Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
III.5. [Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General]
Section summary
Marx settles accounts with the Hegelian dialectic, which the Young Hegelian critics (Strauss, Bauer) had never questioned, and credits Feuerbach with showing that philosophy is religion in thought. Hegel’s greatness in the Phenomenology is to have grasped the self-generation of man as a process, and labour as man’s essence; but he knows only abstract mental labour, treats objectivity itself as estrangement, and so supersedes estrangement only in thought, confirming religion, the state and the rest in their alienated form. Against this Marx sets man as a natural, objective, suffering and passionate being whose history is his act of coming into being. Hegel’s logic is the “money of the spirit”, and the passage from the absolute idea to nature is abstraction, bored with itself, resolving to look at the world.
[XI] (6) This is perhaps the place to give a few indications, for the sake of understanding and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic in general and especially its exposition in the Phenomenology and the Logic, and finally about the relation of the recent critical movement to it.
Preoccupation with the content of the old world, the development of modern German criticism caught up in its material, was so overpowering that there was a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, and a complete lack of awareness about the seemingly formal but really essential question: how do we now stand towards the Hegelian dialectic? This unawareness of the relation of modern criticism to Hegel’s philosophy in general, and to the dialectic in particular, was so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer are still wholly caught within Hegel’s logic: the former completely, the latter in his “Synoptics” (where, against Strauss, he puts the “self-consciousness” of abstract man in place of the substance of “abstract nature”) and even still in Christianity Exposed, at least in potential. Thus we read, for example, in Christianity Exposed:
“As if self-consciousness, in positing the world, positing difference, and producing itself in what it produces, since it supersedes again the difference between what it has produced and itself, since it is itself only in producing and in movement, as if it did not have its purpose in this movement,” etc. Or: “They” (the French materialists) “have not yet been able to see that the movement of the universe has only really come to be for itself, and gone together into unity with itself, as the movement of self-consciousness.”
Expressions that do not show even a verbal difference from the Hegelian conception, but rather repeat it word for word.
[XII] How little awareness there was of the relation to the Hegelian dialectic during the act of criticism (Bauer, the “Synoptics”), how little this awareness arose even after the act of material criticism, is shown by Bauer when, in his Good Cause of Freedom, he brushes aside Herr Gruppe’s impertinent question, “what now about logic?”, by referring him to critics yet to come.
But even now, after Feuerbach, both in his “Theses” in the Anekdota and in detail in the Philosophy of the Future, has overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy at the root; after that criticism, which had been quite unable to accomplish this deed and instead saw it accomplished, has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism that has become clear with itself; after it has, in its spiritualist arrogance, reduced the whole movement of history to the relation of the rest of the world (which, over against it, falls under the category of the “mass”) to itself, and resolved all dogmatic oppositions into the one dogmatic opposition between its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world, between the critical Christ and mankind as the “rabble”; after it has demonstrated its own excellence daily and hourly against the mindlessness of the mass; after it has finally proclaimed the critical Last Judgement in the form of an announcement that the day is drawing near when the whole of decaying mankind will gather before it, be sorted by it into groups, and each particular rabble receive its testimonium paupertatis; after it has had printed its elevation above human feelings, as above the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only now and then letting the laughter of the Olympian gods ring out from its sarcastic lips: after all these diverting antics of idealism (of Young Hegelianism) expiring in the form of criticism, it has not even expressed a suspicion that the time has now come for a critical settlement with its mother, the Hegelian dialectic, nor has it been able to indicate any critical relation to Feuerbach’s dialectic. A completely uncritical attitude to itself.
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, a critical relation to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made real discoveries in this field; he is in general the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The greatness of his achievement, and the quiet simplicity with which Feuerbach gives it to the world, stand in a strange contrast to the opposite relation.
