Alienation, Vocation, and the Ontology of Life

Abstract

This essay argues that critical theory’s diagnosis of alienation tacitly presupposes an ontology of life it cannot fully secure on postmetaphysical grounds alone. While the Frankfurt tradition, especially in Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Honneth, exposes with great force the deformation of life under instrumental reason, reification, and misrecognition, its critique depends upon the claim that human life possesses an integrity and significance not reducible to the systems that mediate it. The essay contends that the doctrine of vocation, rightly understood, provides a theological account of that irreducible significance. Vocation is retrieved not chiefly as profession, task, or social role, but as an ontological claim: human life is constituted by divine address, given before it is chosen, and answerable before it is socially recognized. On this basis, the essay argues that grace does not soften critique but grounds its deepest possibility, securing the claim that alienation names not mere dislocation within history but genuine injury to creaturely life. Theology and critical theory are therefore neither simple rivals nor easy partners. Critical theory discloses the deformations of modern existence that theology must not conceal, while theology articulates the ontological depth without which critique cannot finally explain why such deformation counts as injustice at all.