So powerful was modern German criticism s preoccupation with the past so completely was its development entangled with the subject-matter that here prevailed a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, together with a complete lack of awareness about the apparently formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain within the confines of the Hegelian logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of abstract nature by the self-consciousness of abstract man), and even in Das entdeckte Christenthum. Thus in Das entdeckte Christenthum, for example, you get: Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the Hegelian approach, but on the contrary repeat it word for word. ||XII| How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic during the act of criticism (Bauer, the Synoptiker), and how little this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism, is proved by Bauer when, in his Die gute Sache der Freiheit, he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe What about logic now? by referring him to future critics. But even now now that Feuerbach both in his Thesen in the Anekdota and, in detail, in the Philosophie der Zukunft has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this, has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism, in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world and itself (the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the category of the masses ) and dissolved all dogmatic antitheses into the single dogmatic antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world the antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the rabble ; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own excellence against the dullness of the masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical Last Judgment in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching when the whole of decadent humanity will assemble before it and be sorted by it into groups, each particular mob receiving its testimonium paupertatis; now that it has made known in print its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods even now, after all these delightful antics of idealism (i.e., of Young Hegelianism) expiring in the guise of criticism even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young Hegelianism the Hegelian dialectic and even had nothing to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. This shows a completely uncritical attitude to itself. Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude [of the others]. Feuerbach s great achievement is: Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows: Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself. The positive position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence not an acknowledged ||XIII| position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of sense-certainty based on itself. [Feuerbach also defines the negation of the negation, the definite concept, as thinking surpassing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be directly awareness, nature, reality. Note by Marx ] But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has only found 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 the act of creation, the history of the origin of man. We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and the difference between this process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, in contrast to the same process in Feuerbach s Wesen des Christenthums, or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still uncritical process. Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel s Ph nomenologie, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy. A. Self-consciousness. B. Mind. C. Religion. Natural religion; religion of art; revealed religion. D. Absolute knowledge. Hegel s Encyklop die, beginning as it does with logic, with pure speculative thought, and ending with absolute knowledge with the self-conscious, self-comprehending philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement i.e., comprehending itself abstractly. Logic mind s coin of the realm, the speculative or mental value of man and nature its essence which has grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence unreal is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking. Then: The externality of this abstract thinking ... nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as abstract thought, but as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin the thinking which as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and affirms itself, as absolute knowledge and hence absolute, i.e., abstract, mind, thus receiving its conscious embodiment in the mode of existence corresponding to it. For its real mode of existence is abstraction. There is a double error in Hegel. The first emerges most clearly in the Ph nomenologie, the birth-place of the Hegelian philosophy. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts ... They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher who is himself an abstract form of estranged man takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation process [Ent u erungsgeschichte] and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) ||XVII| thought of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, [Entfremdung] which therefore forms the real interest of the transcendence [Aufhebung] of this alienation [Ent u erung], is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject that is to say, it is the opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness within thought itself. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself [selbst sich vergegenst ndlicht] in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the estrangement [Entfremdung] and the thing to be superseded [aufzuhebende]. ||XVIII| The appropriation of man s essential powers, which have become objects indeed, alien objects is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought, i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movements of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the genuine criticism contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Ph nomenologie as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel s later works that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man for example, the realisation that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness, that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man s essential powers put to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world this appropriation or the insight into this process appears in Hegel therefore in this form, that sense, religion, state power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, theological, speculative mind. The human character of nature and of the nature created by history man s products appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind thought-entities. The Ph nomenologie is, therefore, a hidden, mystifying and still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man s estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The unhappy consciousness , the honest consciousness , the struggle of the noble and base consciousness , etc., etc. these separate sections contain, but still in an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in itself abstract consciousness (the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness with consciousness absolute knowledge the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but proceeding now only within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result. |XVIII|| ||XXIII|  The outstanding achievement of Hegel s Ph nomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man true, because real man as the outcome of man s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement. We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel s one-sidedness and limitations as they are displayed in the final chapter of the Ph nomenologie, Absolute Knowledge a chapter which contains the condensed spirit of the Ph nomenologie, the relationship of the Ph nomenologie to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel s consciousness concerning both and their relationship to one another. Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel s standpoint is that of modern political economy.  He grasps labour as the essence of man as man s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy the alienation of man who knows himself, or alienated science thinking itself - Hegel grasps as its essence; and in contradistinction to previous philosophy he is therefore able to combine its separate aspects, and to present his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did that they grasped separate phases of nature and of abstract self-consciousness, namely, of human life as phases of self-consciousness is known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute. Let us now turn to our subject. Absolute Knowledge . The last chapter of the Ph nomenologie . 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. (Positing of man = self-consciousness). The issue, therefore, is to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced within the orbit of estrangement as something alien, therefore denotes not only the annulment of estrangement, but of objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being. The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in the following way: The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self this is according to Hegel the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side. Man is equated with self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man man created by abstraction. Man is selfish. His eye, his ear, etc., are selfish. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say on that account self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers . Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; it is not human nature that is a quality of ||XXIV| self-consciousness. The self-abstracted entity, fixed for itself, is man as abstract egoist egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.) For Hegel the human being man equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human being is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought of the real estrangement of the human being. Instead, the actual estrangement that which appears real is according to its innermost, hidden nature (which is only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation of the estranged objective essence appears therefore, as incorporation into self-consciousness: The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object. Expressed in all its aspects, the surmounting of the object of consciousness means: Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history. <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 he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.> 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 an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant an indispensable object to it, confirming its life just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun s objective essential power. A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective. ||XXVII| A non-objective being is a non-being. Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being 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 thus a different reality than itself; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous thing a product of mere thought (i.e., of mere imagination) an abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, 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 that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object. <But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is as it is objectively human sensibility, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate to the human being.> And as everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin history which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of origin it is a conscious self-transcending act of origin. History is the true natural history of man (on which more later). As we have already seen, the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement (which has to advance from indifferent strangeness to real, antagonistic estrangement), means likewise or even primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something negative, self-annulling a nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but a positive meaning for consciousness, since this nullity of the object is precisely the self-confirmation of the non-objectivity, of the ||XXVIII| abstraction of itself. For consciousness itself the nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its own self-alienation.... The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its sole act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness insofar as the latter knows this something. Knowing is its sole objective relation. It ,consciousness, then, knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it) because it knows the object as its self-alienation; that is, it knows itself knows knowing as object because the object is only the semblance of an object, a piece of mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which has confronted itself with itself and hence has confronted itself with a nullity a something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself that it only externalises itself; that it itself only appears to itself as an object or that that which appears to it as an object is only itself. On the other hand, says Hegel, there is here at the same time this other moment, that consciousness has just as much annulled and reabsorbed this externalisation and objectivity, being thus at home in its other-being as such. In this discussion all the illusions of speculation are brought together. There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel s part vis- -vis religion, the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle. ||XXIX| If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion. In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject. A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together. Thus, for example, in Hegel s philosophy of law, civil law superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals the state, the state superseded equals world history. In the actual world civil law, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments states of the existence and being of man which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion. In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It appears and is made manifest only in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of law; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion then, too, it is only as a philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment and the really religious man. But at the same time I assert them, in part within my own existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them for this is only their philosophic expression and in part I assert them in their distinct original shape, since for me they represent merely the apparent other-being, allegories, forms of their own true existence (i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises. In just the same way, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equals measure, measure superseded equals essence, essence superseded equals appearance, appearance superseded equals actuality, actuality superseded equals the concept, the concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equals the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature superseded equals subjective mind, subjective mind superseded equals ethical objective mind, ethical mind superseded equals art, art superseded equals religion, religion superseded equals absolute knowledge. On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of a conceptual entity; thus, private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality and therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action this superseding in thought, which leaves its object in existence in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself of self-consciousness, of abstraction. ||XXX| From the one point of view the entity which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already as an object of knowledge, i.e., dogmatics; the same with jurisprudence, political science and natural science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions. [The conventional conception of theology, jurisprudence, political science, natural science, etc. - Ed.] On the other hand, the religious, etc., man can find in Hegel his final confirmation. It is now time to formulate the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm of estrangement. But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world created by man of man s essential powers born to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real emergence, the actual realisation for man of man s essence and of his essence as something real. Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (although again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man s self-estrangement, the alienation of man s essence, man s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, manifestation of his nature, objectification and realisation. <In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man s act of self-genesis conceives man s relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.> This movement, in its abstract ||XXXI| form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is nevertheless an abstraction an estrangement of human life it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by man s abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from himself. Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object the estranged essential reality of man is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely estrangement s abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of the 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 is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity an abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as an independent activity as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content produced by abstraction from all content. As a result therefore one gets general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.) (The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental forms dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his logic, interpreting each of them first as negation that is, as an alienation of human thought and then as negation of the negation that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as this still takes place within the confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping at the last act the act of self-reference in alienation as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms; * Nature as nature that is to say, insofar as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions is nothing a nothing proving itself to be nothing is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled. Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction. Externality here is not to be understood as the world of sense which manifests itself and is accessible to the light, to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense of alienation, of a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the idea. Nature is only the form of the idea s other-being. And since abstract thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognises at the same time that sensuousness externality in contrast to thought shuttling back and forth within itself is the essence of nature. But he expresses this contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something defective. ||XXXIV| An entity which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself intrinsically has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its essence is different from it itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in General, Marx, 1844