(1) the proof that philosophy is nothing but religion brought into thought and developed by thinking, another form and mode of existence of the estrangement of the human essence, and so equally to be condemned;
(2) the founding of true materialism and of real science, in that Feuerbach likewise makes the social relation of “man to man” the basic principle of theory;
(3) in that he sets against the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolutely positive, the positive that rests on itself and is positively grounded on itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting from the positive, from what is sensuously certain) as follows.
Hegel starts from the estrangement of substance (logically: from the infinite, the abstractly universal), from the absolute and fixed abstraction. That is, in popular terms, he starts from religion and theology.
Secondly, he supersedes the infinite and posits the actual, the sensuous, the real, the finite, the particular (philosophy, supersession of religion and theology).
Thirdly, he supersedes the positive again and restores the abstraction, the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology.
Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself, as philosophy that affirms theology (transcendence, etc.) after having denied it, and so affirms it in opposition to itself.
The position, or self-affirmation and self-confirmation, contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position not yet sure of itself, and so burdened with its opposite, doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and so not proving itself by its existence, not admitted; [XIII] and so the sensuously certain position grounded on itself is set directly and immediately against it.
But in conceiving the negation of the negation, in terms of the positive relation contained in it, as the true and only positive, and in terms of the negative relation contained in it, as the only true act and self-activating act of all being, Hegel has found only the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only man’s act of generation, the history of his origin. We shall explain both the abstract form and the difference between this movement as Hegel has it and, in contrast to modern criticism, the same process in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity; or rather the critical form of this movement, which in Hegel is still uncritical. A glance at Hegel’s system. One must begin with Hegel’s Phenomenology, the true birthplace and secret of Hegel’s philosophy.
I. Consciousness. (a) Sense-certainty, or the This and meaning. (b) Perception, or the thing with its properties, and illusion. (c) Force and understanding, appearance and the supersensible world.
II. Self-consciousness. The truth of the certainty of oneself. (a) Independence and dependence of self-consciousness; lordship and bondage. (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.
III. Reason. Certainty and truth of reason. (a) Observing reason; observation of nature and of self-consciousness. (b) Actualisation of rational self-consciousness through itself. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the heart and the madness of self-conceit. Virtue and the way of the world. (c) Individuality that is real in and for itself. The spiritual animal kingdom and deceit, or the matter in hand. Law-giving reason. Law-testing reason.
I. True spirit; ethical life. II. Spirit estranged from itself; culture. III. Spirit certain of itself; morality.
Just as Hegel’s Encyclopaedia begins with logic, with pure speculative thought, and ends with absolute knowing, with the self-conscious, self-comprehending philosophical or absolute, that is, superhuman, abstract spirit, so the whole “Encyclopaedia” is nothing but the unfolded essence of the philosophical spirit, its self-objectification; just as the philosophical spirit is nothing but the estranged spirit of the world thinking within its self-estrangement, that is, comprehending itself abstractly. Logic: the money of the spirit, the speculative thought-value of man and of nature; their essence grown wholly indifferent to all real determinateness, and so unreal; alienated thought, which therefore abstracts from nature and from real man; abstract thought. The externality of this abstract thought… nature, as it is for this abstract thought. Nature is external to it, its loss of itself; and it grasps nature externally too, as abstract thought, but as alienated abstract thought. Finally spirit, this thought returning to its own birthplace, which, as anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious spirit, still does not count for itself, until it finally finds itself and affirms itself as absolute knowing, and so as absolute, that is, abstract, spirit, and receives its conscious existence, the existence that corresponds to it. For its real existence is abstraction.
