ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a commonly experienced feeling of being somebody else, one of the most intriguing phenomena of modernity. I argue that this feeling is an outcome of the pivotal tendencies of modernity, i.e., the division of labor, social stratification, the dispersal of shared value systems, and the invention of the individual as a separate social category. These developments engender a widespread belief that our identities are externally imposed and foreign to us. To analyze this condition, I use the notion of hamartia borrowed from ancient poetics. However, while in antiquity hamartia concerned eminent individuals who had failed to recognize their actual position, in modernity hamartia is democratized and affects nearly everybody. The chapter opens with an analysis of Arthur Rimbaud’s celebrated “Letter of the Seer” and Franz Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis as two canonical descriptions of being out of one’s place. Further, I depict two genealogies of modern hamartia: one in which hamartia is framed as alienation and a symptom of the failure of modernity; and the other in which hamartia is favorably appraised as a virtue, for it offers an opportunity of expanding the self and the mind. The former idea is embraced by N. Machiavelli, J.-J. Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, and W. Gombrowicz. The other mode of thinking is espoused by I. Kant, A. Smith, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, and R. Rorty. The chapter concludes with an outline of modern strategies of coping with inevitable hamartia.
