alienação hegel e marx

8/6/2019 Alienao Hegel e Marx

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ALIENATION IN HEGEL

AND MARX

Although its roots lie far back in the Judeo-Christian

tradition, the concept of alienation first gained promi-

nence in the philosophy of Hegel, and particularly inhis mature writings. There are signs of the idea in his

earlier works, but it is not until the Phenomenology

(1808), thought by many to be Hegel's most important

work, that alienation occupies a central place in his

writings.

In the opening sections of the Phenomenology Hegel

attacked the views of common sense and simplified

natural science that the world consisted of discreteobjects independent of man's consciousness. Truth, for

Hegel, was not to be found in knowledge that was

purified of any influence from man's own desires and

feelings. Ultimately Hegel considered that there could

be no truth that was not intimately linked with the

ongoing process of human beings as thinking subjects;

truth was their truth. The supposed objectivity of the

world of nature was in fact an alienation, for man's

task was to discover, behind these appearances, his own

essential life and finally to view everything as a facet

of his own self-consciousness. The same principle ap-

plied to the world of culture in which such spheres

as art and religion, if viewed as independent of man,

constituted so many alienations to be overcome by

integration into the final understanding and recapitula-

tion which was Absolute Knowledge.

The central actor in this process for Hegel was Spirit.

Hegel thought that reality was Spirit developing itself.In this process Spirit produced a world that it thought

at first was external; only later did it realize that this

world was its own production. Spirit was not something

separated from this productive activity; it only existed

in and through this activity. At the beginning of this

process Spirit was not aware that it was externalizing

or alienating itself. Only gradually did Spirit realize

that the world was not external to it. It was the failure

to realize this that constituted, for Hegel, alienation.This alienation would cease when men became fully

self-conscious and understood their environment and


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their culture to be emanations of Spirit. Freedom con-

sisted in this understanding, and freedom was the aim

of history.

Hegel had created a system; and all his disciples

agreed that it was the final one. However, when it cameto applying the system to particular problems, they

conceived their Master's system to be ambivalent. The

fact that alienation seemed to them to be a challenge,

something to be overcome, led them to put the em-

phasis on the concepts of dialectic and negativity in

Hegel's system; and thus they challenged, first in reli-

gion and then in politics, the Master's view that the

problem of alienation had, at least in principle, been

solved. The foremost among these radical disciples ofHegel, Bruno Bauer, applied the concept of alienation

to the religious field. Bauer, who lectured in theology

and made his name as a Gospel critic, considered that

religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity, caused

a division in man's consciousness by becoming opposed

to this consciousness as a separate power. Thus religion

was an attitude towards the essence of self-conscious-

ness that had become estranged from itself. In this

context, Bauer promoted the use of the expression

self-alienation that soon became current among the

Young Hegelians.

Like Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach was also fas-

cinated by the problem of religious alienation, but his

concept of it was much simpler. Whereas Bauer con-

sidered that men's religious creations eventually

adopted an inhuman form, Feuerbach saw in religion

simply the projection of man's essential desires and

capacities. Since what was ascribed to God were reallyattributes of man, man was separated from himself, and

thus alienated. This idea was elaborated in Feuerbach's

best known book The Essence of Christianity, published

in 1841. Feuerbach described the fundamental idea

of his book thus: The objective essence of religion,

particularly the Christian religion, is nothing but the

essence of human, and particularly Christian, feeling.

The secret of theology is therefore anthropology....

The foundation of a new science is laid here in that038


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the philosophy of religion is conceived of and pre-

sented as esoteric or secret anthropology or psychol-

ogy (McLellan [1969], p. 88).

Feuerbach made an even greater impact through his

Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy andhis Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future, both

published in 1843. Their major purpose was to point

out that Hegel's philosophy was just as alienating a

force as religion and needed to be reabsorbed in the

same manner. Feuerbach began his Theses with the

statement the secret of theology is anthropology, but

the secret of speculative philosophy is theology (ibid.,

p. 98). In Feuerbach's view, the great deficiency in

Hegel's philosophy was its negation of theology fromthe standpoint of theology. Thus Hegelthe German

Proclusnever managed to break out of the circle of

ideas and could not realize the true relationship of

thought to being: being is the subject, thought the

predicate. As a philosopher in his own right, Feuer-

bach was only of the second rank: basically he had

one idea that he expounded in many different ways.

