Since they were first published in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s early writings on alienation have served as a radical touchstone in the fields of
Zoom study group on the Selections from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks edited by Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Thursdays 8pm from 18 August 2022 to 10 November 2022
, or, as it is also expressed, that is not felt to be true
, not given as an inwardly revealed eternal verity, as something sacred that is believed
. Experience is just this, that the content - which is Spirit - is in itself substance, and therefore an object of consciousness
. But this substance which is Spirit is the process in which Spirit becomes what it is in itself
; and it is only as this process of reflecting itself into itself that it is in itself truly Spirit .
It could make no sense, from the point of view of Hegel s dialectics, to invert this process of showing that all the everyday world is the self-development of Spirit, as reflected intuitively in religion and systematically in science - to invert it to show what? That Spirit, or Reason, or God are revealed by dialectical analysis to be, not rational, reconciling, and harmonising as Hegel wanted them to be, but awkward, variegated, and changeable as the at-first-sight world?