XIII

[XIII.2.]
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 Phanomenologie, 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 and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) [See the note by Marx linking to this page on page XVII column 2] [XVII.2.]
[XIV.2.]

[XIII.1.]
position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of sense-certainty based on itself.

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 o/ creation, the history of the origin of man.

We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and it 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 Phanomenologie, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy.

Phenomenology.

A. Self-consciousness.

I Consciousness. (a) Certainty at the level of sense-experience; or the "this" and "meaning". (b) Perception, or the thing with its properties, and deception. (c) Force and understanding, appearance and the supersensible world.

II Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of self. (a) Independence and dependence of self-consciousness; lordship and bondage. (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.

III. Reason. Reason's certainty and reason's truth. (a) Observation as a process of reason. Observation of nature and of self-consciousness. (b) Realisation of rational self-consciousness through its own activity. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the heart and the insanity of self-conceit. Virtue and the course of the world. (c) The individuality which is real in and for itself. The spiritual animal kingdom and the deception or the real fact. Reason as lawgiver. Reason which tests laws.

B. Mind.

I. True mind; ethics. II. Mind in self-estrangement, culture. III. Mind certain of itself, morality.

C. Religion. Natural religion; religion of art; revealed religion.

D. Absolute Knowledge.

Hegel's Enzyklopadie, 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.
[XIV.1.]