Alienation, Human Nature, and Parallels between Marx and Hegel Methods

Michael Vossen

Marx takes himself to be presenting a fundamentally different view than Hegel. . To investigate how his view is different, I will analyze the concept of alienation put forth in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in an attempt to discover which assumptions and methods of Marx differ him from Hegel. In doing so, I will first examine the nature of alienation claims in general, and then show how Marx’s account fits the model. In doing so, I hope to clarify the concept of human nature used by Marx in his claim. Then, I will examine how his concept apparently differs from that of Hegel. By doing so, I’ll try to show that Marx’s account of alienation relies on a concept of human nature that tries to eliminate the abstract elements of Hegel’s account through a dismissal of spiritual and abstract entities, seemingly based on Marx’s materialism. This difference between accounts seems to be premised on reading Hegel as “mysteriously” positing an abstract man. Finally, this analysis will show that depending on how Marx arrives his concept of human nature, he is either actually not differing much from Hegel, or differing from Hegel in a way that is problematic for his account of alienated labor.

Since both Marx and Hegel claim that a subject can be alienated, an analysis of alienation claims in general will help identify the type of assumptions needed to make such claims, and thus provide a basis to compare the assumptions made by Marx and Hegel. Therefore, we should ask what makes alienation claims possible? There are two ways a subject is said to be alienated. The first way is when a subject feels alienated, the second when a subject is alienated. Both follow similar logic, except that the first is a subjective judgment made by the subject, and the second is an objective fact about the subject. In either case, in making an alienation claim there is a set of activities or states that constitutes for a subject being what it is. If the subject is prevented from partaking in this set, the subject is said to be alienated, and the thing that prevents him from partaking in the set is described as alienating. For instance, if in part being a human consists in being part of a group, then a human that is not part of a group due to, say a rule or custom is said to be alienated and that rule or custom is alienating. A subject can be alienated without feeling alienated if they don’t recognize that they are being prevented from partaking in the set, or if they don’t think the action or state is part of the set and are mistaken. A subject can also feel alienated without being alienated if they think that they are prevented from partaking in a part of the set that isn’t actually part of the set.

If this analysis of alienation is correct, then it provides insight about the assumptions needed to make an alienation claim. In order to say that a subject can objectively be alienated, a philosopher will have to claim that a certain set of actions or states constitutes subject hood for that subject. Marx seems to be using the second concept of alienation, for he holds that a person can be alienated without feeling alienated, and such a statement can only be made if an objective set exists and the person does not recognize it. Furthermore, Marx’s account of the alienation of labor also suggests he is using the second notion. Marx claims that the labor is alienating because “... labor is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being...”1By this statement, Marx means that labor, at least the labor of capitalist societies, does not belong to the set of activities that constitute being human. This seems to be because the worker puts part of himself into the objects he works on, and must sell those objects for substances. This separates man from part of himself. Further, interacting with the objects of one’s labor seems to be necessary for consciousness for Marx, and consciousness is the action that separates man from animals; “Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him.”2 This explains why Marx thinks that while “... eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions.”, the type of labor in capitalist society “separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animals."3The activities listed are a part of the set of human actions, yet they leave out conscious life-activity, which is the particularly human activity. Conscious life-activity is missing from the set because the object’s of labor which contain part of the laborer do not belong to the laborer, and thus they can’t look be conscious of themselves since they can’t use the objects in the right way. Thus, the laborer only can participate in the set of actions that makes a thing an animal, so the laborer is in a sense an animal. Note that like for Hegel, consciousness is required to truly be free, so alienated laborers are also not free.

