Alienated identity developed over millennia, intensifying at the Enlightenment.

Evidence

While Bordo’s thesis of the birth of a separate human identity with the Enlightenment need not be entirely abandoned, it requires, I shall argue, major modification. The Enlightenment period does involve a major intensification of the domination of nature, just as our own period involves a major intensification of the instrumentalisation of biological life, but the essential ingredients of alienated identity are already present in a major way and as major themes in pre-Enlightenment thought. We can better account for the development of a dualised human identity in terms of a colonisation process taking place over a much longer period than the Enlightenment, and involving, as does colonisation itself, distinct stages and sites. As I will argue in chapter 6, the formation of an alienated and hyperseparated human identity which takes shape in the Enlightenment involves a different set of sites for separation and the denial of dependency, and corresponds to a later phase in the process of separation, rather than to the entire process. This later phase corresponds to the relocation of radical exclusion between humans and nature, previously situated in human identity and human virtue, to the new site of mind or consciousness, leading to mechanism. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Casts Enlightenment mechanism as a relocation of dualism to the new site of mind — a precise mechanism account complementing Merchant’s treatment of Descartes. — connects to: Modernity preserved the opposition to nature while discarding the afterlife — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 387; Alienation deepens precisely when people happily identify with imposed existence; Existentialism can be traced to a mood found across millennia of troubled thinkers — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 7 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Alienation deepens precisely when people happily identify with imposed existence #complicates (0.85)
• Alienation takes different forms for educated and laboring colonized men #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 818
• Existentialism can be traced to a mood found across millennia of troubled thinkers #corroborates (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 7
• Alienation presupposes an earlier unalienated human relationship to distort #expands (0.78)
• Millennial authenticity embraced mainstream ambition instead of detached alienation #qualifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 338
• Intellectual alienation arises from rigidified middle-class closed societies #corroborates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 821
• Alienation accurately describes working-class privation but not general spiritual malaise #qualifies (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 241
• Enlightenment thinking sought the indubitable and lost sight of the undeniable #complicates (0.72) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 657
• Identity is both a source of agency and increasingly constructed rather than given #complicates (0.70)