As Marx said later: Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach

is very poor. Nevertheless, after Hegel he was epoch-

making because he put the emphasis on certain points,

uncomfortable for the Christian consciousness and im-

portant for the progress of criticism, which Hegel had

left in a sort of mystical twilight between clarity and

obscurity (ibid., p. 113).

It was in this atmosphere of rapid secularization that

Marx evolved his own concept of alienation. Bruno

Bauer had talked of alienation in religion; Feuerbach

had carried this further by pointing out that Hegel'sphilosophy was itself the last bastion of theology;

finally Moses Hessnicknamed the communist

rabbihad transferred Feuerbach's ideas to the realm

of economics, by analyzing, in his essay On the Essence

of Money (1844), money as the alienated essence of

man. Marx accepted all these accounts of alienation,

considering economics to be fundamental inasmuch as

work was man's basic activity. In all these fields Marx's

common idea was that man had alienated to someoneor something what was essential to his nature

principally, to be in control of his own activities, to


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be the subject and initiator of the historical process.

In the different forms of alienation some other entity

had obtained what was proper to man: in religion it

was God, in politics the State, in economics the market

process and cash nexus. (A note is necessary on the

German originals of the term alienation. Marx usestwo words to express the concept of alienation:

Entfremdung and Entusserung. His distinction be-

tween these two words is by no means as precise as

that of Hegel. Often they appear to be synonymous

and are used together for rhetorical effect. If anything,

Entfremdung conveys the sense of alienation in which

two people are said to be alienated from each other;

while Entsserung has more the sense of making

external to oneself with legal and commercial over-tones. Neither of these words is to be confused with

Vergegenstndlichung, that is, objectification, which,

in Marx as opposed to Hegel, is a neutral process that

can be either good or bad according to the partic-

ular circumstances.)

Marx first worked out his ideas in detail with regard

to political alienation in his Critique of Hegel's Philos-

ophy of Right. Here Marx examined paragraph by

paragraph Hegel's Philosophy of Right and claimed

that the state, described by Hegel as productive of,

and superior to, its own elements, constituted an aliena-

tion of man's essence. Applying to Hegel Feuerbach's

reversal of subject and predicate, Marx wrote: The

Idea is made subjective and the true relationship of

the family and civil society to the state is conceived

of as their imaginary activity. The family and civil

society are the presuppositions of the state; they are

its properly active elements. But in speculation therelationship is inverted. When the Idea is made a

subject, the civil society, the family, 'circumstances,

caprice' etc. become unreal objective phrases of the

Idea and have a completely different significance

(Early Texts, p. 62).

The place where Marx wrote at greatst length on

his concept of alienation and his debt to Hegel are

two passages in the Paris Manuscripts. In the passageon alienated labour (ibid., pp. 133ff.), Marx deals

with the relationship of the worker to his product. The


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fact that the worker is related to the product of his

labor as to an alien object means that the more the

worker produces the more he approaches loss of work

and starvation. Marx goes on to detail four types of

alienated labor: the alienation of the product from the

producer; the alienation of the act of production; thealienation of nature from men; and finally of man from

his species-being (a term borrowed from Feuerbach

meaning the common factors making up man's nature).

This negative picture is complemented by the descrip-

tion that Marx gives of unalienated man in the notes

that he made on James Mill at the same time as the

writing of the Manuscripts. Put rather roughly, what

Marx means when he talks of alienation is this: it is

man's nature to be his own creator; he forms anddevelops himself by working on and transforming the

world outside him in cooperation with his fellow men.

In this progressive interchange between man and the

world, it is man's nature to be in control of this process,

to be the initiator, the subject in which the process

originates. However, this nature has become alien to

man; that is, it is no longer his and belongs to another

person or thing. In religion, for example, it is God who

is the subject of the historical process and man is in

039

a state of dependence on His grace. In economics,

according to Marx, it is money and the processes of

the market that maneuver men around instead of being

controlled by them. The central point is that man has

lost control of his own evolution and has seen this

control invested in other entities. What is proper to

man has become the attribute of something else, and

thus alien to him.