The first appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, as the birthplace of Hegel’s philosophy. When, for example, he conceives wealth, state power, etc., as beings estranged from the human being, this happens only in their form as thoughts… They are thought-entities, and so merely an estrangement of pure, that is, abstract, philosophical thought. The whole movement therefore ends with absolute knowing. What these objects are estranged from, and what they confront with their claim to reality, is precisely abstract thought. The philosopher, himself an abstract form of estranged man, sets himself up as the measure of the estranged world. The whole history of alienation and the whole taking back of alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract, that is, absolute, [XVII] [Marx’s reference: “See p. XIII.”] thought, of logical, speculative thought. Estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of this alienation and of the supersession of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject, that is, the opposition between abstract thought and sensuous reality, or real sensuousness, within thought itself. All other oppositions and their movements are only the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric form of these oppositions, which alone are of interest and which form the meaning of the other, profane oppositions. It is not that the human being objectifies itself inhumanly, in opposition to itself, but that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought, that counts as the posited essence of estrangement and the essence to be superseded.
[XVIII] The appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects, and alien objects, is therefore, first, only an appropriation that takes place in consciousness, in pure thought, that is, in abstraction: the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and movements of thought. This is why already in the Phenomenology, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance, and despite the criticism really contained in it, which often anticipates far later developments, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works (this philosophical dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world) already lies latent, is present as a germ, as a potentiality, as a secret. Secondly: the vindication of the objective world for man (for example, the recognition that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness, that religion, wealth, etc., are only the estranged reality of human objectification, of human essential powers born into works, and so only the way to true human reality): this appropriation, or the insight into this process, appears in Hegel in such a way that sensuousness, religion, state power, etc., are spiritual beings; for only spirit is the true essence of man, and the true form of spirit is thinking spirit, logical, speculative spirit. The human character of nature, and of the nature produced by history, of man’s products, appears in the fact that they are products of abstract spirit, and so far, therefore, spiritual moments, thought-entities. The Phenomenology is therefore concealed criticism, still obscure to itself and mystifying; but in so far as it holds fast to the estrangement of man (even though man appears only in the form of spirit), all the elements of criticism lie concealed in it, and are often already prepared and worked out in a way that goes far beyond Hegel’s standpoint. The “unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle of the “noble and base consciousness”, etc., etc.: these separate sections contain the critical elements (though still in an estranged form) of whole spheres, such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as the essence, the object, is a thought-entity, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness; the different forms of estrangement that appear are therefore only different forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as abstract consciousness (which is how the object is conceived) is in itself merely a moment of self-consciousness distinguishing itself, so too the result of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness with consciousness, absolute knowing, the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but going on only within itself; that is, the dialectic of pure thought is the result. [Marx’s reference: “See continuation p. XXII.”] [XVIII]
[XXIII] [Marx’s reference: “See p. XVIII.”] The great thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is, first, that Hegel conceives the self-generation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as supersession of this alienation; that he therefore grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man, true because real man, as the result of his own labour. The real, active relation of man to himself as a species-being, or the activation of himself as a real species-being, that is, as a human being, is possible only because he really brings out all his species-powers (which again is possible only through the collective activity of men, only as the result of history) and relates to them as objects, which at first is again possible only in the form of estrangement.
We shall now show Hegel’s one-sidedness and limitation in detail in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “Absolute Knowing”, a chapter that contains both the summarised spirit of the Phenomenology, its relation to the speculative dialectic, and Hegel’s consciousness of both and of their mutual relation.
For the present let us anticipate only this. Hegel stands on the standpoint of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man; he sees only the positive side of labour, not its negative side. Labour is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour Hegel knows and recognises is abstract mental labour. So what forms the essence of philosophy in general, the alienation of man knowing himself, or alienated science thinking itself, Hegel grasps as its essence; and so, as against previous philosophy, he can gather together its separate moments and present his philosophy as the philosophy. What other philosophers did (grasping separate moments of nature and of human life as moments of self-consciousness, and indeed of abstract self-consciousness) Hegel knows as the doing of philosophy. That is why his science is absolute.
The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object. (Positing of man = self-consciousness.)
The task is therefore to overcome the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such counts as an estranged relation of man, one that does not correspond to the human essence, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced as alien, under the determination of estrangement, therefore means superseding not only estrangement but objectivity too; that is, man counts as a non-objective, spiritual being.
