Alienation as an Ontological Category: An Analysis Based on Reflexive Pluralism—Taking the Thought Experiment of “Sleepless Humans” as an Example

When technology begins to touch upon dimensions once regarded as the foundational bedrock of human existence, a recurrent "essentialist fear" emerges in public discourse: that humanity will lose some irreducible "essence" as a result. Taking "sleepless humans"—a technology that liberates humans entirely from sleep—as a thought experiment, this paper conducts a systematic philosophical analysis of this fear. It argues that essentialist fear relies metaphysically on a dubious static view of essence, mistaking the existential form of humans at a specific historical stage for an immutable law of human nature; existentially, it is rooted in a deep attachment to a familiar steady state, misinterpreting the pain and unease of the collapse of the old territory as an intuitive grasp of objective truth; and politically, it serves as a discursive weapon for the bearers of the old steady state in power struggles. To replace this essentialist framework, this paper extracts and develops the concept of "alienation in the ontological sense"—a value-neutral process category—from the theoretical resources of reflexive pluralism. This concept is decomposed into a three-stage dynamic: a period of pain upon encountering a new "hardcore", a period of adjustment in actively constructing a new existential form, and a new steady state where the new construction is naturalized across generations and its origins are forgotten. On this basis, the paper proposes that the contested "hardcore" should be understood not as a fixed essentialist red line, but as a generic framework constituted by empirical resistance phenomena, mechanistic scientific hypotheses, and discursive mobilization at the game-theoretic level. Thus, this paper achieves a fundamental shift in the framing of the question: the real issue is not "what essence will we lose", but "what will we gain, what will we pay, who decides, and how do those with different choices coexist"—questions of practical game-playing rather than metaphysical judgment. Ultimately, this paper shows that de-essentializing "alienation" and reconstructing it as an ontological category not only provides a new conceptual tool for analyzing human enhancement technologies but also offers a non-essentialist and non-nihilist analytical path for understanding any historical transformation of fundamental modes of human existence.