Last time, I took a detour into the construction of the Molitor edition of Marx’s works, which the evidence says Foucault was reading in the 1950s when he took extensive notes on Marx. A question that came out of that is whether/how Marx distinguishes Entausserung (“alienation”) and Entfremdung (“estrangement”). It seems to me that he clearly does, at least some of the time when he’s talking about Hegel. In what follows, I want to confine my discussion to the end of the 1844 Manuscripts and the discussion of Hegel, and schematize what I take Marx’s argument on the subject to be.
I take it that the section on alienated labor does an outstanding job getting at the concepts if not the terminology involved: objectification in labor becomes estranged when you have a lousy job and put your personality into a job and get minimum wage and a headache back. But that part wasn’t in the Landshut and Mayer edition of the Manuscripts, which meant it wasn’t in the Molitor edition Foucault was using, which is how I found myself needing to figure out the alienation/estrangement distinction in the part of the manuscripts that was included. Hence the Phenomenology.
Writing about the Phenomenology, Marx says:
“Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern political economy. He sees labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation [Entäusserung; Molitor: extériorisation] or as an alienated man [entäusserter Mensch; Molitor: homme extériorisé]]” (Early Writings, 386; MEW Ergänzungsband, 574; Molitor VI, 70; I’m going to stop with the Molitor references at this point).
The rest of the paragraph talks about Hegel’s process of exteriorization into the world by spirit and coming to fulfillment through this process. In other words, this is good alienation, and Marx consistently follows Hegel in using Entausserung (for those who read last week: Molitor consistently translates as extériorisation).
To schematize, here is what I think Marx is doing here. I’ll use the old-fashioned anthropological “man” here, since that’s what he does, and he’s embedded in a discourse that does so too.
1. Man as a natural, Species Being
Man is a natural, species being. As a natural being, this puts people in relation to objects of need like food, and means that “he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects [er nur an wirklichen, sinnlichen Gegenständen sein Leben äußern kann]” (Early Writings, 390; MEW 578). Note the precision: expressing life here is the same root as alienating. This is a baseline necessity and part of the determination of people as natural entities: “a being which does not have its nature outside itself [außer sich] is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature” (ibid.). I’ll get back to the emphasis on nature in a minute. The second part of that definition is “species being,” which here means that “man is not only a natural being he is a human natural being; i.e. he is a being for himself and hence a species-being [Gattungswesen], as which he must confirm and realize himself both in his being and in his knowing” (EW 391; MEW 578).
In other words, people have self-consciousness and so have to not just have things in the world, they have to know that they have them; they have to have some sort of conscious relationship to appropriation. That is, “neither objective nor subjective nature is immediately present in a form adequate to the human being.” Marx makes a connection to history at this point:
“And as everything natural must come into being [entstehen muß: must originate], so man also has his process of origin [Entstehungsakt] in history. But for him history is a conscious process [Entstehungsakt], and hence one which consciously supersedes itself. History is the true natural history of man [des Menschen]” (EW 391; MEW 579).
So far so good. Humans are natural creatures who are deeply embedded in nature, and self-consciousness is what defines the human species, but is itself also a natural process.
2. Hegel treats nature as pure exteriority
Hegel, on the other hand, treats nature as exteriority, and instead puts everything in self-consciousness or the absolute. As a result, the entire description is one of humanity as estranged. That is, the dialectical process occurs but remains essentially estranged. This is most clear in Marx’s discussion of Hegel’s Logic. For example:
“This movement [of the absolute] in its abstract form as dialectic is therefore regarded as truly human life. And since it is still an abstraction, an estrangement of human life, it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man. It is man’s abstract, pure, absolute being (as distinct from himself), which itself passes through this process” (EW 396; MEW 584).
The subject of this process is “God, absolute spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea.” On the other hand, “real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols of this hidden [verborgnen], unreal man and this unreal nature” (ibid.).
Marx thinks Hegel’s endeavor is self-refuting, if only you take a clear-eyed look at it. This is evident in the move to nature:
“The abstraction which comprehends itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the abstraction, and so arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. Hence the whole of the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself and that only nature is something” (EW 397; MEW 585).
Nature becomes a radical outside, apprehended only via intuition.
3. Objectivity becomes the problem
Evidence that this is Hegel’s move is that objectivity itself becomes the thing to be overcome. The estrangement is because the characterization is abstract, and from the point of view of abstracted self-consciousness, objectivity is a problem. Thus, overcoming alienation in self-consciousness is overcoming the objectivity of what self-consciousness posits. With reference to the chapter on absolute knowledge, Marx writes that “the main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object.” He adds parenthetically: “the positing of man = self-consciousness”)” (Early Writings, 386; MEW 575).