The second passage of importance in the Paris Man-

uscripts is the final section entitled Critique of Hegel's

Dialectic (ibid., pp. 157ff.). Here Marx began by de-

scribing Feuerbach's great achievement which was

to have demonstrated that Hegel's philosophy was

merely a different form of the alienation of man's

nature; Feuerbach had reestablished the primacy of

man's social relationship to man. Marx readily ac-knowledged his own debt to Hegel. Therefore the

greatness of Hegel's Phenomenology, he wrote, and


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its final product, the dialectic of negativity as the

moving and creating principle, is that Hegel conceived

of the self-creation of man as a process, objectification

as loss of the object, as externalisation and the tran-

scendence of this externalisation. This means, therefore,

that he grasps the nature of labour and understandsobjective man, true, because real man, as the result

of his own labour (ibid., p. 164). Nevertheless, Hegel's

conception of labor was of abstract, mental labor and

he only succeeded in overcoming alienation in the

realm of consciousness.

Although Hegel said that man suffered from eco-

nomic and political alienation, it was only the thought

of economics and politics in which Hegel was inter-ested. The whole process ended in Absolute Knowl-

edge, with the result that it was the philosopher who

judged the world. In other words, Hegel had confused

alienation and objectivity. Thus, according to Hegel,

What is supposed to be the essence of alienation that

needs to be transcended is not that man's being ob-

jectifies itself in an inhuman way in opposition to itself,

but that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in

opposition to, abstract thought. The appropriation of

man's objectified and alienated faculties is thus firstly

only an appropriation that occurs in the mind, in pure

thought, i.e. in abstraction (ibid., pp. 162f.). Marx's

central criticism of Hegel, therefore, was that aliena-

tion would not cease with the supposed abolition of

the external world. The external world, according to

Marx, was part of man's nature and the point was to

establish the right relationship between man and his

environment. Marx therefore rejected Hegel's notion

of Spirit and replaced its supposed antithesis to theexternal world by the antithesis between man and his

social being.

In his early writings, therefore, Marx sketched a

notion of alienation which, taking the analyses in reli

gion and politics of his contemporary Young Hegelians

as models, had its roots in the socioeconomic situation

of the worker in capitalist society. Yet in the 1930's

and '40's, alienation did not play any part in the manydiscussions of Marx's thought. In the 1960's, however,

it was accepted that it is the major theme running


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supported by a detailed analysis of the effects of ad-

vanced technology, should not obscure the continuity.

The section of Capital that most recalls the early

writings, is the final section of Chapter One, entitled

Fetishism of Commodities. The whole section isreminiscent of the passage on alienated labor in the

040

Paris Manuscripts and of the notes on James Mill that

Marx composed in 1844. Marx writes:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because

in it the social character of man's labour appears to them

as an objective character stamped upon that labour; becausethe relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour,

is presented to them as a social relation, existing not be-

tween themselves, but between the products of their labour

(I, 488).

However, the writing that best shows the centrality

of the concept of alienation to Marx's thought is the

Grundrisse. This manuscript is the thousand-page draft

that served Marx as a basis for Capital but remained

unpublished until 1941. The Grundrisse, of which the

Critique of Political Economy and Capital are only

partial elaborations, is the centerpiece of Marx's work.

It is the basic work which permitted the generaliza-

tions in the famous Preface to the Critique of Political

Economy. For Capital is only the first of the six volumes

in which Marx wished to develop his Economics, the

title by which he referred to his magnum opus on the

alienation of man through Capital and the State.

The scope of the Grundrisse being wider than that

of Capital, Marx's thought is best viewed as a con-

tinuing meditation on themes begun in 1844, the high

point in which meditation occurred in 1857-58. The continuity

between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse

is evident. Marx himself talked of the Grundrisse as

the result of fifteen years of research, thus the best

period of my life. This latter was written in November1858, exactly fifteen years after Marx's arrival in Paris

in November 1843. He also says, in the Preface of 1859:


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the total material lies before me in the form of mono-

graphs, which were written at widely separated pe-

riods, for self-clarification, not for publication, and

whose coherent elaboration according to the plan indi-

cated will depend on external circumstances. This can

only refer to the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and theLondon notebooks of 1850-52. Marx constantly used,

and at the same time revised, material from an earlier

date: for instance, he used his notebooks of 1843-45

while writing Capital.

