Hegel and Marx on the Self-Realization of Man

Studia Hegeliana, 2022

The concept of “self-realization” plays a central role in philosophy, since it summarizes the idea that a good life is a flourishing life, that is, an existence in which a person makes the best of what she is. A long tradition has understood this in terms of actualizing one’s potential or fulfilling one’s highest and most worthy aspirations. The aim of this paper is to analyze Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Right, in order to show that they outline an alternative and valuable account of self-realization that conceives of human flourishing as tied to the flourishing of the world.

2005

The purpose of this study is to present the different approaches, which Hegel and Marx have developed regarding the relation between consciousness and life, consistent with their aims. Hegel̕s aim is to combine all the opposed ideas and beliefs proposed throughout the history of philosophy into a unified whole. Hegel̕s dialectics which is immanent to life can also explain the opposition between consciousness and life. Self-consciousness, which appears as subjectivity in Hegel̕s philosophy, at first, treats the life as an object of desire. Later, however, self-consciousness which cannot thus realize itself desires another self-consciousness who will recognize itself, so it relates with an other self-consciousness. This relation is defined as a أlife and death struggleؤ. At the end of the struggle, there arise new forms of self-consciousnesses, Master and Slave. While the Slave produces for its Master, it relates itself to Life and this relation between Slave and Life brings about Sla...

In the following paper our intention is to underline the relevant role of the action as the main factor in reaching self-consciousness, in both Hegel's and Marx's thought. Particularly, we will examine the well-known Phänomenologie des Geistes' figure Lordship and Bondage and the vexata quaestio about «class in itself» and «class for itself» from Marx's Das Elend der Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy); moreover, we will discuss against the hypothesis of a perfect parallelism between the specific concepts used by the two philosophers in their above-mentioned writings.

Ethics&Politics, 2019

In this contribution I defend the thesis that Hegel's notion of species (Gattung) is not merely the name given to a group of self-reproducing living beings but rather it is at the basis of the Hegelian naturalistic conceptions of self-conscious life, sociality and world history. I maintain that self-reflection and self-referring negativity are the main characteristics of the self-conscious life and they determine the features of both the individual self-consciousness and the entire human species by shaping social practices and world history as acts of actualized freedom. Therefore, the definition of human species goes far beyond the description of its natural features and depends on the fact that self-consciousness is able to determine itself by negating external powers or conditioning. The main argument of this contribution is that human species and its historical evolution can be defined by means of this self-referring negativity and by self-consciousness' capacity to place the external reality under an order of values and concept autonomously yielded.

This essay describes Hegel's account of self-consciousness as a dynamic process exploring otherness.

In Hegel’s “theory of spirit” – differentiated and institutionalized in our contemporary disciplinary fields as psychology, sociology and political science – the initial conceptual moment in the development of individuality, before the subject can determine or give itself specific cognitive and social content, the individual takes an initial simple but also abstract appearance of “being-for-self”. This essay explores the "emergence" of the modern individual in Hegel's work.

Hegel Bulletin, 2018

Picking up on Marx's and Hegel's analyses of human beings as social and individual, the article shows that what is at stake is not merely the possibility of individuality, but also the correct conception of the universal good. Both Marx and Hegel suppose that individuals must be social or political as individuals, which means, at least in Hegel's case, that particular interests must form part of the universal good. The good and the rational is not something that requires sacrificing one's interests for the community or denying one's particular character so as to become an equal rational agent. Very much to the contrary, the rational or the common good is nothing but the harmonious structuring of particular interests. While Section I introduces Marx's and Hegel's conceptions of individual and social beings, Sections II and III discuss their respective views of individuality, and Sections IV and V discuss the notion of a universal good containing individual interests.

The article attempts to show, first, that for Hegel the role of property is to enable persons both to objectify their freedom and to properly express their recognition of each other as free, and second, that the Marx of 1844 uses fundamentally similar ideas in his exposition of communist society. For him the role of ‘true property’ is to enable individuals both to objectify their essential human powers and their individuality, and to express their recognition of each other as fellow human beings with needs, or their ‘human recognition’. Marx further uses these ideas to condemn the society of private property and market exchange as characterised by ‘estranged’ forms of property and recognition. He therefore uses a structure of ideas which Hegel had used to justify the institutions of private property and market exchange in order to condemn those same institutions. It is concluded that Marx’s adoption from Hegel of the idea that property as the means of self-objectification and of expressed recognition, leaves his vision of communism open to the charge that in it, just as in market society, the relations between human beings are mediated by things.