss of identity is construed in individualist terms—as a moral failing of the individual—whereas, on a social approach, it is construed as a problem emanating from our social existence.

What difference does this difference make? From a social-ontological perspective, the erosion of our practical identities by “making exceptions of ourselves” is not simply a matter of failing to live up to the commitments we have submitted ourselves to. Rather, more importantly, it has to do with the fact that one will no longer be recognized by others (and society) as the kind of person one understands oneself to be (loyal, trustworthy, etc.) and, therefore, the enabling conditions for exercising one’s identity might be undermined. This, in turn, implies that it is essential to practical identities that one can be held accountable by others for not upholding the social norms, standards, obligations, etc. associated with them; one can fail to fulfill one’s identity precisely because the criteria for success/failure are not individually but rather socially constituted. For example, a doctor violating the disciplinary norms of her profession, norms that she did not herself create but submitted herself to, can be expelled from the profession.

The loss of one’s profession would represent the kind of “existential death” Korsgaard speaks of: losing one’s identity is likened to be “for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead” (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 102). Hence, for Korsgaard existential “death” is exclusively a matter of the agent not living up to her own standards, whereas the appropriative view understands it as a loss of a possible mode of being-in-the-world with others. A simple example will suffice to illustrate the difference. Jonathan Lear (2008) in his book Radical Hope, describes the collapse of the Crow nation’s way of life, which was the result of a variety of factors, including the decimation of the buffalo by American settlers, prohibitions on tribal warfare, and the transfer of the Crow people to settlement/reserves. For example, it was no longer possible for Crow men to perform their identities as warriors and for the Crow youth to appropriate this identity because this was no longer a possibility that could be successfully enacted within their society. Just as it is impossible, for example, to be a samurai in present-day Japan, the traditional roles and identities constitutive of the Crow form of life were no longer live options. So, we could say that the Crow warriors were unable to fulfill the commitments that made their life worth living and indeed, suicide was rampant among their population during the transition to life on reserves. But this had nothing to do with a moral failing on their part but rather with the collapse of the condition of the possibility of their enacting their practical identity, viz. the world as a ‘totality of significance’, as Heidegger puts it. In other words, their activity of self-constitution essentially depended on the possibilities and symbolic resources afforded by their social world.

By contrast, constitutivism is limited to understanding such phenomena only in moral language—in terms of individual virtues or vices or the violation of this or that moral rule.

The problem in question runs much deeper, however, viz. to the condition of the possibility of ethical agency as such. Hence, it is not clear what constitutivism could possibly have to say to the Crow in the aftermath of the devastation of their way of life other than, “Are you sure you have tried to constitute or project value onto the world hard enough? Are you sure you have properly applied the test of reflective endorsement until you have hit the ‘unconditioned’?” To exhort someone to project value on the world when the condition of the possibility of valuing anything at all has collapsed betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the relation between self, other, and world. The fact that the plight of the Crow nation brings to light not our solipsistic loneliness in the world, but rather our radical dependence on it, reveals the bankruptcy of the model of the unencumbered self-legislator. Or, to take the case of a racialized subject in a white supremacist society, the fact that she does not reflectively endorse the reifying and alienating cultural scripts inherited from and projected upon her by society does not put an end to her “normative problem” because what it means to be a ‘black’ subject, for example, cannot be unilaterally determined by an individual act of will, by simply following the correct decision-making procedure.

This point is brought home by Frantz Fanon in his essay, “The Lived Experience of the Black”. Fanon begins by describing an experience of being seen by a child while walking down the street who screams, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened”: “Dirty Nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (Fanon, 1967, p. 109; italics added). Here it is neither a matter of the child merely seeing or registering what is there, nor one of brute animal instincts or inclinations overcoming him. Rather, the child’s sight and affective orientation/dispositions were guided in advance by a negative understanding of Blacks shaped by stories, rumors, school lessons, etc. that he internalized from society. The child has internalized this mode of seeing-as through a process of socialization that involves the communicative transmission of the narrative self-understanding of the society in question. Thus, Fanon’s famously claims that

[the white man] had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories […] I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity […] I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, and for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships (Fanon, 1967, pp. 111-12).