The object shows itself not only as returning into the self (according to Hegel this is the one-sided conception of that movement, the one that grasps only one side). Man is posited = self. But the self is only man conceived abstractly and produced by abstraction. Man is selfish (selbstisch). His eye, his ear, etc., are selfish; each of his essential powers has in him the property of selfhood. But for that reason it is quite wrong to say: self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers. Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; human nature is not a quality of [XXIV] self-consciousness.
The self abstracted and fixed for itself is man as an abstract egoist, egoism raised in its pure abstraction to thought. (We shall return to this later.)
For Hegel the human essence, man, = self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness does not count as the expression, reflected in knowledge and thought, of the real estrangement of the human essence. Rather, the real estrangement, the estrangement that appears as real, is in its innermost hidden essence (first brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the appearance of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness. The science that comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation of the estranged objective essence therefore appears as an incorporation into self-consciousness: the man who takes possession of his essence is only self-consciousness taking possession of objective essences. The return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object.
(5) For it, the negative of the object, or the object’s superseding of itself, has positive significance; or it knows this nothingness of the object, because it alienates itself; for in this alienation it posits itself as object, or, for the sake of the inseparable unity of being-for-itself, posits the object as itself.
(6) On the other hand, this at the same time contains the other moment, that it has equally superseded this alienation and objectivity and taken them back into itself, and so is at home with itself in its otherness as such.
(8) Consciousness must likewise relate to the object according to the totality of its determinations, and must have grasped it according to each of them. This totality of its determinations makes the object in itself a spiritual being, and for consciousness it truly becomes so through the apprehension of each single one of them as the self, or through the spiritual relation to them just mentioned.
On (1). That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as vanishing is the return of the object into the self mentioned above.
On (2). The alienation of self-consciousness posits thinghood. Because man = self-consciousness, his alienated objective essence, or thinghood, = alienated self-consciousness (thinghood is what is an object for him, and only what is an essential object for him, and so his objective essence, is truly an object for him. Since it is not real man, and so not nature either (man is human nature), that is made the subject as such, but only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, thinghood can only be alienated self-consciousness), and thinghood is posited by this alienation. That a living, natural being, equipped and endowed with objective, that is, material, essential powers, should have real natural objects of its essence, and that its self-alienation should be the positing of a real objective world, but in the form of externality, and so one that does not belong to its essence and overpowers it, is quite natural. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious about it. The opposite, rather, would be mysterious. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness can by its alienation posit only thinghood, that is, only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction, and no real thing. It is [XXVI] further clear that thinghood is therefore nothing independent or essential over against self-consciousness, but a mere creature, something posited by it; and what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is only a confirmation of the act of positing, which for a moment fixes its energy as the product and in semblance gives it the role (but only for a moment) of an independent, real being.
When real, corporeal man, standing on the solid, well-rounded earth, breathing out and breathing in all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects through his alienation, it is not the positing that is the subject; it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action must therefore also be an objective one. The objective being acts objectively, and it would not act objectively if objectivity were not part of its essential determination. It creates, posits objects only because it is posited by objects, because it is by origin nature. In the act of positing, therefore, it does not fall from its “pure activity” into a creating of the object; its objective product only confirms its objective activity, its activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.
We see here how consistent naturalism or humanism differs both from idealism and from materialism, and is at the same time the truth that unites them both. We see at the same time how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history.
[Crossed through in the manuscript: Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a living natural being, he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers, an active natural being; these powers exist in him as dispositions and capacities, as drives. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited being, as animals and plants are; that is, the objects of his drives exist outside him, as objects independent of him; but these objects are objects of his need, essential objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. That man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being, of his expression of life, or that he can express his life only in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural, sensuous, and to have object, nature, sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature, sense for a third party, are one and the same.] Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is the acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essence. The sun is the object of the plant, an object indispensable to it, confirming its life, just as the plant is the object of the sun, as expression of the sun’s life-awakening power, of the sun’s objective essential power.