The content of the Grundrisse only serves to confirm

what is plain from the external evidence: the beginning

of the chapter on Capital reproduces almost word for

word the passages in the Manuscripts on human need,man as a species-being, the individual as a social being,

the idea of nature as, in a sense, man's body, the paral-

lels between religious and economic alienation, the

utopian and almost millennial elements, etc. One point

in particular emphasizes this continuity: the Grundrisse

are as Hegelian as the Paris Manuscripts and the central

concept of both of them is alienation.

Aided by the publication of Marx's early writings,

the increasing complexity and anonymity of capitalist

society, and the gap between ideology and reality in

many socialist ones, the concept of alienation has be-

come very topical. Its very topicality, however, is in

danger of rendering the concept of alienation vacuous;

for often it seems merely to be used to designate any

state of affairs that is considered unsatisfactory. How-

ever, Marx's description of alienation, particularly as

contained in the Paris Manuscripts, is by no means as

vacuous as many of its contemporary interpretations.For it contains both an account of the relationship

between socioeconomic conditions and psychological

states that is, to some extent at least, testable, and also

a far from vague view of human nature. Because it

contains both of these it is also a concept in which

facts and values are inextricably bound together, and

so one which runs counter to the prevailing demand

for a sharp distinction between evaluative and descrip-

tive statements. Thus, although Marx was always writ-ing with certain initial value judgments presupposed,

empirical criteria are, up to a point, applicable to his


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hypotheses. Marx's concept can be further clarified by

asking what he would consider as nonalienation. This

positive side of Marx's critique is less well-known. But

the passage on alienated labour in the Paris Manu-

scripts should be read in close conjunction with his

description of production in a human manner con-tained in his notes on James Mill, and with the concep-

tion of the future communist society outlined in the

Grundrisse. The metaphysical and ethical elements of

the concept of alienation that originated with Hegel

and Feuerbach still persist to some extent in Marx, but

they are given a socioeconomic context that makes

them all the more interesting to the modern mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Arvon, Ludwig Feuerbach, ou la tranformation du

Sacr (Paris, 1957). S. Avineri, The Social and Political

Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968). H. Barth, Wahr-

heit und Ideologie (Zurich, 1945). J.-Y. Calvez, La Pense

de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956). L. Dupr, The Philosophical

Foundations of Marxism (New York, 1966). L. Feuerbach,

The Essence of Christianity (London, 1853). J. Findlay,

Hegel: A Re-examination (London, 1958). E. Fromm, Marx's

Concept of Man (New York, 1961). G. Hegel, Phenomenology

of Mind (London and New York, 1910). J. Hyppolite, Gense

et Structure da la phnomnologie de l'esprit de Hegel (Paris,

1947). E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism

(London, 1962). W. Kaufmann, Hegel (New York, 1965). A.

Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947). J.

Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology (La Salle, 1965). H.

Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (London, 1941). K. Marx,

Capital, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1961-62); idem, Selected Writings

in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. Bottomore and

M. Rubel (London, 1956); idem, The Early Texts, ed. D.041

McLellan (Oxford, 1971); idem, Writings of the Young Marx

on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat

(New York, 1967). D. McLellan, Marx before Marxism (New

York, 1970), with extensive bibliography on the early Marx;

idem, Marx's Grundrisse (New York, 1971); idem, The

Thought of Karl Marx (New York, 1971), with extensive

bibliography on Marxist thought as a whole; idem, TheYoung Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969). B. Ollman,

Alienation: Marx's Concept of Man in Capitalist Society


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(Cambridge, 1971). J. Plamenatz, Man and Society, Vol. 2

(London, 1963). S. Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philo-

sophie (Berlin, 1931). R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in

Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1961).

DAVID McLELLAN[See also Alienation in Western Theology; Economic His-

tory; Economic Theory of Natural Liberty; Hegelian Politi-

cal and Religious Ideas; Historical and Dialectical Materi-

alism; Marxism; Socialism.]

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