Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Reduction of Real Alienation
The Reduction of Real Alienation to Abstract Thought
The first emergence of this critique is most clearly seen in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which serves as the cradle of Hegelian philosophy. When Hegel views entities such as wealth, state power, and so forth, as alienated essences for human beings, this occurs only in a speculative manner. These entities are treated as ideal, representing merely a philosophical estrangement of the pure, or abstract, idea. All movement in this system begins and ends with Absolute Knowledge.
Abstract thinking is precisely where these real-world objects are missed. This abstract thought confronts its own claim to reality. The philosopher (an abstract form of alienated man) stands in for the alienated world. The entire history of alienation and any revocation of this alienation is not the history of real human activity, but the history of the production of abstract thought—that is, the history of logical speculation.
The True Interest of Estrangement
The estrangement that constitutes the true interest of this alienation, and the suppression of this alienation, is the opposition between:
- In-itself and For-itself;
- Consciousness and Self-awareness;
- Object and Subject.
This is, fundamentally, the opposition within thought itself: the opposition between abstract thought and sensuous reality. All other oppositions and movements are merely the appearance, the wrapper, or the esoteric form of these competitions, which are the only interesting meaning of the secular opposition. What essentially occurs in the process of estrangement, and what needs to be overcome, is not the fact that human beings are objectified in human form, but rather that this objectification is conceived in opposition to abstract thought.
Appropriation and the Spiritual Essence
The appropriation of human essential forces, which have been converted into a transferred object, is presented in two ways:
1. Appropriation in Pure Thought
First, the appropriation takes place only in consciousness, in pure thought—that is, in abstraction. This is the appropriation of objects as thoughts and the movements of thought about these objects. In the Phenomenology (despite its seemingly negative and critical appearance, and despite the real criticism contained within it, which often anticipates much later development), there lies dormant a seed, a present power, a mystery: the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works, which seek to solve and restore existing philosophical empiricism.
2. The Claim of the Objective World
Secondly, the claim of the objective world for man (e.g., knowledge of sensuous consciousness is not an abstract sensuous consciousness, but a sensuous awareness of human knowledge). The understanding of this process in Hegel is presented such that sensitivity, religion, state power, and so forth, are spiritual essences, as only the spirit is the true essence of man. The true form of the mind is the thinking mind: the logical, speculative spirit.
The Phenomenology as Hidden Critique
The humanity of nature and of nature produced by the history of man’s products is evident because they are products of the abstract mind and, therefore, to that extent, spiritual moments or designed essences. The Phenomenology is a critique that is hidden, obscure even to itself, and mystifying. However, in retaining the estrangement of man (though man appears only in the form of the spirit), all the elements of criticism are concealed within it, often prepared and processed in a way that exceeds the Hegelian standpoint.
Sections such as the “unhappy consciousness,” the “honest consciousness,” and the struggle of the “noble consciousness and vile consciousness” contain, in an estranged form, the critical elements of whole areas like religion, the State, and civil society. Just as the essence, the object, appears as the essence of thought, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness. The object appears only as abstract consciousness, and man only as self-consciousness.
The various forms of alienation that emerge are, therefore, only different forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Since abstract consciousness itself (the object conceived as such) is simply a moment of differentiation of the self, and also arises as a result of the movement of self-identity with consciousness, the result—Absolute Knowledge—is the dialectic of pure thought, moving not outward, but only within itself.