Spirit and Alienation in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust: Entfremdung, Entäußerung, and the Causal Entropy of Normativity

In what follows, I will first trace back Brandom’s understanding of alienation to his understanding of skepticism in the first and second parts of A Spirit of Trust. I will then analyze, in this light, his take on alienation as both a defective metaphysical structure and a meta-attitude and unveil some tensions that arise between these two aspects and are due to the prevalence of the latter. In the second part of my paper, I will develop some thoughts on the fact that Brandom seems to ignore the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung, and thus, on the one hand, assigns to alienation only the negative meaning of estrangement (ignoring the structural process of alienation as externalization or objectification, which can assume both a negative and a positive meaning) and, on the other hand, conceives alienation basically as subjective alienation (ignoring the objective side of alienation as a structural phenomenon). Finally, I will argue that, once the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung is taken into account, the relations both between alienation and domination and between alienation and work, and consequently the relation between Spirit and nature, should be reconsidered in a way that puts into question the bootstrapping model that Brandom supports.