One of the hallmarks of the modern conception of man is a kind of anxious inquietude — we struggle to ovecome the diremption and alienation that haunts our consciousness. In the Lockean account, our restlessness is a function of our distance from nature — our capacity for autonomous creation and the absence of any purposive guidance relegates us to feckless industry; we replace the pain of want with the pain of a labor that can never find completion. Locke’s response to our alienation seems to be that we should exacerbate it, we should disconnect ourselves even more, in the hopes that we can create a world via rational control that is finally hospitable to us. Locke counters our existential angst with commerical productivity but seems less than sanguine about our prospects for happiness.
Pascal, on the other hand, sees our alienation as the permanent condition of man, and less a function of our distance from nature than our distance from God through the transmission of original sin from man to man. Locke and Pascal share common ground insofar as they see our restlessness as the condition of man, something not clearly revisable through our own efforts or through the forces of history. Rousseau and Marx would criticize both of them for espousing a-historical accounts underappreciative of the possibility for a kind of final wholeness and contentment available to us — Rousseau believes that Locke only captures modern European man at a certain stage of his development. Is the only or primary difference between these divergent anthropologies their position on history? What does it mean for Marx or Rousseau to achieve a final wholeness or to decisively overcome alienation? Is this merely a matter of overcoming divisive class and political differences or is there a seismic shift in human consciousness that is realistically articulatable?