In short, prior to and independent of his volition and acts of self-constitution, Fanon’s race mattered: his historicity was already implicated in the child’s socially conditioned response and yet he recognized that it was nevertheless up to him to take up and appropriate in one way or another. To attempt to pack the characteristics constitutive of facticity enumerated by Fanon above into the animal side of the “animal + reflection” equation, therefore, would be manifestly absurd; to equate the burden with animality would be, quite simply, to fail to grasp its existential weight.

In this context, to understand himself as others saw and understood him would be to adopt an alienated and reified self-relation; alienated because he can neither appropriate the racist projections, nor seamlessly fit into the world and absorb himself in everyday tasks and reified because such projections attribute a fixed set of “objective” properties independent of his self-interpretations. Hence, as a racialized subject, Fanon’s notes that he is always already “overdetermined from without”; the “without” he is referring to is the social world in which he must appropriate himself, rather than merely to the desires to which we are passively exposed (Fanon, 1967, p. 116). The racist lifeworld, therefore, is more of an obstacle to rather than a site for the development of freedom and individuality, a realization that eventually leads Fanon to confront his own historicity and re-appropriate it in order to put back together the “fragments” of his identity. It is worth stressing that Fanon’s “failure” of appropriation, in this case, does not have individual but rather social origins, precisely because to appropriate the racist conception of Black identity of a supremacist society is to undermine the basic preconditions of ethical agency as such or, as Fanon puts it, to internalize or “epidermalize” an inferiority complex. In other words, it would be tantamount to being complicit—whether wittingly or unwittingly—in one’s own subjugation.

If we also consider that appropriation is a fundamental condition of ethical agency, then the kind of self-reification described by Fanon represents a violation of the conditions of the possibility of ethical agency as such. As Axel Honneth has argued in his ontological critique of reification, to deny another of their normative perspective is,

not merely to violate a norm, but to commit a fundamental error, because one thereby violates the elementary conditions that underlie all our morality. Thus if we keep to the literal meaning of the term, we should take reification in its negative sense to mean a violation of the necessary presuppositions of our social lifeworld (Honneth, 2008, p. 149; italics added).

In short, the racialized subject is an “ontological problem” from the standpoint of the racist society, a problem that is rendered invisible by an individualist approach and which cannot be solved from within the deliberative standpoint alone.

Indeed, their status as “ontological problems” cannot be willed away no matter how good they might be at voluntary self-constitution because any solution would have to address the social-structural dimension. This is because one’s identity, actions, etc., do not acquire their meaning through acts of volitional fiat but in a world in which meaning is socially constituted. The way racist values, norms, practices, etc. insidiously shape our everyday, non-deliberative being-in-the-world thus reveals that the existential significance of race cannot be captured by an individualist ontology that identifies thrownness with passive animality; to do so would be to distort the phenomenology of race/racism and to misslocate the problem altogether.

A preliminary sketch of the appropriative approach

It is important to underline that what is ultimately at stake in the discussion of the limitations of the constitutivist model is the transition from ethics to social criticism. Clearly, it is not possible to criticize modes of relating to self as alienated or reified and the social environments that promote such relations, unless we have a framework capable of making such phenomena visible in the first place. This was the thrust of the appeal to the phenomenology of race/racism and of cultural collapse. Given the recent revival of a critique of reification and alienation in contemporary social and political by critical theorists like Rahel Jaeggi through an appeal to the notion of ‘self-appropriation’, it is worth concluding the paper with some thoughts about how our respective conceptions differ. As such, I will begin with a preliminary sketch of some of the core features of my appropriative model and end by comparing it to Jaeggi’s Marxist-Hegelian conception in her recent work, Alienation.^[7] It is my contention that Jaeggi’s approach is, like constitutivism, equally haunted by the specter of individualism, which makes it ill-equipped to carry out its own social-critical aims. In other words, because self-appropriation is construed in individualist terms, it is not capable of understanding failures of appropriation as indications of broader problems with forms of life or social environments.

