Kanchana asked:

According to Hegel "alienated consciousness" will finally be overcome when we realize that we are all
part of ____ ____?

According to Hegel all reality originates from ____; whereas for Marx all reality originates from ____?

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Trying to guess what you're really asking is not the best way to find an answer! However, since
"alienation" is a key term in Hegel's chapter on Master and Slave, which was subsequently picked up
by Marx, I'll try to give a simple and straightforward answer (leaving the complexities of the issue a
little to one side). In that chapter Hegel put out the idea that the Master, due to his power over his
servants, is in a position to satisfy his desires and 'consumer' orientation by simply putting his
servants to work on the satisfaction of his 'needs'. In the result, Hegel says, his consciousness of
being is reduced since all he needs to do is enjoy the products of his servants' labours. Thereby he
becomes alienated from life, from the hands-on type of awareness that puts us in touch with
life-as-it-is lived. Inadvertently, however, the slave or servant, although socially oppressed, becomes
a beneficiary in that, being forced to do the hands-on work, retains these connections to life etc.

One of Hegel's successors and critics, Ludwig Feuerbach, put forward a different, anthropological
perspective. He maintained that men had projected all their good nature on God and retained all the
nasty, evil and negative aspects of life in the human realm; the task was therefore not to simply
accept this alienated Hegelian consciousness but to do something about it; and the first step in this
direction would be to dismantle religion and thus retrieve from God (you understand he was an
atheist) the good side of human nature and proceed from there to combat alienation by developing a
non-alienated consciousness which sees Man as a part of Nature and to encourage the structuring
society in such a way that the disparities of which Hegel speaks and which are grounded in religion,
disappear. This is what Marx latched onto: his "Theses on Feuerbach" are, as it were, his first
articulate statement on what he perceived as alienation.

As a postcript to this, it might not be out of place to take note of the historical fact that in western,
capitalist societies, the employer and employee classes came over time to an accommodation to
each other, of which one outcome is the fairly generous profit sharing by the working class, who are
thereby placed in the same position as Hegel's erstwhile master: in present-day capitalist societies,
the only difference between master and slave is that the former has a few bucks more to spend, but
generally only on the same things which the working class enjoys too, so that in terms of Hegelian
alienation we are all of us alienated from Nature now, because capitalist societies have turned to
large-scale consumerism. So there does not seem to be any hope, at least not on the immediate
horizon, that alienation is going to disappear (we won't bother mentioning the communist experiment).

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney