XXX

[XXX.2.]
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.)

(b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the reversal already described, this act appears in Hegel: First as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human being itself is taken to be only an abstract, thinking being, conceived merely as self-consciousness. And,

Secondly, because the exposition is formal and abstract, the supersession of the alienation becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or for Hegel this movement of self-genesis and self-objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life - with itself as its aim, at peace with itself, and in unity with its essence.

This movement, in its abstract
[XXXI.2.]

[XXX.1.]
--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, lie 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.

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.

(a) Supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being. In the same way atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation--which is itself, however, a necessary premise--does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.

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)
[XXXI.1.]



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