On the appropriative view, the self-relation is not a purely reflexive relation of a self to itself, but rather a hermeneutical mode of relating to one’s inherited social existence, which encompasses the relation to self, other, and world. Hence, the appropriative view does not equate reflexivity with self-reflection like constitutivism, but rather situates it in our average everyday engagement with the world. So, in opposition to Korsgaard, it is not the case that reflective self-consciousness “forces us to have a conception of ourselves”, but rather the fact of our being thrown into and addressed by an intersubjectively shared, value-laden, and linguistically articulated world such that we are always already acting in light of one practical identity or another (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 100). In other words, on the appropriative view, one does not need to engage in self-reflection in order to have a relation to self.

This situating of the self-relation within everyday “skilled coping” is at the heart of Heidegger’s alternative to the conception of the human as a rational animal, which is based on the notion of ‘care’ [Sorge] as the ontological meaning of human existence (being-in-the-world).^[8] The notion of ‘care’ expresses the idea that the meaning of one’s existence is always already an issue, at stake, and in play—whether one is explicitly aware of it or not. Whether we are engaged in everyday skilled coping or thematic self-reflection, we always already understand our own existence in one way or another—whether implicitly or explicitly—as a constant issue or question that matters to and concerns us. This idea can be further elaborated in terms of what might be called Heidegger’s “reflection” thesis^[9]: in all our modes of comportment towards ourselves, the world and others, an understanding of self is “reflected” back to it. This, in turn, reveals the way the ontological structure of existence is a unified whole: every disclosure of self is equally a co-disclosure of other and world, which already points to the insufficiency of methodological individualism and to the need for a broader, social-ontological approach to the self-relation.

Self-appropriation is thus possible only because the meaning of our thrown existence makes a claim upon and addresses us such that we must respond in one way or another. Otherwise put, self-appropriation is a mode of self-responsiveness, responsiveness to an existence that is not neutral state of affairs to be observed from without, but rather to a situation in which we always already find ourselves, one that grips us such that we must come to grips with it, so to speak:

The existential relationship [self-relation] cannot be objectified. Its basic essence is one’s being concerned and letting oneself be concerned. [It is] a responding, a claim, an answering for, a being responsive […] “Comportment” is the way I stand in my relationship to what concerns me in each case, the manner one responds to beings (ZS: 185).

What is at stake in self-appropriation, therefore, is not a “what”, but a “how”, a way of being-in-the-world constitutive of ethical agency as such. In sum, the ontology of care represents Heidegger’s alternative to the traditional bifurcated conception of human being, thereby “remov[ing] freedom from the traditional perspective where emphasis is placed on self-initiating spontaneity, sua sponte, in contrast to a compulsive mechanical sequence” (MFL: 201).

As a basic mode of existence, self-appropriation involves an open-ended process of elaborating and refining the meaning of one’s social existence that is always already at stake in both non-deliberative agency and thematic self-reflection by exploiting the hermeneutical resources inherited from the social world into which we are thrown. In this context, the concept of ‘appropriation’ has two important features worth highlighting. First, to appropriate is to make-proper or to make one’s own and, therefore, is an activity internally connected to validity. In other words, it is not the case that self-interpretation and belief-formation are separate activities such the adoption of one self-interpretation does not settle the question of whether I take it to be valid or applicable to me; to interpret is simply to be in the business of belief and, therefore, oriented towards truth, full stop. As Gadamer rightly argues, understanding as appropriative interpretation is not “‘knowledge as domination’— i.e., an appropriation as taking possession”, it is not “a form of domination but of service […] service of what is considered valid” or of what Gadamer calls, “applicable meaning” (Gadamer, 2004, p. 310; italics added). The internal connection between appropriation and validity, therefore, enables us to reject Richard Moran’s (2001) criticism of the hermeneutic view of the self, viz. that self-interpretation amounts to a kind of self-fulfilling voluntarism (Moran, 2001, pp. 36-65). It also enables us to claim, along with Rahel Jaeggi (2014), that appropriation involves positively identifying oneself with or avowing what is appropriated, thereby assimilating it into our self-understanding.

