Alienation

Hegel and Feuerbach

The concept is also found earlier in the writings of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831). In writings around 1805, Hegel made some use of a conception of alienation very similar to that found in Marx which remained unpublished in Marx's lifetime. In Hegel's mature writings, notably The Phenomenology of Mind (alternatively, Phenomenology of Spirit) and his Philosophy of History, he sees the history of the world as the development of Spirit (Geist). In each age the Spirit is to be found in each level of society: civil society, (commerce), the state, art, religion, and philosophy. The Spirit is more explicit in the state than in civil society, in art than in the state, and in religion than in art; it is most explicit in philosophy. Thus, as Hegel was living in Prussia, which he argued was the most advanced state in history, Hegel's philosophy is the culmination of human history, at least up to the time at which he was writing.

For Hegel, history is the gradual reconciliation of Spirit with the world, its opposite, in a mediated fashion, and hence its return from self-alienation. The development of Spirit thus takes place in alienation from itself. Its development involves the development of Reason, which gradually comes to recognize itself in its opposite. For Hegel, human history is basically a process of intellectual labor.

Hegel's ideas came to dominate German philosophy in the 1830s. His followers divided between right Hegelians, who accepted Hegel's own view that the Prussian state was the culmination of human history, and left Hegelians, who thought that human history needed to pass through a further stage, which involved the incorporation of religion into the state. This would involve a recognition that religion does not involve a transcendent God but is a human product.

The immediate starting point of Marx's ideas about alienation is the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Feuerbach was basically a left Hegelian but departed radically from other left Hegelians because he argued that there was no role for abstraction. Philosophy should be a direct copy of nature. He thought that Hegel's account of history and his philosophy were true, but they needed to be inverted, meaning that the subject and predicate would be reversed—or, more specifically, that men would be seen as developing religion and philosophy in parallel with their own style of life. Once these are inverted, men will worship collective humanity rather than transcendent gods. Feuerbach avowed himself a communist, meaning that he upheld the ideal of a community based on love.

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