XLII If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely an- 
thropological phenomena in the [narrower] sense, but truly 
ontological™ affirmations of being (of nature), and if they are only 
really affirmed because their object exists for them as a sensual object, 
then it is clear that: 

(1) They have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but 
rather that the distinct character of their existence, of their life, is 
constituted by the distinct mode of their affirmation. In what 
manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their 
gratification. 

(2) Wherever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of 
the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working 
up of the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object. 

(3) Insofar as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., is human, the 
affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own gratification. 

(4) Only through developed industry—i.e., through the me- 
dium of private property—does the ontological essence of human 
passion come into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity; 
the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s own 
practical activity. 

(5) The meaning of private property—apart from its estrange- 
ment—is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of 
enjoyment and as objects of activity. 

* That part of the third manuscript which serves as a supplement to p. XXXIX of 
the second manuscript breaks off at this point on the left side of p. XXXVIII. The 
right-hand side of p. XXXVIII is empty. Then follows the “Introduction” (pp. 
Ae XL) and the passage on money (pp. XLI-XLIII).— Ed. 

> This word cannot be clearly deciphered in the manuscript —Ed. 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 323 

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the 
property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of 
eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipo- 
tence of its being. It is therefore regarded as omnipotent.... Money 
is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his 
life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, 
also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the 
other person. 

“What, man! confound it, hands and feet 
And head and backside, all are yours! 
And what we take while life is sweet, 
Is that to be declared not ours? 
Six stallions, say, I can afford, 
Is not their strength my property? 
I tear along, a sporting lord, 
As if their legs belonged to me.” 

Goethe: Faust (Mephistopheles) * 
Shakespeare in Timon of Athens: 

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, 

I am no idle votarist! ... 

Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, 

Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. 
. Why, this 

will lug your priests and servants from your sides, 

Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: 

This yetlow slave 

Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; 

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves 

And give them title, knee and approbation 

With senators on the bench: This is it 

That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; 

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores 

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices 

To the April day again. Come, damned earth, 

Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds 

Among the rout of nations.” 

And also later: 

“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce 
*Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler 
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars! 

Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer, 
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow 
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God! 

* Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Faust’s Study; (the English translation is taken from ° 
Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, translated by Philip Wayne, Penguin, 1949, p. 91).— Ed. 

That solder’st close impossibilities, 

And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue, 
\|XLII] To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! 
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue 

Set them into confounding odds, that beasts 

May have the world in empire!”* 

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To 
understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage 
from Goethe. 

That which is for me through the medium of money—that for 
which I can pay (i. e., which money can buy)—that am I myself, the 
possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the 
extent of my power. Money’s properties are my—the posses- 
sor’s— properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am 
capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, 
but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore lam 
not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified 
by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but 
money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. 
I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, 
and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its 
possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being 
dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. | am brainless, but 
money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor 
be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he 
who has” power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do 
not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart 
longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, 
therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary? 

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to 
me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of 
all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also 
the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as 
well as the real binding agent—the [...]° chemical power of society. 

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money: 

(1) It is the visible divinity—the transformation of all human and 
natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding 
and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it. 

(2) It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and 
nations. 

* Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3. (Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck 
translation.) —~ Ed. 

In the manuscript: “is” — Ed. 
“ In the manuscript one word cannot be deciphered. — Ed. 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 325 

The distorting and confounding of all human and _ natural 
qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities—the divine power of 
money—lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and 
self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. 

That which Iam unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all 
my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by 
means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into 
something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary. 

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach 
because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me 
the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes 
from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from 
their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, 
actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being 
into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly cre- 
ative power. 

No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his 
demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or 
existence for me, for a third party, for the [others], || XLIII| and 
which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The 
difference between effective demand based on money and ineffec- 
tive demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the 
difference between being and thinking, between the idea which mere- 
ly exists within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside 
of me. 

If I have no money for travel, I have no need—that is, no real and 
realisable need—to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no 
money for it, I have no vocation for study—that is, no effective, no 
true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for 
study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective 
vocation for it. Money as the external, universal medium and faculty 
(not springing from man as man or from human society as society) 
for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, 
transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are 
merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting 
chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras— essen- 
tial powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the 
imagination of the individual— into real essential powers and faculties. 
In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general 
distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and 
confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes. 

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the 
individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be 

entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into 
hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into 
master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence 
into idiocy. 

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, 
confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and 
confusing of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding 
and confusing of all natural and human qualities. 

He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As 
money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one 
specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for 
the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint 
of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for 
every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the 
fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace. 

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a 
human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for 
trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically 
cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other 
people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging 
effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to 
nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of 
your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking 
love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce 
reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving 
person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is 
impotent—a misfortune. || XLIII| 

[CRITIQUE OF THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 
AND PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE} 

|| XI] (6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explanation 
and justification, we might offer some considerations in regard to 
the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in the 
Phanomenologie and Logik, and also, lastly, the relation {to it] of the 
modern critical movement. 

