Critical theory stands among the most searching moral accomplishments of modern thought. It has compelled theology, philosophy, and politics alike to abandon a comforting illusion: that systems merely coordinate human life. In truth, they configure it. Economic rationality, technological mediation, bureaucratic administration, and the machinery of mass culture do not hover above the human person as neutral instruments. They descend into the interior. They school desire. They narrow imagination. They define what may plausibly be hoped for and what must be dismissed as naïve.
Alienation, therefore, is not a technical malfunction within an otherwise adequate arrangement. It is deformation sedimented into the very architecture of modern existence.
This achievement should not be domesticated. It renders romantic invocations of “order” intellectually unserious. It chastens any theology tempted to baptize what merely functions. It exposes how easily vocation, severed from its ontological depth, collapses into ideological compliance. In this sense, critical theory performs a genuine purification.
And yet its own speech bears a weight it does not fully acknowledge.
I. The Ontological Density of Alienation
To call a condition “alienated” is already to invoke a norm. Alienation is not variation; it is distortion. And distortion presupposes a measure.
If human life were nothing more than a transient configuration within evolving systems of production and communication, alienation could describe structure but not condemn it. It could map patterns, but it could not name injustice.
But critical theory does not merely map.
The worker rendered interchangeable does not simply encounter difference. He encounters violation. The protest—I am worth more than this—does not appeal to procedural malfunction but to intrinsic worth. It speaks as though dignity precedes recognition and survives its denial.
This is decisive. The binding force of that protest is not borrowed from the system it resists. It presents itself as valid even when the system refuses to ratify it. Alienation wounds because life has a form proper to it.
The unavoidable question emerges: what must life be such that deformation counts as injustice rather than inconvenience?
II. The Strain Within Immanence
Later developments within the Frankfurt tradition seek to secure normativity without recourse to metaphysics. Communicative rationality grounds validity in the presuppositions of discourse. Recognition theory locates normativity within the moral grammar of relational affirmation.
These are not trivial achievements. They resist reduction to instrumental reason. They defend the irreducibility of persons against pure system logic. They labor faithfully within a postmetaphysical horizon.
But the tension remains.
Why is undistorted communication the proper form of life? Why does misrecognition constitute injustice rather than maladjustment? Why does colonization signify loss rather than transformation?
If communicative structures and recognition practices are wholly emergent from historical contingency, then their authority cannot exceed that contingency. Normativity cannot outrun its ground.
Yet critique speaks as though it does.
When alienation is named distortion, life is tacitly granted an integrity not generated by the system and not exhausted by recognition. The “ought not” uttered by the worker carries a gravity that cannot be reduced to discursive coherence. The grammar of critique exceeds the resources of its own immanence.
III. Vocation as Ontological Clarification
The Lutheran doctrine of vocation, properly understood, does not sacralize social placement. It does not immunize historical arrangements from judgment. When reduced to such functions, it deserves critique.
Vocation is not first a task but a structure of being.
To be human is to be addressed. Life does not originate in self-assertion, nor does it arise from systemic coordination. It is called—into existence and into responsibility.
Before occupying any role, the human person stands coram Deo. Before receiving recognition, one is known. Before achievement, one is summoned.
This claim does not compete with sociological analysis; it makes moral protest intelligible. If life is constituted by divine address, then dignity is not produced by communicative agreement. It is not conferred by recognition and cannot be revoked by misrecognition.
Alienation is rupture precisely because life precedes the systems that deform it.
Grace, in this register, secures what critique presupposes.
IV. Critique Intensified
Such grounding does not silence critical theory; it deepens it. If vocation were identical with social station, critique would rightly dismantle it. But if vocation names ontological address, then no system exhausts it, no arrangement is ultimate, no role definitive.
Because life stands coram Deo, it cannot be reduced to function. Because it is sent coram hominibus, it cannot retreat into private interiority.
Emancipation matters—but it does not generate dignity. Recognition matters—but it does not constitute worth. Communication matters—but it does not ground being.
Life is not first emancipation achieved; it is existence received as call.
V. The Unavoidable Claim
Critical theory has demonstrated that systems deform life. It has unmasked reification. It has defended the irreducibility of the person. Yet in doing so it has already affirmed that life exceeds system—and that such excess requires grounding.
Without ontological givenness, alienation becomes rearrangement within contingency. With it, alienation is rupture within a created order.
Grace, therefore, is not decorative theology appended to critique. It names the condition under which critique has binding force at all.
- Life matters because it is given.
- Life can be violated because it is given.
- Life can be judged because it is given.
This is not theology smuggled into critical theory. It is the clarification of what the language of distortion already assumes.
Vocation is not consolation. It is the ontological grammar of the worker’s protest.
And once this is seen, the force of “ought not” no longer hovers uncertainly above history. It stands upon ground.
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