It may be thought that Marx is using the first notion of alienation, since he does emphasize that the worker will feel a certain way when alienated, and this feeling may constitute alienation for the worker. But if this is the case, then the alienation is purely a subjective judgment on the part of the worker, and the claim that labor, especially the forced labor of a capitalist system, is alienating does not carry the weight needed to criticize the system which produces such labor. If this alienation is only a subjective judgment made by the worker and there is no objective set of human actions, then changing the worker’s judgment, most likely through presenting him a view of human existence that sees his actions as falling within the set of human actions, can solve the problem of alienated labor. Marx recognizes this possibility, for he criticizes the capitalist for “...counting the lowest possible level of life (existence) as the standard, indeed as the general standard-general because it is applicable to the mass of men.”4 It is hard to see how this is a criticism unless there is some objective standard of life which is higher than that which the capitalist tricks the worker into believing is true. If there is no such standard, then it is hard to see why one subjective judgment is better than another, and thus why the capitalist’s judgment is too low.

Marx sees himself as differing from Hegel in that his concept of the set of human actions brings the idea of human species-the set of human actions- “from the heaven of abstraction to the real of earth.” 5 In characterizing abstraction as unreal and mysterious, Marx may be criticizing Hegel for how he arrives at his concept human nature. Marx often characterizes Hegel’s arguments as mysterious and abstract. One way that Hegel’s arguments seem mysterious is because they rely on premises about human nature that are posited without arguments. For example, Hegel states that there are certain feminine and masculine characteristics, yet does not derive these inductively from examples. In this way, Hegel’s arguments aren’t connected to facts about real subject.

This criticism is interesting in that it relates to a general problem with claiming that a certain set of activities constitutes a things nature: how does one determine which activities are part of the set? There are two general ways one might arrive at the set. The first is through statistical regularity and the second is through normative regularity.(see Meg) Statistical regularity determines the activities that constitute being a thing by looking at the average activities done by a population of those things. For example, given a population of men, if a high enough percentage eat, drink, procreate, read, jog, fence, etc then these activities in part constitute being human. Normative regularity is simply the pattern of actions preformed by a thing, that in part constitute its nature. Normative regularity is not derived from anything and is posited as true based on intuition, and it does not rely on facts about the world. While this may make the origin of sets derived by normative regularity seem abstract and mysterious, this lack of influence from statistical facts allows for sets derived by normative regularity to make claims that sets derived by statistical regularity can’t. Sets derived by normative regularity can say that an action is necessary for being a thing even when most or all things in the group do not do the action. For example, if most humans in the world were not self-conscious, a proponent of statistical regularity would have to conclude that self-consciousness is not an action required for being human, since the average human is not conscious. Whereas a proponent of normative regularity can hold that self-consciousness is required for being human even if most humans are not self-conscious. The proponent of normative regularity can then diagnose the non self-conscious humans as defective.

If Marx’s analysis of Hegel is correct, then Hegel seem to be using normative regularity to come to his set of human actions. If Marx is critical of the way Hegel arrives at his set, then Marx probably will try not to use the same method. It is unclear what method Marx uses, since Marx wants to make objective claims about worker’s alienation. If Marx differs from Hegel in method by abstracting from facts to human nature, then what human nature is is relative to the facts about humans. While this seems to fit with Marx’s philosophy well, as actually changing the world would then change facts about human nature, it seems problematic to his account of alienated labor, since Marx probably would say that even if most humans did not perform conscious life activity, conscious life activity would still be required for being human. Since Marx says that workers become animals when deprived of the ability to perform conscious life activity, he may simply not count their activity as human activity, but this would mean that the workers literally cease to be human, whereas it seems more plausible to say that the workers are still humans, simply defective humans. Finally, if it is not the case that Marx is using statistical regularity, then it seems seem as if like Hegel, he too is positing what human nature is-albeit a different picture than Hegel-yet still using the same method as Hegel. Thus, depending on how Marx arrives his concept of human nature, he is either actually not differing much from Hegel, or differing from Hegel in a way that is problematic for his account of alienated labor.


Notes

1. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 pg 74
2. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 pg 76
3. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 pg 76
4. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 pg 95
5. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right pg 53
6. Normative Regularity is a concept developed by Margaret Scharle to explain part of Aristotle’s Physics, and is used in her presumably unpublished paper “Elemental Teleology and the Role of Nature”. I borrow the concept from her, and in no way claim credit for it.


Works Cited

Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. From “The Marx-Engels Reader”, edited by Robert C. Tucker. W.W. Norton & Company, 1972.