October 3, 2018

Dialectic Materialism: Journal Review

Angelo Cullen L. Yonzon

“Marx’s Concept of Alienation and it’s impact on human life”

By Muhammad Iqbal Shah

I don’t know much about Alienation, even it’s general meaning. In this Journal that I
have picked to review, it has a lot of compact details about the term Alienation, may it be
the dictionary meaning, social and etc. I want to share the insights of each term of
alienation and expand more on it’s meaning to give a more clearer meaning to it. Also,
this paper don’t just present the meaning of alienation but also give an great information
on how Alienation affects each person in every day life. This is journal focuses on how
Marx landed to the conclusion of Alienation which we will tackle later, but also a back
ground on whom he got his idea from, since most of the works of Marx are most likely a
revision of someone’s work and made it better. This paper is a compact and direct to the
point type of paper which I really appreciate because it provides a brief but informative
piece.

I want to start off with my personal concept of Alienation. Before I started this paper I
asked my friend what alienation is and my friend said that it was like you are out of place
or from the term “alien” it means “foreign” and it seemed acceptable and I believed it,
and what I can say is that, I think that this is a very negative term because who wants to
be out of place or feel foreign. Reading through the journal of Muhammad Iqbal Shah, I
was able to get a better view of “Alienation”. As a quick summary, he said that Alienation
is a state where in tha person feels one-self alone, estranged, worthless and meaning less,
but this he said may only be a cause of socio-political setup which means that people are
only controlled by their set up where they are living and moves through the demands of
the social and political norms that we should be aware of.
What is the meaning of Alienation in the Dictionary? It says that it is a transfer of land
ownership to another, to estrange; make unfriendly; to cause to be detached or
withdrawn; to cause of change of affection; to sell a piece of property to another that is
alienate. These are the meanings of alienations, from the references above it categorizes
Alienation, first is the Ordinary sense that indicated that it’s in a sense “turning away or
keeping away” from related ones. In legal terms it is about the possession of one be
shifted to another. In Psychology it is a man’s feeling of alien-ness towards society,
people, nature or even his own. But what is “Alienation” in Philosophy?

The idea was traced back from Plato’s Philosophy. Plato said that there is a world of
forms in which everything is perfection, it is a world of ideas that exist independently of
the mind, it is also beyond the spheres of space and time, this he called the absolute
realities and the spacio-temporal world where they came to existence in which they are
absolutely contrary to each other. For Plato this world is only a mere reflection of the
mere absolute, to further explain this, I would like to give an example of the idea of Plato.
In Greek mythology, there are gods whom people worship because of their “absolute”,
one of the gods is Ares of the god of War. Ares was worshiped and looked up to because
“Ares” as an ultimate being that perfects all war, people admire his perfection with
fighting. What Plato is saying is that this figure of “gods” is an idea in which Man would
like to meet, but they are only Alienated from that fact that these “gods” is only ideal and
that they project it as a perfection of whom they want to be or achieve. Gods are the
absolute realities and men are the spacio-temporal beings where men are only shadows of
these perfections and shadows only hollow reflections of these perfections.

For Plotinus, it is a “Theory of Emanation”, Plotinus stated that the universe and all other
things and beings emanated from the indivisible Unity which is The GOD. In this theory
it is said that there is a most perfect being and that the perfection overflows in which we
came to existence and now the closer you get to the “one” it diminishes alienation in a
way that it does not create things but rather being one with GOD in which it leads you to
nothing ness and no alienation shall occur.
Now having clarified what “Alienation ” is , this gives me an idea on how Hegel
discussed what Alienation is. According to Hegel, everything is related and nothing is
independent, this makes me think that he is right because the fact that we are born in need
of help from our parents in order to survive, it is in our very nature that we are not
independent. He elaborates more on this by saying that the idea of “absolutes” is not just
a set of something fixed natured or a totality of something (godliness), it is a dynamic self
and is in continuous activity. To explain further on this it is like that if you meet a certain
perfection, does that mean it ends there? No, we continuously strive for change. Hegel’s
alienation is technical in which alienation is a necessary process to achieve true self
knowledge.

Related to Hegel’s alienation, Feuerbach accepted the fact that the human person is
alienated from themselves, however he disagrees that the self is a “self-alienated God”
because for him, the aspects of life such as Wisdom, Power, Dignity, Beauty etc. These
are only a projection of the self or human nature. Man alienates from himself because of
these ideas of “higher beings” people allow themselves to be controlled by this ideas.

On Marx’s alienation, I really appreciated his work because from Hegel and Feuerbach,
their “Alienation” is purely intellectual and theoretical. For Marx, it is more on a practical
sense. He said that alienation is a material and social process. Today we are now living in
a world where we are boxed to do what we need to do, an example is that I am studying
in order to get a degree and get a higher pay and be educated. Alienation of Marx is that
of which you do out of the pressure that the society pushes you to do, which led him to
thinking that the Capitalist are the ones who directs the world unconsciously due to their
aggressiveness to gain power over the other because as stated in the journal, the laborer
should be the one getting the higher pay however since the property owner owns it, you
have to work for the property owner in order to survive and do the demands in order for
you to be supplied with your needs.

A quick summary is that Alienation for Marx is in a practical sense, we should be aware
that it is happening now, that we are alienated only because of the ones above us or the
private property owners plays a great role in changing circumstances that push an
individual to do something alien just to survive.