A being that does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and has no part in the being of nature. A being that has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being that is not itself an object for a third being has no being for its object; that is, it does not relate objectively, and its being is not objective.
Suppose a being that is neither itself an object nor has an object. Such a being would, first, be the only being; no being would exist outside it; it would exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, another reality, than the object outside me. For this third object I am therefore another reality than it, that is, its object. A being that is not the object of another being therefore presupposes that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous being, only thought, that is, only imagined, a being of abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, and so to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.
Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and, because he feels his suffering, a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power striving energetically towards its object.
[Crossed through in the manuscript: But man is not only a natural being; he is a human natural being, that is, a being that exists for itself, and so a species-being, which must confirm and activate itself as such both in its being and in its knowing. Neither, therefore, are human objects natural objects as they immediately present themselves, nor is human sense, as it immediately is, objectively, human sensuousness, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is immediately present in a form adequate to the human being.] And as everything natural must come into being, so man too has his act of coming into being, history; but for him history is a known act of coming into being, and so one that consciously supersedes itself as such. History is the true natural history of man. (To be returned to.)
Thirdly, since this positing of thinghood is itself only a semblance, an act that contradicts the essence of pure activity, it must also be superseded again, and thinghood denied.
On (3), (4), (5), (6). (3) This alienation of consciousness has not only a negative but also a positive significance, and (4) this positive significance not only for us or in itself, but for it, consciousness, itself. (5) For it, the negative of the object, or the object’s superseding of itself, has positive significance; or it knows this nothingness of the object, because it alienates itself; for in this alienation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the inseparable unity of being-for-itself, knows the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, this at the same time contains the other moment, that it has equally superseded this alienation and objectivity and taken them back into itself, and so is at home with itself in its otherness as such.
We have already seen. The appropriation of the estranged objective being, or the supersession of objectivity under the determination of estrangement (which must proceed from indifferent strangeness to real, hostile estrangement), means for Hegel at the same time, or even principally, the supersession of objectivity, since what offends self-consciousness, what is estrangement for it, is not the determinate character of the object but its objective character. The object is therefore something negative, something that supersedes itself, a nothingness. This nothingness of the object has for consciousness not only a negative but a positive significance, for that nothingness of the object is precisely the self-confirmation of its non-objectivity, of its [XXVIII] abstraction. For consciousness itself, therefore, the nothingness of the object has a positive significance because it knows this nothingness, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that this nothingness exists only through its self-alienation…
The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its only act. Something therefore comes to be for it in so far as it knows this something. Knowing is its only objective relation. It knows the nothingness of the object, that is, the object’s not being distinct from it, the non-being of the object for it, because it knows the object as its self-alienation; that is, it knows itself (knowing as object) because the object is only the semblance of an object, an illusory mist, but in its essence nothing but knowing itself, which has set itself against itself and so has set against itself a nothingness, a something that has no objectivity outside knowing; or knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself, alienates itself; that it itself only appears to itself as an object, or that what appears to it as an object is only itself.
On the other hand, says Hegel, this at the same time contains the other moment, that it has equally superseded this alienation and objectivity and taken them back into itself, and so is at home with itself in its otherness as such.
First: consciousness, self-consciousness, is at home with itself in its otherness as such. It is therefore (or, if we here abstract from Hegel’s abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man in place of self-consciousness) it is at home with itself in its otherness as such. This implies, first, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) claims to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuousness, reality, life: thought outdoing itself in thought (Feuerbach). This aspect is contained here in so far as consciousness, merely as consciousness, takes offence not at estranged objectivity but at objectivity as such.
Secondly, it implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has recognised and superseded the spiritual world (or the spiritual, universal existence of his world) as self-alienation, nevertheless confirms it again in this alienated form and presents it as his true existence, restores it, claims to be [in his] otherness as such at home with himself; so that after superseding religion, for example, after recognising religion as a product of self-alienation, he still finds himself confirmed in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: what Feuerbach calls the positing, negation and restoration of religion or theology, but which is to be conceived more generally. So reason is at home with itself in unreason as unreason. The man who has recognised that he leads an alienated life in law, politics, etc., leads his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself, with both the knowledge and the essence of the object, is therefore the true knowledge and life.
There can therefore no longer be any question of Hegel’s accommodation to religion, the state, etc., for this lie is the lie of his principle.
[XXIX] If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know confirmed in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness. My self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its own essence, I then know confirmed not in religion but rather in religion annihilated and superseded.
In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence precisely through the negation of the illusory essence, but the confirmation of the illusory essence, or of the essence estranged from itself, in its denial; or the denial of this illusory essence as an objective essence dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject.
A peculiar role is therefore played by superseding (Aufheben), in which denial and preservation, affirmation, are combined.
Thus in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for example, private right superseded = morality, morality superseded = the family, the family superseded = civil society, civil society superseded = the state, the state superseded = world history. In reality private right, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., continue to exist; only they have become moments, existences and modes of existence of man that are not valid in isolation, but dissolve and generate one another, etc.: moments of the movement.
In their real existence this mobile essence of theirs is concealed. It first comes to light, is first revealed, in thought, in philosophy; and so my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion, my true political existence my existence in the philosophy of right, my true natural existence my existence in the philosophy of nature, my true artistic existence my existence in the philosophy of art, my true human existence my philosophical existence. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state, of art. But if only the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the true existence of religion, then I am truly religious only as a philosopher of religion, and so I deny real religiosity and the really religious man. But at the same time I confirm them: partly within my own existence, or within the alien existence I set against them, for this is only their philosophical expression; partly in their own original form, for they count for me as merely apparent otherness, as allegories, as forms of their own true existence, that is, of my philosophical existence, hidden under sensuous veils.
Likewise quality superseded = quantity, quantity superseded = measure, measure superseded = essence, essence superseded = appearance, appearance superseded = actuality, actuality superseded = the concept, the concept superseded = objectivity, objectivity superseded = the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded = nature, nature superseded = subjective spirit, subjective spirit superseded = ethical objective spirit, ethical spirit superseded = art, art superseded = religion, religion superseded = absolute knowing.
On the one hand, this superseding is a superseding of something thought; so thought private property supersedes itself in the thought of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, sensuous reality, and so takes its own action for sensuous, real action too, this superseding in thought, which leaves its object standing in reality, believes it has really overcome it; and on the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, the object also counts for it in its reality as a self-confirmation of itself, of self-consciousness, of abstraction.
[XXX] From the one point of view, therefore, the existence that Hegel supersedes in philosophy is not real religion, the state, nature, but religion already as an object of knowledge, dogmatics; likewise jurisprudence, political science, natural science. From this point of view, then, he stands in opposition both to the real essence and to the immediate, unphilosophical science, or the unphilosophical concepts, of this essence. He therefore contradicts their current concepts.
We must now grasp the positive moments of Hegel’s dialectic, within the determination of estrangement.
(a) Superseding as an objective movement that takes alienation back into itself. This is the insight, expressed within estrangement, into the appropriation of the objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement; the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged determination of the objective world, through its supersession in its estranged existence. In the same way atheism, as the supersession of God, is the coming to be of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s property, the coming to be of practical humanism; or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, communism humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation (which is, however, a necessary presupposition) does positive humanism, beginning positively from itself, come into being.
But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world produced by man, of his essential powers born into objectivity; they are no poverty returning to unnatural, undeveloped simplicity. They are, rather, for the first time the real coming to be, the realisation become real for man, of his essence, and of his essence as something real.
So Hegel, in grasping the positive meaning of negation related to itself (though again in an estranged way), grasps man’s self-estrangement, alienation of essence, loss of object and loss of reality as self-gain, expression of essence, objectification, realisation. (In short, within abstraction he grasps labour as man’s act of self-generation, and man’s relation to himself as an alien being, the activation of himself as an alien being, as nascent species-consciousness and species-life.)
(b) In Hegel, however, apart from (or rather as a consequence of) the perversity already described, this act appears, first, as a merely formal one, because it is an abstract one, because the human essence itself counts only as an abstract thinking essence, as self-consciousness; and
secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the supersession of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation; or, for Hegel, that movement of self-generation, of self-objectification, as self-alienation and self-estrangement, is the absolute and so the final human expression of life, which has itself as its aim, is at rest in itself and has arrived at its essence.
This movement in its abstract [XXXI] form as dialectic therefore counts as truly human life; and because it is nevertheless an abstraction, an estrangement of human life, it counts as a divine process, but as the divine process of man: a process that man’s abstract, pure, absolute essence, distinct from him, itself goes through.
Thirdly: this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject comes into being only as the result. This result, the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the idea that knows and activates itself. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols of this hidden, unreal man and this unreal nature. Subject and predicate therefore stand to each other in a relation of absolute inversion: mystical subject-object, or subjectivity reaching over the object, the absolute subject as a process, as a subject that alienates itself and returns into itself from alienation, while at the same time taking alienation back into itself, and the subject as this process; pure, restless circling within itself.
Since Hegel posits man = self-consciousness, the estranged object, the estranged essential reality of man, is nothing but consciousness, only the thought of estrangement, its abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty supersession of that empty abstraction, the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification therefore becomes its mere abstraction, absolute negativity, an abstraction that is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activity, as activity pure and simple. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real, living act, its content too can be only a formal content, produced by abstraction from all content. They are therefore the general, abstract forms of abstraction that belong to every content and so are both indifferent to all content and, for that very reason, valid for every content: the forms of thought, the logical categories, torn away from real spirit and real nature. (We shall develop the logical content of absolute negativity further on.)
The positive thing Hegel has achieved here, in his speculative logic, is that the determinate concepts, the universal fixed forms of thought, in their independence of nature and spirit, are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human essence, and so also of human thought; and that Hegel has therefore presented them and gathered them together as moments of the process of abstraction. For example, being superseded is essence, essence superseded the concept, the concept superseded… the absolute idea. But what, then, is the absolute idea? It supersedes itself again, unless it wants to go through the whole act of abstraction again from the beginning and content itself with being a totality of abstractions, or abstraction comprehending itself. But abstraction that comprehends itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must give itself, abstraction, up, and so it arrives at a being that is its very opposite, at nature. The whole Logic is therefore the proof that abstract thought is nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, that only nature is something.
“considered in its unity with itself, is intuition” (Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, third edition, p. 222 [§ 244]), which (loc. cit.) “in the absolute truth of itself resolves to release freely out of itself, as nature, the moment of its particularity or of first determination and otherness, the immediate idea, as its reflection” (loc. cit.);
this whole idea, which behaves in so strange and baroque a fashion and has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is nothing whatever but abstraction, that is, the abstract thinker: abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened about its truth, resolves under various conditions (false and themselves still abstract) to give itself up and to put its otherness, the particular, the determinate, in place of its being-at-home-with-itself, its nothingness, its universality and its indeterminateness; to release freely out of itself nature, which it concealed within itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-thing; that is, to abandon abstraction and for once take a look at nature free of it. The abstract idea that directly becomes intuition is nothing whatever but abstract thought that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. This whole transition from logic to the philosophy of nature is nothing but the transition, so hard for the abstract thinker to accomplish and therefore so adventurously described by him, from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling that drives the philosopher from abstract thought to intuition is boredom, the longing for a content.
