Alienation

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Alienation is a philosophical term that was coined by Hegel , Fichte , Schelling and Marx , among others . It is related to the concept of objectification , but also has aspects of the concept of alienation .

definition

The word alienation is used by Fichte, Hegel and Schelling from everyday language as a philosophical term, that is, as such, "converted".

As with the term “ suspension ”, Hegel uses the speculative peculiarity of language (which he praised very much) of combining several different meanings in one word.

Alienation has different aspects:

  • Creation of something new
  • Giving away, discarding something of your own
  • Self-opening from the inside to the outside.

theology

Originally the concept of alienation, here as Greek kenosis , comes from Christianity . In the New Testament , the term kenosis appears in a letter from Paul to the Philippians . What is meant there is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ : "He was equal to God , but did not cling to being like God, but emptied himself and became like a slave and like men."

Based on this, kenose is also the theological doctrine of the alienation of the divine Logos ; In the 19th century a school of the Kenotiker was formed , whose main representative is Wolfgang Gess (1819-1891). The Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji sees in the term alienation also aspects of the path to the Buddhist concept of Shunyata (for example: “emptiness”).

Hegel

In Hegel, alienation is described as

  • produced by work and
  • its giving away determined.

The alienation is centrally located in the second phase of Hegel's dialectic (the first Absolute spirit person is, according to God in Christianity, the father) to nature and people through alienation. This corresponds to the second person of God, the Son. According to Hegel, the course of world history runs in such a way that the world spirit alienates itself through the conscious activity of man as objectifications that assume an independent existence in relation to him, come into contradiction to him and thus provoke a new, higher form of consciousness.

In this way the world spirit works the historical process out of itself in constant alienation, withdrawal and renewed alienation. In this way, Hegel succeeds in depicting a close interlocking of subject and object, setting it into contradiction and dialectically canceling it .

Schelling

For Schelling , the concept of alienation "of Revelation philosophy" is also with systematic significance in his. Here, however, the term is used in the sense of the cessation of the outside, which is disfigured in the German language by the prefix “dis-”. Schelling understands the de-expression as a decisive moment in the kenotic movement of God of the alienation of all externality, and so it is taken up by Paul in its theological significance .

Marx

The economic and social interpretation of the term is only carried out when it is used by Karl Marx , who took over the essential concepts of Hegel. Even if the concept of alienation is often related to the concept of reification and alienation, in Marx it is not entirely negative, but also positively describes the possibility of recognizing oneself as a producer in the alienated product of labor and thus confirming and confirming oneself to realize.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Phil 2,5-11  EU . Quoted from the standard translation [1] .
  2. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz:  Gess, Wolfgang. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 235-236.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  3. ↑ See the corresponding passage from the text excerpts from James Mill's book "Élémens d'economique politique" (1844), in: Marx-Engels-Werke , supplementary volume I, p. 462.