“It is therefore a question of surmounting the object of consciousness. Objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit; Molitor: matérialité] as such is seen as an estranged [entfremdetes; Molitor: aliéné] relationship which does not correspond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being” (Early Writings, 386-7; Molitor 71-2; MEW 575).
Here, in other words, Marx seems to be respecting the conceptual distinction between going out into the world and gaining from the experience versus losing from the experience. The cause of this problem turns out to be abstraction, as I’ll indicate next.
4. The abstraction problem
Because real people are both objective and require objects, overcoming objectivity resolves/sublimates the alienation in Hegel while simultaneously making permanent the estrangement. the residual estrangement is because of abstraction.
We see this in a difficult paragraph that Marx calls a recapitulation. I’ll quote it at length:
“The appropriation of estranged objective being or the supersession [Aufhebung] of objectivity in the form of estrangement – which must proceed from indifferent otherness to real, hostile estrangement – principally means for Hegel the supersession of objectivity, since is not the particular character of the object but its objective character which constitutes the offence and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned. The object is therefore a negative thing, a self-superseding thing, a nullity [ein Negatives, ein sich Selbst Aufhebendes, eine Nichtigkeit]. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but also a positive significance for consciousness, for it is precisely the self-confirmation of its non-objectivity and abstraction. For consciousness itself the nullity of the object therefore has a positive significance because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation [daß es diese Nichtigkeit, das gegenständliche Wesen, als seine Selbstentäußerung weiß]; because it knows that this nullity exists only as a result of its own self-alienation” (Early Writings, 391-2; MEW 579-80).
As the phrase set off in dashes indicates, estrangement isn’t a given or necessary. It is rather the end result of a process in which something simply different or antagonistic becomes adverse or oppositional (“hostile”). To get over this state of alienation-become-hostile, what has to be aufgehoben is not anything particular about the object (it’s being angry, or its being blue, or its being a shift manager at McDonalds) – it is the fact that it is an object, that it is something standing external to the subject (Gegenstand, quite literally). Self-consciousness objects to the presence of something outside itself. So when this something is actually an abstraction, or rather when it knows it to be an abstraction (when self-consciousness turns it into non-thing, or apprehends it as a non-thing) it knows that this object isn’t anything real; it knows that the object it encounters is merely the product of its own process of externalization [daß es weiß, daß sie nur ist durch seine Selbstentäußerung …. : literally, “that it knows that it only is through its self-alienation…”]. Knowing that the object is only an abstraction thus simultaneously guarantees a successful Aufhebung from the point of view of abstracted self-consciousness, and guarantees the estrangement of the process from any actually existing, material consciousness.
Phew! What looked like a hostile object in the world is really only my own process of going out in the world and making it in its own image. If only I wasn’t an actual, natural person…
5. The Logic
Finally, then, with regard to the Logic, we see the final nesting of the whole thing in estrangement. Hegel has things basically upside down; an estranged person is also an estranged thinker, because as a thinker a person is natural and embodied. The Logic performs a conjuring trick to obscure the problem by describing the process in terms of thought itself. But the entire thought process occurs in a context of estrangement, and so the system is ultimately self-referential and estranged from reality. Marx says:
“the man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence, i.e. from his natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed phantoms existing outside nature and man. In his Logic, Hegel has locked up all these phantoms, conceiving each of them firstly as negation, i.e. as alienation of human thought, and secondly as negation of the negation, i.e. as supersession of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But since this negation of the negation is itself still trapped in estrangement, what this amounts to is in part the restoration of these fixed phantoms in their estrangement and in part a failure to move beyond the final stage, the stage of self-reference in alienation, which is the true existence of these phantoms” (Early Writings, 398; MEW 586).
Then his footnote concludes: “it is already clear that if man is not human [literally: if man is not, i.e., does not exist as such], then the expression of his essential nature cannot be human, and therefore that thought itself could not be conceived as an expression of man’s being, of man as a human and natural subject, with eyes, ears, etc., living in society, in the world and in nature wenn der Mensch nicht ist, auch seine Wesensäußerung nicht menschlich sein kann, also auch das Denken nicht als Wesensäußerung des Menschen als eines menschlichen und natürlichen mit Augen, Ohren etc. in der Gesellschaft und Welt und Natur lebenden Subjekts gefaßt werden konnte]” (398 n14; MEW 586)
The Hegelian process of alienation is never the activity of an embodied subject. It’s an abstract process which remains estranged from natural embodiment. Hence natural embodiment appears to it as an objectivity to be overcome and ultimately as a nothing; from the point of view of the embodied subject, the Hegelian process of alienation is hostile (and not merely indifferent) to that subject insofar as they are embodied.
At any rate, all of this seems to be the gist of Marx’s reading here in the Hegel section of the 1844 Manuscripts.
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