(Man estranged from himself is also a thinker estranged from his essence, that is, from his natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed spirits dwelling outside nature and man. In his Logic Hegel has locked up all these fixed spirits together, and has conceived each of them first as negation, that is, as alienation of human thought, then as negation of the negation, that is, as supersession of this alienation, as real expression of human thought. But since this negation of the negation is itself still caught in estrangement, it is partly the restoration of these fixed spirits in their estrangement, partly a halt at the last act, self-relation within alienation, as the true existence of these fixed spirits; and partly, in so far as this abstraction comprehends itself and feels an infinite boredom with itself, the abandonment of abstract thought, of thought moving only in thought, without eyes, without teeth, without ears, without everything, appears in Hegel as the resolve to recognise nature as essence and to take up intuition.)
[XXXIII] But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, fixed in separation from man, is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has resolved on intuition intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in a form hidden and mysterious even to himself, as absolute idea, as thought-thing, so in releasing it from himself he has in truth released only this abstract nature, only the thought-thing of nature, though now with the significance that it is the otherness of thought, that it is real, intuited nature distinct from abstract thought. Or, to speak in human language, the abstract thinker learns in his intuition of nature that the beings he thought he was creating out of nothing, out of pure abstraction, in the divine dialectic, as pure products of the labour of thought weaving within itself and never looking out into reality, are nothing but abstractions from determinations of nature. The whole of nature therefore only repeats to him the logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form. He analyses nature and these abstractions again. His intuition of nature is therefore only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature, the process of generating his abstraction, consciously repeated by him. Thus, for example, time = negativity relating itself to itself (p. 238, loc. cit.). To becoming superseded as existence there corresponds, in natural form, motion superseded as matter. Light is, in natural form, reflection into itself. The body as moon and comet is the natural form of the opposition which according to the Logic is on the one hand the positive resting on itself and on the other the negative resting on itself. The earth is the natural form of the logical ground, as the negative unity of the opposition, etc.
Nature as nature, that is, in so far as it is still sensuously distinct from that secret sense hidden within it, nature separated and distinct from these abstractions, is nothing, a nothing proving itself to be nothing; it is senseless, or has only the sense of an externality that must be superseded.
“The finite-teleological standpoint contains the correct presupposition that nature does not contain the absolute end within itself.” P. 225 [§ 245].
“Nature has shown itself to be the idea in the form of otherness. Since the idea is thus the negative of itself, or external to itself, nature is not external merely relatively, in relation to this idea, but externality constitutes the determination in which it is as nature.” P. 227 [§ 247].
Externality is not to be understood here as sensuousness that expresses itself and is open to the light and to sensuous man. Externality is to be taken here in the sense of alienation, of a lack, a defect, that ought not to be. For the true is still the idea. Nature is only the form of its otherness. And since abstract thought is the essence, what is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognises at the same time that sensuousness is the essence of nature, externality as against thought weaving within itself. But at the same time he expresses this opposition in such a way that this externality of nature is its opposition to thought, its deficiency, that in so far as it is distinct from abstraction it is a deficient being. [XXXIV] A being that is deficient not only for me, in my eyes, but in itself, has something outside itself that it lacks. That is, its essence is something other than itself. For the abstract thinker, therefore, nature must supersede itself, because he has already posited it as a being potentially superseded.
“For us, spirit has nature as its presupposition, of which it is the truth and therefore the absolutely first. In this truth nature has vanished, and spirit has shown itself to be the idea that has reached its being-for-itself, whose object as well as its subject is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, because in nature the concept has its complete external objectivity, but this its alienation has been superseded, and in it the concept has become identical with itself. It is this identity, therefore, only as a return from nature.” P. 392 [§ 381]. “Revelation, which as the abstract idea is immediate transition, the becoming of nature, is, as the revelation of spirit, which is free, the positing of nature as its world; a positing that, as reflection, is at the same time the presupposing of the world as independent nature. Revelation in the concept is the creation of nature as spirit’s own being, in which it gives itself the affirmation and truth of its freedom.” “The absolute is spirit: this is the highest definition of the absolute.” [P. 393, § 384.] [XXXIV]