“Alienation,” to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late-20th-century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not indicate a mental feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which might somehow be blamed on commercialism, or on cultural or sexual “repression.” Alienation, for Marx, was far more essential, more cosmic. It implied, at the very least, as we have actually seen, the organizations of money, expertise, and the division of labor. The removal of these evils was essential to join the cumulative organism or species guy “to himself,” to recover these splits within “himself” and between male and “himself” in the type of man-created nature. However the extreme evil of alienation was yet much more cosmic than that. It was metaphysical, a deep part of the viewpoint and the world-view that Marx picked up from Hegel, and which, through its allied “dialectic,” gave Marx the describes of the engine that would inevitably bring us communism as a law of history, with the ineluctability of a law of nature.
Everything began with the 3rd-century thinker Plotinus, a Platonist theorist and his fans, and with a theological discipline relatively remote from political and financial affairs: creatology, the “science” of the First Days. We have actually already seen, in truth, that another allied and practically similarly remote branch of faith– eschatology, or the science of the Last Days– can have massive political and financial consequences and implications.
The crucial question of creatology is, Why did God develop the universe? The response of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and thus the answer of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike, is that God, a perfect being, created the universe out of benevolence and love for his animals. Duration. And this appears to be the only politically safe response too. The answer provided by heretics and mystics from early Christians on, however, is quite various: God developed deep space not out of perfection and love, however out of felt need and flaw. Simply put, God developed the universe out of felt uneasiness, solitude, or whatever. In the start, before the development of the universe, God and male (the cumulative organic types, naturally, not any particular individual), were joined in one, so to speak, cosmic blob. How we can even mention “unity” in between male and God prior to male was even produced is a quandary that will need to be cleared up by somebody more schooled in the divine secrets than today author. At any rate, history then becomes a process, certainly a pre-ordained process, by which God establishes his prospective, and male the collective types establishes its (or his?) capacity. However even as this development happens, and both God and male develop and render themselves more best in and through history, offsetting this “good” advancement a horrible and terrible thing has actually also occurred: man has been separated, cut off, “alienated” from God, along with from other men, or from nature. Hence the prevalent concept of alienation. Alienation is cosmic, irremediable, and esoteric, inherent in the very procedure of development, or rather, irremediable until the terrific day undoubtedly arrives: when guy and God, having both completely developed themselves, finish the procedure and history itself by remerging, by uniting as soon as again in the merger of these two terrific cosmic blobs into one.
Note, first, how this terrific historic procedure comes about. It is the inescapable, pre-ordained “dialectical” process of history. There are, as typical, three stages. Phase one is the original stage: male and God are in happy and unified unity (a unity of pre-creation?), but things, especially with the mankind, are rather undeveloped. Then, the magic dialectic does its work, phase two happens, and God produces male and deep space, both God and male developing their potentials, with history a record and a process of such development. However development, as in the majority of dialectics, proves to be a two-edged sword, for guy experiences his cosmic separation and alienation from God. For Plotinus, for example, the Great is unity, or The One, whereas Evil is identified as any sort of diversity or multiplicity. In mankind, evil originates from self-centeredness of individual souls, “deserter [s] from the All.”
But then, finally, at long last, the advancement process will be finished, and phase 2 establishes its own Aufhebung, its own “raising,” its own transcendence into its opposite or negation: the reunion of God and guy into a remarkable unity, an “ecstasy of union,” and end to alienation. In this stage three, the blobs are reunited on a far higher level than in phase one. History is over. And they shall all live(?) gladly ever after.
However keep in mind the huge distinction between this dialectic of creatology and eschatology, which of the orthodox Christian circumstance. In the very first place, the alienation, the catastrophe of man in the dialectical legend from Plotinus to Hegel, is esoteric, unavoidable from the act of production itself. Whereas the estrangement of male from God in the Judeo-Christian legend is not metaphysical however just moral. To orthodox Christians, creation was purely excellent, and not deeply tainted with evil; difficulty came only with Adam’s fall, an ethical failure not a metaphysical one. Then, in the orthodox Christian view, through the Incarnation of Jesus, God provided a path by which this alienation might be eliminated, and the person could accomplish redemption. However note again: Christianity is a deeply individualistic creed, considering that each individual’s redemption is what matters. Redemption or the absence of it will be achieved by each individual, each individual’s fate is the main concern, not the fate of the supposed cumulative blob or organism, man with a capital M. In the orthodox Christian schema, each individual goes to heaven or hell.
But in this presumably optimistic magical view (nowadays called “procedure faith”), the only salvation, the only pleased ending is that of the cumulative organism, the species, with each private member of that organism being brusquely annihilated along the way.
This dialectical faith, in particular its creatology, began in full flower with the Plotinus-influenced 9th-century Christian mystic John Scotus Erigena (c. 815– c. 877), an Irish-Scottish theorist located in France, and continued through a heretical underground of Christian mystics, in specific such as the 14th-century German, Meister Johannes Eckhart (? 1260–? 1327). The pantheistic outlook of the mystics was similar to the call of the Buddhist-theosophist-socialist Mrs Annie Besant: as Chesterton perceptively and wittily kept in mind, not to enjoy our neighbor but to be our neighbor. Pantheist mystics hire each individual to “unite” with God, the One, by obliterating his person, separated, and therefore pushed away self. While the methods of various mystics might vary from the Joachites, or the Brethren of the Free Spirit, whether through a procedure of history or through an inescapable Armageddon, the objective stays the same: obliteration of the individual through “reunion” with God, the One, and the ending of cosmic “alienation,” a minimum of on the level of each individual.
Especially influential for G.W.F. Hegel and other thinkers in this tradition was the early-17th-century German cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme (1575– 1624), who contributed to this heady pantheistic brew the supposed system, the force that drives this dialectic through its inescapable course in history. How, Böhme asked, did the world of pre-creation transcend itself into creation? Before creation, he answered, there was a primal source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated, indistinct, actual Absolutely nothing (Ungrund). (It was, by the method, typical of Hegel and his Idealist followers to think that they include grandeur and explanation to a lofty but muddled principle by capitalizing it.) Strangely enough, to Böhme, this No-thing possessed within itself an inner striving, a nisus, a drive for self-realization. It is this drive which creates a transcending and opposing force, the will, which creates deep space, transforming the Absolutely nothing into Something.
This short article is excerpted from chapter 11 of volume 2 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Idea( 1995 ). An MP3 audio file of this chapter, told by Jeff Riggenbach, is readily available for download.