HEGEL – OBJECTIFICATION AND ALIENATION
PROGRESS OF REASON TO THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FREEDOM
We may now turn to Hegel's philosophy itself. The two central concepts in that philosophy are 'Spirit' (Geist) and 'the Idea' (Idee). Taking something of a risk, I shall translate Hegel's Geist as 'the human spirit or essence' and Idee as 'thought or reason'. These two concepts are intimately connected, because what distinguishes human beings, what is their 'spirit' or 'essence' is their capacity for thought or reason.
However, Hegel's major development of idealist philosophy after Kant lay in his insistence that both spirit and thought or reason - 'the Idea' - have a history. The human capacity for reason, the human understanding, grows and expands, deepens, through time. Human history, for Hegel, is the history of that development of reason. And he went further. For in Hegel's philosophy we not only find the view that mind and world are one (in the sense that there is nothing which can be known of the world except through the mind). We also find the view that mind actually creates the world.
For Hegel this is true in two senses:
Since for Hegel 'the world' = 'knowledge of the world', then as knowledge changes (i.e. as mind develops) so the world changes.
Since human beings act in the world on the basis of their knowledge of it, the world becomes increasingly shaped and dominated by reason through human-activity-conducted-on-the-basis-of-reason, a form of activity which becomes increasingly predominant among human beings as their species progresses.
All human artefacts, from the most humble (tables, chairs, spoons) to the most grand (towns and cities, the economy, the state) are embodiments or 'objectifications' of human reason. In other words, the physical organization of our towns and cities, our economy or ‘system of needs’, our political system, forms one reasonable or a rational system. The organization of the world around us is the embodiment, the physical expression of human reason at work.
For Hegel, what all human beings have in common - what makes them human - is 'mind' (reason, thought). Moreover, the categories of thought are the same for all human minds. Hence in Hegel the world becomes the creation, the product, of these universal categories of thought.
Hegel had a particular way of speaking about all this which involved the use of two of his most important concepts — objectification and alienation. According to Hegel, all human history is a process whereby ideas objectify themselves in material reality. Thus, the idea of 'shelter' is objectified into houses, the ideas of 'communication' and 'transport' are objectified into roads, railways, buses, cars, telegraph wires, etc. And the idea of a 'general interest of society' is objectified into the institutions of the state.
However, this process of objectification is also, for Hegel, a process of alienation. Because as mind objectifies itself into innumerable different material products and social and political institutions (the family, the occupational group, the state) it fails to grasp that these things are its products, its embodiments, its manifold objectifications. Hence it treats them as things separate ('alien') from itself. In fact this was how Hegel explained empiricism, empiricism was the expression, in the realm of philosophy, of mind's alienation from itself.
The linked concepts of objectification and alienation bring us to the heart of Hegel's philosophy of history. For Hegel, human history is the process by which mind first alienates itself through objectification and then, gradually and in stages, recognizes these objectifications as its own products and comes, therefore, to understand these objectifications and its own achievements and potential.
For Hegel, the goal, the culmination of history is the overcoming of alienation and the final triumph of reason. This consists in mind's total self-understanding and self-consciousness both of itself and thus (simultaneously) of the world.