The concept of alienation is not original with Marx. His use of it in the early writings draws upon, and presupposes familiarity with, the philosophers through whom he acquired it, especially Hegel and Feuerbach. From the beginning, however, Marx's views about the nature and causes of alienation differ decisively from theirs.
Both of Marx's predecessors regard alienation as consisting fundamentally in a certain form of acute false consciousness, in a certain error or illusion about oneself, one's humanity or one's relation to ultimate reality. For Hegel, the paradigm of alienated life is the 'unhappy consciousness'. This term refers to a form of misunderstood Christian religiosity (that is, to any Christianity which has not yet reinterpreted itself according to Hegel's rationalistic pantheism). In The Phenomenology of Spirit, the unhappy consciousness is described as the finite, individual self-consciousness which mistakenly conceives of its own ground or spiritual 'essence' (Wesen) as a being outside it and opposed to it, a divine being dwelling outside the world in a supernatural 'beyond'. Because the unhappy consciousness takes itself, and the whole changeable world, to be at odds with its own essence, it regards itself and the natural world as 'inessential' (unwesentlich); it feels itself, its activity and the whole sphere of its finite temporal existence to be, empty, worthless, devoid of true reality or significance. As Hegel puts it: 'The consciousness of life, existence, and action is only a sorrowing over this existence and action, for it has in it the consciousness of its opposite as the essence, and of its own nothingness.' The unhappy consciousness thus consumes itself in a desperate yearning after the beyond, and in a ceaseless penitential labor and desire aimed at reconciling it with its divine essence. Yet just because these acts proceed from it, they are straightway recognized as 'inessential' and hence futile. The only comfort for the unhappy consciousness lies in its faith that God has himself effected this reconciliation. Yet the unhappy consciousness is too permeated by a sense of its own poverty to be able to comprehend this reconciliation or enjoy it directly. It therefore conceives the act of atonement as wholly contingent and miraculous, performed in the remote past in a distant land, whose fruits it can hope to enjoy only in an after life. The unhappy consciousness can experience a sense of reconciliation with its own essence only in the rite of communion, which even here is mediated by the power of an external agency, the priesthood.
Hegel sees the unhappy consciousness as an important stage in human history, that is (in Hegelese), in the world spirit's coming to awareness of itself in time. In the unhappy consciousness, spirit's 'particularity', in the form of the individual human personality, feels separated or alienated from its essence or ground in the universal world spirit. Just for this reason, however, it is in the unhappy consciousness that the individual self in all its depth first becomes an object of awareness. In other words, according to Hegel, it is in Christianity that the individual human person first comes to be truly recognized as a spiritual power, and the proper vehicle of spirit's self-knowledge. This is why Hegel insists that the message of his philosophy itself is really just the Christian message of reconciliation, translated out of the 'unhappy' form of the contingent, the remote and the miraculous, and demonstrated to be a matter of metaphysical necessity.
On Hegel's diagnosis, the unhappy consciousness is unhappy only because it does not interpret the world aright. It does not recognize that the natural realm, far from being 'inessential', is the necessary expression or objectification of the divine world spirit, of which consciousness itself is only the particularization. The alienation of the unhappy consciousness is consequently just a matter of finite spirit's imperfect knowledge of its own infinite essence. The only remedy for alienation is the attainment of a higher stage of self-knowledge, where God and humanity, the universal essence of spirit and its particular self-consciousness, are seen to be fundamentally in harmony or identical with each other.
Feuerbach's critique of religion frees Hegel's analysis of the unhappy consciousness from its mystical trappings, and makes explicit its latent humanism. According to Feuerbach, the idea of God is really no more than the idea of our own human essence, our Gatungswesen, erroneously conceived as an entity distinct from and opposed to us. Religion is the 'self-alienation of the human being, the division (Entzweinung) of the human being from himself'. Religion's appeal is really the appeal of each person's own self-affirmation and love for the human species; but it involves a love and an affirmation which has been perverted, misdirected, focused on an imaginary being beyond humanity and nature. In order to love and praise God, men and women must despise and degrade themselves: 'What is positive, essential in the intuition or determination of the divine being can only be human, and so the intuition of the human being as an object of consciousness can only be negative, hostile to the human being. To enrich God, the human being must become poor; that God may be all, the human being must be nothing.'
Moreover, despite the fact that the central idea in Feuerbach's critique of religion is borrowed directly from Hegel, the Hegelian philosophy really fares no better in his judgment. For it, like the unhappy consciousness, locates what is essential in human thoughts and deeds not in real, natural, living human beings, but in an abstraction, a supernatural and superhuman world-mind. In this way, says Feuerbach, 'absolute [Hegelian] philosophy externalizes (entäussert) and alienates (entfremdet) from the human being his own essence and activity.