Second, appropriation is always appropriation of something, of what is other, unchosen, or outside of the agent’s control. As a result, it captures the essential unity of the so-called “passive” and “active” dimensions of the self-relation. Indeed, it is precisely this aspect of appropriation enables it to make the transition from ethics to social philosophy because it means that failures of appropriation cannot be construed entirely in individualist terms, as purely psychological phenomena. Otherwise put, it requires that any assessment of impairments of appropriation must be made from the broader, holistic perspective of an agent’s embeddedness in a social environment with others.

The way in which the appropriative view avoids the kind of aporias associated with Korsgaard’s additive conception of the human should now be clear: since our own existence and selfhood is always already implicated in our everyday comportment, self-interpretation does not alienate us or bring about a break from our so-called “passivity”, but rather articulates it in such a way that it can be positively appropriated. Indeed, since appropriation always already depends upon the prior disclosure of the intelligibility of the world into which we are thrown and which we already implicitly understand, it does not represent a “subjective projection” of meaning onto an otherwise valueless world, but rather a making-explicit and development of a pre-given, publicly intelligible meaning.

A crucial implication of our sketch of the appropriative view thus far is that it rejects the traditional two-tiered model of the self-relation—namely a passive, heteronomous, first order animality and an active, autonomous, capacity for second-order reflection—in favour of two mutually interdependent modes of relating to one’s thrown social existence, viz. the non-deliberative, spontaneous mode of appropriation in skilled coping and the mode of thematic, reflective re-appropriation. The second mode allows us to further refine, elaborate, and re-articulate our spontaneous, incipient self-interpretations in order to make better sense of ourselves, the world, and our relations to others.

What is explicitly articulated and re-appropriated, in turn, can subsequently be reflected back into our everyday practices and thereby constitute a part of the background that enables and informs everyday activities. Consequently, there is a constant interplay between the two modes: the identities, beliefs, emotions, etc., that are challenged, disrupted, and called into question in skilled coping, can be made a theme for a re-appropriative interpretation and subsequently incorporated back into our self-understanding. What is ultimately at stake, therefore, is the development of a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of one’s situation, which embraces, self, other, and world. But this is not to say that it is only in the second mode that such refinement takes place. On the contrary: sometimes we can get clear on what we think, feel, etc. not by engaging in fireside self-contemplation, but rather in the process of expressing our thoughts, feelings, or by simply throwing oneself into a situation, so to speak.

Indeed, if we consider that essential to any notion of self-reflection is the ability to change one’s mind, then we must concede the existence of a wider a variety of modes of reflexivity than constitutivism allows for. Hence, as mentioned above, we modify our beliefs and behaviour in everyday dialogue, in exposing ourselves to new and unfamiliar situations, people, etc.—whether deliberately or unwittingly; such activities simply do not conform to the more private mode of deliberate, thematic, “self-reification”. As a result, what is required is a much broader notion of reflection/reflexivity, one which the appropriative view accommodates by situating reflexivity in our everyday social existence and abandoning the two-tier model of the self. Accordingly, to say that the self-relation is appropriative all the way down is to claim not only that freedom permeates both modes, rather than restricted to the level of thematic self-reflection and deliberation, but also that it must be understood in social rather than individual terms. Only then is it possible to claim that so-called “failures” of appropriation (Jaeggi) are of social and political import and, therefore, require collaborative solutions.

Given that freedom can be theorized only from out of the social rather than in opposition to or independently of it, it is also necessary to distinguish between an unowned/inauthentic (Uneigentlichkeit) self-understanding and relation to norms and possibilities of being—e.g., a generalized deferral to the perspective of the community and conformity to social roles, simply doing what “one” or “everyone” does—and an individualized (authentic/owned) relation, which does not take the perspective of others/society as self-authenticating and decisive, but rather the agent’s particular situation to which only she can respond, commit, and take responsibility for.^[10] In authentic self-appropriation, one has the possibility of “taking” or “winning oneself” back from one’s anonymous absorption in social roles by recognizing that one is not identical to the norms, traditions, practices, values, etc. of one’s society. This, in turn, is why self-appropriation is an accomplishment internally related to the achievement of authentic/owned selfhood [Eigentlichkeit]^[11]: appropriation [aneignen] as both a making-own and a making-proper enables and reflects an ‘owned’ [eigentlich] mode of existence —one that is truly mine and not someone else’s. As a result, the notion of ‘appropriation’ is built into the very definition of selfhood from the outset as a fundamental mode of self-relation. Steven Crowell nicely summarizes the task of authentic appropriation as follows:

The kind of subject who can be an agent while being absorbed in the world is a self whose identity is normatively achieved not by overcoming the passivity in its nature in order to constitute itself as a unified person, but rather by overcoming its anonymity to take responsibility for its own self as a task (Crowell, 2007, p. 329).

The limitations of Jaeggi’s appropriative model

Having brought some of the core features of the appropriative model into view, I’ll conclude by distinguishing it from Jaeggi’s approach. Let’s start with the common ground shared between both approaches. Like Jaeggi, I understand appropriation as an ability that involves the positive identification with and avowal of what one appropriates (desires, thoughts, social roles, etc.), as opposed to merely noting or reporting them, which would represent an alienated relation to self. Hence, it implies successful assimilation into one’s self-understanding and does not presuppose a pre-existing self waiting to be appropriated, thereby avoiding the charge of essentialism. And, insofar as the activity of appropriation is impeded, it is possible to speak of self-alienation. This, in turn means, a critique of alienation based on appropriation is formal, in that, it does not need to appeal to an objective conception of the good life. That is to say, it is critical of forms of life and social environments to the extent they undermine their appropriation by their members, not to the extent they lack particular substantive goals or values per se. Thus, both approaches follow a model of immanent critique in that they do not appeal to standards and criteria that transcend those endorsed by alienated agents.

The similarities between our respective approaches, however, end here. The core difference lies in the conception of selfhood in which appropriation is grounded. In the Heideggerian view, appropriation is always appropriation of our thrown social existence, which encompasses a relation to self, other, and world^[12] and which pervades both everyday skilled coping and deliberate acts of second-order reflection. In other words, the notion of appropriation is premised on a non-dualist, holist, and anti-reductivist conception of selfhood defined in opposition to the traditional two-tiered model of the self. As was previously shown, it is precisely the individualism of the two-tiered model that prevents constitutivism from accounting for the social dimension of the self-relation.

It is, therefore, surprising that, despite its social-critical aims, Jaeggi’s approach is equally wedded to the two-tiered model inherited from German moral philosophers Ernst Tugendhat and Peter Bieri (Jaeggi, 2014, pp. 32-51; 177-79). This is clearly manifest in Jaeggi’s gloss of appropriation as capacity of willing such that appropriation is “appropriation of the will” or a “willing of one’s will” (Jaeggi, 2014, pp. 32-51). Hence, successful appropriation is fittingly characterized as “having oneself at one’s command”, which hearkens back to the kind of self-mastery and imperviousness to “outside forces” evoked by the Kantian model (Jaeggi, 2014, pp. 32-51).^[13] Correspondingly, failure to appropriate oneself is described as “deficiency of willing one’s will” and as not being “at one’s command”. Jaeggi thus argues that the loss of freedom entailed in alienation is not to be understood in terms of Kantian heteronomy because self-alienation is not an external, but rather more an ‘internal’ affair, in that, it involves a person’s inability to appropriate his/ her actions, desires, thoughts, etc. Despite her claim that appropriation is also related to the material world and, therefore, that its ‘internal’ character is somewhat misleading, it is not clear upon what grounds Jaeggi is entitled to such a claim since she already accepts the twotiered model of the self and the inside-outside dichotomy inherited from Kant (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 200). In other words, insofar as Jaeggi defines alienation as a loss of internal freedom in opposition to heteronomy a loss of external freedom, she has already bought into the Kantian paradigm lock, stock, and barrel.