So powerful was modern German criticism’s preoccupation with 
the past—so completely was its development entangled with the 

* Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phinomenologie des Geistes and Wissenschaft der 
Logik.— Ed. 

Economie and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 327 

subject-matter—that there 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 ent- 
deckte Christenthum. Thus in Das entdeckte Christenthum, for example, 
you get: 

“As though in positing the world, self-consciousness does not posit that which is 
different {from itself] and in what it is creating it does not create itself, since it in 
turn annuls the difference between what it has created and itself, since it itself has 
being only in creating? and in the movement—as though its purpose were not this 
movement?” etc.; or again: “They” (the French materialists) “have not yet been 
able to see that it is only as the movement of self-consciousness that the movement 

of the universe has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with itself.” 
(Pp. 113, 114-15.] 

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 Synop- 
tiker), 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 Fretheit, 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 

* Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker.— Ed. 
In the manuscript: “in movement” .— Ed. 
§ Ludwig Feuerbach, “Vorlaufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie” in 
Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik.— Ed. 

' 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 an- 
tithesis 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: 

(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion 
rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i. e., another 
form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence 
of man; hence equally to be condemned; 

(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by 
making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle 
of the theory; 

(3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims 
to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively 
based on itself. 

1, Certificate of poverty.— Ed. 
> This refers to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.— Ed. 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 329 

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies’ 
starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) 
as follows: 

Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance (in logic, 
from the infinite, the abstractly universal)—from the absolute and 
fixed abstraction; which means, put in a popular way, that he sets 
out from religion and theology. 

Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, 
real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and 
theology). 

Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstrac- 
tion, the infinite—restoration of religion and theology. 

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.* 

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 Phdnomenologie, the true point of origin and the secret of 
the Hegelian philosophy. 

* 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.” 

Phenomenology. 

A. Self-consciousness. 

I. Consciousness.(a) Certainty at the level of sense-experience; or 
the “this” and “meaning”. (8) Perception, or the thing with its proper- 
ties, and deception. (y) Force and understanding, appearance and the 
supersensible world. 

Il. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of self. (a) Indepen- 
dence and dependence of self-consciousness; lordship and bond- 
age. (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism, scepticism, the 
unhappy consciousness. 

III. Reason. Reason’s certainty and reason’s truth. (a) Observa- 
tion 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. I]. 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 Enzyklopddie,? 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., com- 
prehending 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 

* Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 
im Grundrisse.— Ed. 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 331 

returning home to its own point of origin—the thinking which as 
the anthropological; phenomenological, psychological, ethical, ar- 
tistic 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 embodi- 
ment 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 Phdnomenologie, 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) IX VII|% thought—of 
logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore 
forms the real interest of this alienation and of the transcendence 
of this alienation, 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 in distinction from and in opposition to 
abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the 
estrangement and the thing to be superseded. 

|| 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 Phanomenologte as a 
germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the 
equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works—that philo- 
sophic 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, the logical, specula- 
tive 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 Phdnomenologie 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 conscious- 
ness”, 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 conscious- 
ness 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 conscious- 
ness—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]| 

NXXIII The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phano- 
menologie 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 objectifi- 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 333 

cation 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 co-operative 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 
Phénomenologie, “Absolute Knowledge” —a chapter which contains 
the condensed spirit of the Phanomenologie, the relationship of the 
Phanomenologie to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel’s conscious- 
ness 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 con- 
tradistinction 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 human life as phases of 
self-consciousness, namely, of abstract 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 “Phanomenologie”. 

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 estrange- 
ment of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness is 
not regarded as an expression—reflected in the realm of knowl- 
edge 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 estrange- 
ment 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, there- 
fore, 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 tts aspects, the surmounting of the object of 
consciousness means: 

(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as 
something vanishing. 

(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which posits 
thinghood.’” 

(3) That this alienation has not merely a negative but a positive 
significance. 

(4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but 
for self-consciousness itself, 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 335 

(5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, or its annul- 
ling of itself, has positive significance—or it knows this futility of the 
object—because of the fact that it alienates itself, for in this 
alienation it posits itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible 
unity of being-for-self, posits the object as itself. 

(6) On the other hand, this contains likewise the other moment, 
that self-consciousness has also just’ as much superseded this 
alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at 
home in its other-being as such. 

(7) This is the movement of consciousness and this is therefore the 
totality of its moments. 

(8) Consciousness must similarly be related to the object in the 
totality of its determinations and have comprehended it in terms of 
each of them. This totality of its determinations makes the object 
intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth for 
consciousness through the apprehending of each one of the 
determinations as self or through what was called above the spiritual 
attitude to them. 

