t108 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYstruggle of the 'noble and base consciousness', etc., etc., these single
sections contain the elements (though still in an alienated form) of a
criticism of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc.^176This was because the Phenomenology had understood the alienation of
man, contained insights into the process of man's development, and had
seen that the objects which appeared to order men's lives - their religion,
their wealth - in fact belonged to man and were the product of essential
human capacities. Marx summed up his attitude to Hegel as follows:
The greatness of Hegel's Phenomenology and its final product - the
dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle, is on the one
hand that Hegel conceives of the self-creation of man as a process,
objectification as loss of the object, as externalization and the transcend-
ence of this externalization. This means, therefore, that he grasps the
nature of labour and understands objective man, true because real, man
as the result of his own labour.^177Thus although Hegel did grasp labour as the self-confirming essence of
man, yet 'the only labour Hegel knows and recognises is abstract, mental
labour'.^178
Although Marx's language was (as often) involved, and his arrangement
somewhat haphazard, this is the passage where he gave his fullest and
clearest account of his debt to, and disagreements with, Hegel. Hegel
thought that reality was Spirit realising itself. In this process Spirit pro-
duced a world which it thought at first was external; only later did it
realise that this world was its own creation. Spirit was not something
separate from this productive activity; it only existed in and through this
activity. At the beginning of this process Spirit was not aware that it was
externalising or alienating itself. Only gradually did Spirit realise that the
world was not external to it. It was the failure to realise this that consti-
tuted, for Hegel, alienation. This alienation would cease when men
became fully self-conscious and understood their environment and their
culture to be emanations of Spirit. Freedom consisted in this understand-
ing and freedom was the aim of history. In broad terms, what Marx did
was to reject the notion of Spirit and retain only finite individual beings:
thus the Hegelian relationships of Spirit to the world became the Marxian
notion of the relationship of man to his social being. Marx said that
Hegel only took account of man's mental activities - that is, of his ideas
- and that these, though important, were by themselves insufficient to
explain social and cultural change.
Turning to the final chapter of the Phenomenology, Marx opposed his
view of man as an objective, natural being to Hegel's conception of man
as self-consciousness. If man were reduced to self-consciousness, Marx