As a result, as Beatrijs Haverkamp (2016) has rightly noted in her review of Jaeggi’s Alienation, all the examples of self-alienation provided are construed as individual failures— e.g. the cases of internal division, indifference, powerlessness, etc.—and, as a result, the solutions they call for are correspondingly individual rather than social. That is to say, they seem to demand a change of beliefs, attitudes, etc. as opposed to a transformation of the social environment in which self-appropriation takes place. While I agree with Haverkamp that the individualist leanings of Jaeggi’s views makes it ill-suited to the diagnosis and critique of social pathologies, I reject the basis on which she makes such a diagnosis, viz. a sharp distinction between individual and social pathology such that our options are either self-help, construed in atomistic terms, or social and political change. This is reflected in Haverkamp’s appeal to Raymond Geuss’s (1981) distinction between psychoanalytic theory and critical theory, whereby the former involves psychological deficiencies which are purportedly self-imposed and overcome through a reconfiguration of beliefs, desires, etc. while the latter is concerned with the struggle to change social reality, which requires political action. It is this very picture, however, that the appropriative view is trying to dislodge precisely because it stands in the way of a successful transition from ethics to social and political philosophy.

I want to conclude by suggesting that the key to overcoming the specter of individualism that equally haunts Jaeggi’s view is implicit in her account of and solution to the form of self-alienation called “loss of authenticity” (Jaeggi, 2014, pp. 68-98). This is a case of self-alienation because one cannot appropriate one’s social role as constitutive of one’s identity. According to Jaeggi, the solution lies in “maneuvering” between the pre-existing social role and the individual’s task to take it up and appropriate it in their own way. If freedom, in this case, is a maneuvering between one’s social role and the demand to appropriate it in one way or another, then it seems that we must leave open the possibility that some roles are inappropriable without thereby undermining our ethical agency—as in the case of the phenomenology of racism—or leave little or no room for maneuvering. Jaeggi, however, does not fully exploit the potential of this idea because she argues that social roles are not impossible to appropriate per se^[14] and, therefore, the burden of appropriation always seems to lie squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

Nevertheless, I think the notion of “maneuvering” points in the right direction, namely to the kind of social conception of freedom the appropriative view is after and is better positioned to exploit. In lieu of freedom as “maneuvering”, however, Heidegger employs the notion of “adjustment”: freedom as appropriation is always an adjustment to a pre-given situation. It is important to stress, however, that when we say that someone is “well-adjusted”, for example, we do not mean that they have become fully absorbed into the social order such that they have become tokens of a social type, but rather that they have managed to find their own place within the environment in question. Hence, it is necessary to distinguish between instances of legitimate conformity with inauthentic conformism as an (over) generalized mode of existence or modus operandi. Moreover, to say that one is ‘maladjusted’ does not, on this view, imply a purely individual failing. On the contrary, as the case of Fanon shows, one might be justified in refusing to adjust to certain features of one’s social environment precisely because to do so would undermine the basic preconditions of one’s self-actualization. Consequently, the social environment in question is, in this case, “at fault” in that it undermines—rather than enables—possibilities for authentic self-appropriation.^[15] The actualization of selfhood, therefore, ultimately involves the ability to successfully appropriate one’s social environment and “adjust” to it such that distortions or pathologies in appropriation represent “disturbances in adjustment and freedom”:

A human being’s limited belonging to the realm of the unconcealed [situation] constitutes his being a self. The human being becomes an ego by this limitation [to a given situation] and not by being unlimited in such a way that, beforehand, the “I,” thinking about itself, boasts about being the measure and center of everything that can be represented.^[16]For the Greeks, “I” is the name for a human being who adjusts to the limits [of a given situation] and, thus, at home with himself is Himself (ZS: 188; italics added).

We do psychology, sociology, and psychotherapy in order to help the human being reach the goal of adjustment and freedom in the broadest sense. This is the joint concern of physicians and sociologists because all social and pathological disturbances of the individual human being are disturbances in adjustment and freedom (ZS: 154; italics added).