As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as 
something vanishing—this is the above-mentioned return of the object 
into the self. 

As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness posits thinghood. 
Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective 
essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood 
is thus posited through this alienation (thinghood being that which is 
an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to 
him an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is 
not real man, nor therefore nature— man being human nature—who 
as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man, self- 
consciousness, so thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self- 
consciousness). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being 
equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential 
powers should of his essence have real natural objects; and that his 
self-alienation should lead to the positing of a real, objective world, 
but within the framework of externality, and, therefore, an over- 
whelming world not belonging to his own essential being. There is 
nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be 
mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise. But it is equally clear that a 
self-consciousness by its alienation can posit only thinghood, i.e., only an 
abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is 
|XXVIj'S clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly 
without any independence, any essentiality vis-a-vis self-consciousness; 
that on the contrary it is a mere creature—something posited by 

self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, 
is but confirmation of the act of positing which for a moment fixes 
its energy as the product, and gives it the semblance—but only fora 
moment—of an independent, real substance. 

Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the 
solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, 
posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his 
externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this 
process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose 
action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective 
being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the 
objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only 
creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects—because at 
bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective 
being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of 
the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his 
objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural 
being. 

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, vi- 
tal 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 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 337 

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; ie., 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, and thus 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). 

Thirdly, because this positing of thinghood is itself only an 
illusion, an act contradicting the nature of pure activity, it has to be 
cancelled again and thinghood denied. 

Re 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalisation of consciousness has not 

merely a negative but a positive significance, and (4) it has this 
meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for consciousness 
itself. (5) For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of 
itself, has positive significance—i.e., consciousness knows this nulkty 
of the object— because it alienates itself; for in this alienation it knows 
itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of 
being-for-itself, the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also 
this other moment in the process, that consciousness has also just as 
much superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them 
into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such. 

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 nega- 
tive 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—be- 
cause 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 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 339 

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. 

First of all: consciousness, self-consciousness, is at home in its 
other-being as such. It is therefore—or if we here abstract from the 
Hegelian abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man instead 
of self-consciousness—it is at home in its other-being as such. This 
implies, for one thing, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, 
thinking as thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itsel{—to 
be the world of sense, the real world, life—thought surpassing 
itself in thought (Feuerbach).’* This aspect is contained herein, 
inasmuch as consciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not 
at estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such. | 

Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has 
recognised and superseded the spiritual world (or his world’s 
spiritual, general mode of being) as self-alienation, nevertheless 
again confirms it in this alienated shape and passes it off as his 
true mode of being—re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home 
in his other-being as such. Thus, for instance, after superseding 
religion, after recognising religion to be a product of self- 
alienation, he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as 
religion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his 
merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the 
positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology—but 
it has to be expressed in more general terms. Thus reason is at 
home in unreason as unreason. The man who has recognised that 
he is leading an alienated life in law, politics, etc., is leading his 
true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, 
self-confirmation in contradiction with itselfi—in contradiction with 
both the knowledge and the essential being of the object—is thus 
true knowledge and life. 

There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of 
accommodation on Hegel’s part vis-d-vis religion, the state, etc., 
since this lie is the lie of his principle. 

WX XIX 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 ot 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 to- 
gether. 

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— modes 
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 philo- 
sophy 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.c., 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 con- 
cept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equals 
the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature 
superseded equals subjective mind, subjective mind superseded 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 341 

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 ab- 
straction. 

{{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.’ 

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 appropria- 
tion of his objective essence through the annihilation of the 
estranged character of the objective world, through the superses- 
sion 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 

* The conventional conceptions of theology, jurisprudence, political science, 
natural science, etc.— Ed. 

premise—does positively self-deriving humanism, positive human- 
ism, 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) 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. 4In 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] form as dialectic, is 
therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is neverthe- 
less an abstraction—an estrangement of human life—it is re- 
garded 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. 

Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the 
subject only comes into being as a result. This result—the subject 
knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness—is therefore God, 
absolute Spirit, the seif-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man 
and real nature become mere predicates—symbols of this hidden, 
unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are 
therefore related to each other in absolute reversal—a mystical 
subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object— absolute subject 
as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 343 

into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, 
and the subject as this process; a pure, incessant revolving within it- 
self. 

First. Formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation 
or self-objectification. 

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 mere- 
ly—estrangement’s abstract and therefore empty and unreal ex- 
pression, 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.) 

Hegel’s positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that 
the definite concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their 
independence vis-d-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of 
the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also 
of human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these 
together and presented them as moments of the abstraction- 
process. For example, superseded being is essence, superseded 
essence is concept, the concept superseded is ... absolute idea. But 
what, then, is the absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again, if 
it does not want to perform once more trom the beginning the 
whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality of 
abstractions or the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstrac- 
tion comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be noth- 
ing: it must abandon itself—abandon abstraction—and so it 
arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite—at nature. Thus, 
the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is 
nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that 
only nature is something. 

|XXXII| The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which 

“considered with regard to its unity with itself is intuiting” (Hegel, Encyclopddie, 

344 Karl Marx * 

3rd edition, p. 222 [§244]), and which (loc. cit.) “in its own absolute truth resolves to 
let the moment of its particularity or of initial characterisation and other-being, the 
immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature” (loc. cit.), 
this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and bizarre way, 
and which has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is 
from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction (i.e., the 
abstract thinker), which, made wise by experience and enlightened. 
concerning its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves 
still abstract) conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self-ab- 
sorption (nothingness), generality and indeterminateness by its 
other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let na- 
ture, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a 
thought-entity, go forth freely from itself: that is to say, this idea 
resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of 
abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes 
intuiting, is indeed nothing else but abstract thinking that gives 
itself up and resolves on intuition. This entire transition from logic 
to natural philosophy is nothing else but the transition—so 
difficult to effect for the abstract thinker, who therefore describes 
it in such a far-fetched way—from abstracting to intuiting. The 
mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract 
thinking to intuiting is boredom—the longing for a content. 

(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 nega- 
tion—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*; and in part, to the extent that this abstrac- 

* (This means that what Hegel does is to put in place of these fixed abstractions 
the act of abstraction which revolves in its own circle. We must therefore give him 
the credit for having indicated the source of all these inappropriate concepts which 
originally appertained to particular philosophers; for fave brought them to- 
gether; and for having created the entire compass of abstraction as the object of 
criticism, instead of some specific abstraction.) (Why Hegel separates thought from 
the subject we shall see later; at this stage it is already clear, however, that when man is 
not, his characteristic expression cannot be human either, and so neither could 

thought be grasped as an expression of man as a human and natural subject endowed 
with eyes, ears, etc., and living in society, in the world, and in nature:)— Note by Marx. 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 345 

tion apprehends itself and experiences an infinite weariness with 
itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the form of the 
resolution to recognise nature as the essential being and to go over 
to intuition, the abandonment of abstract thought—the abandon- 
ment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of 
thought sans eyes, sans teeth, sans ears, sans everything.) 

I XXXITI] But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself—nature 
fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man. It goes without 
saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to 
intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in 
the thinker in the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a 
thought-entity—in a shape which was obscure and enigmatic even 
to him—so by letting it emerge from himself he has really let 
emerge only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity—but 
now with the significance that it is the other-being of thought, that 
it is real, intuited nature—nature distinguished from abstract 
thought. Or, to talk in human language, the abstract thinker 
learns in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought 
to create from nothing, from pure abstraction—the entities he 
believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as pure products 
of the labour of thought, for ever shuttling back and forth in itself 
and never looking outward into reality—are nothing else but 
abstractions from characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the 
whole of nature merely repeats the logical abstractions in a 
sensuous, external form. He once more resolves nature into these 
abstractions. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of 
confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature*—is only 
the conscious repetition by him of the process of creating his 
abstraction. Thus, for example, time equals negativity referred to 
itself (op. cit.,” p. 238). To the superseded becoming as being 
there corresponds, in natural form, superseded movement as 
matter. Light is reflection-in-itself, the natural form. Body as moon 
and comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to 
logic is on the one side the positive resting on itself and-on the other 
side the negative resting on itself. The earth is the natural form 
of the logical ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, 
etc. 

* The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript: “Let us consider for a 
moment Hegel's characteristics of nature and the transition from nature to the mind. 
Nature has resulted as the idea in the form of the other-being. Since the 
id [ea]....”—Ed. 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopddie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im 
Grundrisse.— Ed. 

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 noth- 
ing proving itself to be nothing—is devoid of sense, or has only the 
sense of being an externality which has to be annulled. 

“In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct premise that nature 
does not contain within itself the absolute purpose.” P. 225 [§ 245]. 

Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction. 

“Nature has shown itself to be the idea in the form of other-being. Since the idea 
is in this form the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not. just relatively 
external vis-d-vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as 
nature.” P. 277 [§ 247]. 

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— ex- 
ternality 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. 

“For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature’s truth and for that reason its 
absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea 
arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. 
This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect 
external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation 
the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity, therefore, only in 
being a return out of nature.” P. 392 [§ 381]. 

“As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, 
nature; as the revelation of the mind, which is free, it is the positing of nature as 
the mind's world—a positing which, being reflection, is at the same time a 
presupposing of the world as independently existing nature. Revelation in conception 
is the creation of nature as the mind’s being, in which the mind procures the 
affirmation and the truth of its freedom”. “The absolute is mind. This is the highest 
definition of the absolute.” [P. 393, § 384.] [KXXXIVII 

LETTERS 

October 1843-August 1844 

1843 

1