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Religious alienation is a term some use to describe how religion creates an impediment to human self-understanding.
Although the roots of alienation lie far back in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of alienation first gained prominence in the philosophy of Hegel, and particularly in his mature writings. There are signs of the idea in his earlier works, but it is not until the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that alienation occupies a central place in his writings.
In the opening sections of the Phenomenology, Hegel attacked the views of common sense and simplified natural science that the world consisted of discrete objects independent of man's consciousness. Truth, for Hegel, was not to be found in knowledge that was stripped of any influence from man's own desires and feelings. Ultimately, Hegel considered that there could be no truth that was not intimately linked with the ongoing process of human beings as thinking subjects; truth was their truth. The supposed objectivity of the world of nature was in fact an alienation, for man's task was to discover, behind these appearances, his own essential life and finally to view everything as a facet of his own self-consciousness. The same principle applied to the world of culture in which such spheres as art and religion, if viewed as independent of man, constituted so many alienations to be overcome by integration into the final understanding and recapitulation which was Absolute Knowledge.
Hegel had created a system; and all his followers believed that it was the final one. However, when it came to applying the system to particular problems, they conceived his system to be ambivalent. The fact that alienation seemed to them to be a challenge, something to be overcome, led them to put the emphasis on the concepts of dialectic and negativity in Hegel's system; and thus they challenged, first in religion and then in politics, his view that the problem of alienation had, at least in principle, been solved. The foremost among these radical disciples of Hegel, Bruno Bauer, applied the concept of alienation to the religious field. [1] Bauer, who lectured in theology and made his name as a Gospel critic, considered that religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity, caused a division in man's consciousness by becoming opposed to this consciousness as a separate power. Thus religion was an attitude towards the essence of self-consciousness that had become estranged from itself. In this context, Bauer promoted the use of the expression "self-alienation" that soon became current among the Young Hegelians. [2]
For Feuerbach ( The Essence of Christianity (1841)), people alienate their essential being by attributing their human qualities to a god who is then worshipped on account of these qualities. In worshipping god, therefore, people are unconsciously worshipping themselves. Thus Feuerbach argues that religion is a form of alienation which prevents people from attaining realisation of their own species-being. Feuerbach's thinking has been described as humanist in that his theory of alienation is based on a theory of human nature as species-being, as innate to the human species. [3] This position would later be examined by Karl Marx in his "Theses on Feuerbach".
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.
The Ego and Its Own, also translated as The Unique and its Property, is an 1844 work by German philosopher Max Stirner. It presents a post-Hegelian critique of Christianity and traditional morality on one hand; and on the other, humanism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and much of the then-burgeoning socialist movement, advocating instead an amoral egoism. It is considered a major influence on the development of anarchism, existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism.
German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of the division of labor and living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.
The opium of the people or opium of the masses is a dictum used in reference to religion, derived from a frequently paraphrased partial statement of German sociologist and critic of political economy Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people." In context, the statement is part of Marx's structural-functionalist argument that religion was constructed by people to calm uncertainty over their role in the universe and in society.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely-discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge". This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".
"On the Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.
The Essence of Christianity is a book by Ludwig Feuerbach first published in 1841. It explains Feuerbach's philosophy and critique of religion.
Social alienation is a person's feeling of disconnection from a group – whether friends, family, or wider society – to which the individual has an affinity. Such alienation has been described as "a condition in social relationships reflected by (1) a low degree of integration or common values and (2) a high degree of distance or isolation (3a) between individuals, or (3b) between an individual and a group of people in a community or work environment [enumeration added]". It is a sociological concept developed by several classical and contemporary theorists. The concept has many discipline-specific uses, and can refer both to a personal psychological state (subjectively) and to a type of social relationship (objectively).
Some Marxists posit what they deem to be Karl Marx's theory of human nature, which they accord an important place in his critique of capitalism, his conception of communism, and his 'materialist conception of history'. Marx, however, does not refer to human nature as such, but to Gattungswesen, which is generally translated as 'species-being' or 'species-essence'. According to a note from Marx in the Manuscripts of 1844, the term is derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy, in which it refers both to the nature of each human and of humanity as a whole.
Influences on Karl Marx are generally thought to have been derived from three main sources, namely German idealist philosophy, French socialism and English and Scottish political economy.
Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
Marxist–Leninist atheism, also known as Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism, was the state atheist and antireligious element of the former Soviet Union before the extensive glasnost reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. Under Bolshevism, this was a variant of Marxism–Leninism, the official communist state ideology of the Soviet Union. Based upon a dialectical-materialist understanding of humanity's place in nature, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes that religion is the opium of the people; thus, Soviet Marxism–Leninism advocates "scientific atheism", rather than religious belief.
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The following is a list of the major events in the history of German idealism, along with related historical events.
Classical Marxism refers to the economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as contrasted with later developments in Marxism, especially Marxism–Leninism.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, also referred to as the Paris Manuscripts or as the 1844 Manuscripts, are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx, published posthumously in 1932.
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians (Linkshegelianer), or the Hegelian Left, were a group of German intellectuals who, in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831, reacted to and wrote about his ambiguous legacy. The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" have interpreted to mean that the world has already essentially reached perfection.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, a philosophy of history, and a philosophy of Nature based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions.