Feuerbach's account of alienation is aimed not only at prevailing religious ideas, but also at their harmful psychological and social consequences: the devaluatioen of our earthly well being, and the separation of men and women from one another and from their common essence as human beings. Like Hegel, however, Feuerbach thinks of alienation fundamentally as a form of false consciousness, an erroneous conception of the human essence. Hence he too conceives the overcoming of alienation as primarily a theoretical victory, a triumph of a true species consciousness over a false one. For him, the main requirement for a satisfying human life is that people should correctly understand and affirm their essence as species beings, at home in nature and destined for loving unity with other human beings. Marx thus attributes to Feuerbach, as to the other Young Hegelians, the view that once people renounce their religious illusions themselves and come to be animated by the true and rational ideal of what human life should be, the unhappy social consequences of their religious illusions will fall away of themselves, and a truly human society will naturally arise in the place of the old, alienated one.
Alienation and practice
Marx agrees with Hegel and Feuerbach that alienation is closely associated with a certain kind of false consciousness about one's essence, and that the paradigm case of this false consciousness is the be found in religion, especially in Christianity. But he does not agree that alienation consists in a condition of false consciousness, or that it is caused by one. The curious thing about religious illusions is that they both give expression to alienation, to a sense of the emptiness and worthlessness of human life, and also offer us comfort and consolation for this alienation, in the form of an unworldly spiritual calling and the promise of an unalienated life in the beyond. Alienated consciousness thus involves two contrasting ideas: it laments that our natural human life, considered in itself, is alienated, unsatisfying, and worthless; yet it proclaims that our existence is not really alienated after all, if only we place on it the right supernatural interpretation. Hegel and Feuerbach hold that people are alienated only because they misunderstand themselves and the real nature of the human condition. Consequently, it is their view that the illusion of alienated consciousness consists only in the first idea, in its negative attitude toward earthly human life. According to both philosophers, the comforting assurances of religion (at least when these assurances themselves are given the right philosophical interpretation) contain the real truth of the matter.
To Marx, however, the whole phenomenon of alienated consciousness becomes intelligible as soon as we adopt just the reverse supposition: that the unhappy consciousness tells the truth in its laments, not in its consolations. Religion gives expression to the mode of life which really is alienated, empty, degraded, dehumanized. 'Religious misery is in part an expression of actual misery and in part the protest against actual misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions.' Religious illusions have a hold on us because their false promises provide a semblance of meaning and fulfillment to our alienated lives. Religious hopes are 'the fantastic actualization of the human essence, because the human essence possesses no true actuality.' Religion reconciles to an alienated life and makes it seem tolerable to us; it offers us illusory meaning for a mode of life which without this illusion would be experienced directly for what it is: unredeemed meaninglessness.
An alienated society supports religious illusions because they [ed: the illusions] support it [the society]. Society will obviously be more stable if alienated individuals accept some conception of themselves which encourages them to think either that their lives do affirm and fulfill their humanity, or else that their feelings of frustration and emptiness are due to the finitude of the human condition as such, and not the transitory system of social relations in which they are entangled.
The social function of religion, then, is to cloud people's minds and anesthetize them to the sufferings of their alienated condition. This is what Marx means when he (famously) calls religion 'the opium of the people.'
Marx thus rejects the view of Hegel, Feuerbach and the young Hegelians that alienation fundamentally consists in false consciousness. In so doing, he rejects the long tradition of philosophical and religious thinking based on the pious axiom that human life is always meaningful to those who have the wisdom of spirit to lay hold of this meaning. Marx need not deny that alienation might be due to a lack of wisdom. He only holds that this is not in fact the cause of the systematic alienation in modern bourgeois society. Marx holds then, that because they really are so, because we live under conditions which make a fulfilled and worthwhile mode of life impossible for us...
It follows that the critique of false consciousness for Marx is not by itself a liberating act or a victory over alienation, as it was for Hegel and the young Hegelians. On the contrary, the only positive thing that this critique can do is sharpen alienation, make people more painfully aware of their condition, and motivated them to do something about it:
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their actual happiness. The demand to give up illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which requires illusions...the critique of religion disappoints the human being, so that he will think, act and form his own actuality like a human being who has been undeceived, who has come to his senses.
Religious false consciousness is only a symptom of alienation. The battle against it must be seen as only one aspect of the struggle against alienated practice, a battle which cannot be wholly won until the more fundamental practical struggle is successful. 'Religion,' says Marx, 'no longer counts for us as the ground but only as the phenomenon.' In his view, people will continue to fall prey to illusions as long as they need them, and they will continue to need them as long as they are alienated in real life. It is primarily the struggle against alienation which Marx has in mind when he declares that 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but what matters is to change it.'
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