Marx got his notion of “alienation” from Hegel, in Rousseau, “alienation” is the delegation of the power […]
Why are we talking about Feuerbach if we aren’t even going to have him on the exam
The alienation of God is something fixed and absolutely negative?
The philosophy of the future needs to overcome this alienation and therefore needs to erase god but not erase in saying “god doesn’t exist” but understanding that the very substance of god is just a projection and that god is a way to understand man. And once you understand that you will see that God is Man (in universal). The notion of Alienation in Feuerbach is more restricted than Hegel’s. But he considers that strategic, as it is at the core of all the wrong conceptions of metaphysics all these efforts to demonstrate the existence of God are products of alienation. The Young Marx is very close to Feuerbach, even though the text we have is the first text where he has a difference with Feuerbach, where he says that he didn’t go far enough. Alienation isn’t just a question of religion, even though he recognizes that religion is a noxious substance, but basically politics is a question of alienation, the state is alienation, he takes the negative notion of alienation and generalizes. The task of philosophy is to overcome alienation, so we have to take the categories that we use, if we say that the secret to theology is anthropology.
The way Marx understood that he has to go deeper into the social relations was what he explained in this preface.
Marx the political economist is someone who knows well, but remains in the scheme of classical economics drawn by people like David Ricardo. What is new in Marx that Ricardo never though of is the notion of alienation. All the theory of value that is the basics in the first book of “Capital”, is the definition of value as that which is produced by labor through time. This value of the production is subdivided, something goes back to the producer (worker) through salary, salary that has to be reduced with the condition to maintain the worker alive.
The other is the famous theory of the surplus value, that goes to the owner of the production machine. But the owner of the production machine has to pay rent on the field where his company is built, so this part goes to fondiary rent, but also he has to pay back the bank, who has anticipated capital to buy material and produce. So the surplus value is subdivided into three and more.
What is the novelty of Marxism - but wait, this label that is at the beginning and gives value to everything is alienated. One of the interpretations of alienation is that because, if say, value produces 10 only 1 remains with the one who produced and 9 is alienated from the worker.
But there is a more fundamental meaning that recalls phenomenology more closely. It’s that the worker doesn’t realize themselves the enjoyment - we could call it the psychological aspect - the notion of alienation is fundamental from Rousseau to Marx, and is acquired and even used somewhat in Freud.
From Rousseau to Marx there is a continuity but with a lot of changes in application first, expansion, restriction, expansion again. And qualification, neutral, let’s say even positive, in Hegel, we could even say that it isn’t static but it is positive. While for Feuerbach and Marx it is clearly negative and must be overcome.
What is interesting in marx but is not in the text we read. That economy, even economy that was more sympathetic to Marx’s project in the fifties shows that the theory of value in Ricardo’s economy. And what is really important in Marx is the theory of surplus value and alienation. If we look at late Marx, Marx of the Capital, everything rests on the definition of value. The dialectic of history, which is a struggle among classes, is defined by value. As he said before, the worker, the capitalist, all of these distinctions in society are due to the subdivision of Value. If you get rid of the theory of value in Marx, you get rid of the backbone for how Marx understood society.
In this preface we saw that Marx, towards the end decided to stop wasting his time with philosophy, which is a structure, it is an ideology: he must focus on economic production. It is a paradox that Marx has to be judged on something that almost universally 20th century economy considered rubbish.
And this is why the most persistent legacy of Marx is precisely in this manuscript of ‘44. Just before his thesis on Feuerbach. The Marx in transition that is criticizing Hegel but is still very close to him has been discovered and is also called the “humanistic” Marx.
From a historical point of view, this is a very interesting rebus. Let’s make an example of another author we haven’t seen closely. All the projects of Kant’s first critique is to start from a conception of science whose paradigm is neutral, and who gives knowledge of reality and cannot be denies. How can we make these judgements which are necessary and can’t be made a priori, that have to bring new knowledge.
How does one just come to a lecture and yap for 2 hours. Like genuinely, how?
In “On Interpretation” Paul Ricœur, introduces the idea that what characterizes post-hegelian philosophy is the emergence in different fields of thinkers that cast doubt on the history of