Alienation, or estrangement, is a concept of considerable antiquity, whose metaphysical origins have been veiled in the course of time by the progressive secularization of Western thought. Historians of philosophy trace the concept back to the writings of Plotinus, whose doctrine of emanation assumed a procession from an ultimate indefinable source or principle to a multiplicity of finite beings: the undivided One unfolds into its various manifestations by a downward process linking the supersensible