Hegel's view?

Question

What is alienation and Hegel's view of alienation?

Answer 1

In a dictionary definition sense, alienation is becoming separated from something for various reasons. Legally speaking, you can become 'alienated' from a property, which means you transfer all possession and right of it to someone else. In common parlance, someone who feel alienated feels alone and separate (it's usually implied that they're alienated from society as a whole or a part).

For Hegel, alienation referred to a very specific phenomenon. He had a sort of spin on a Descartian view, in that he emphasized that everything in the universe could only be percieved through the lens of the mind. And that meant that everything was coloured by the lens itself. Understanding the universe, to Hegel, was an exercise in understanding yourself, and it was meaningless to try and separate the self from the universe. If you take away the lens, there is nothing left.

In this way, Hegel found the efforts of scientists to be completely backwards. Scientists focus on objectivity and separation from themselves. They are seeking a reality outside and un-influenced by the people doing the observation. A reality that Hegel asserts does not really exist. Hegel's term for the kind of understanding scientists acquire was 'alienated', because the information collected was separated from what actually DEFINED it - the self.

Nor was alienation of knowledge particular to scientists. Artists, politicians, historians, priests, and basically everyone tended to be guilty of alienating various things instead of acknowledging their ultimate involvement in all the results. This was, Hegel thought, part of the journey to true discovery, but not (as many assert) the actual end-point. Hegel spent some time trying to re-define all these things in non-alienated ways, but ended up resorting to such convoluted descriptions in doing so that many consider him to be one of the most difficult philosophers of all time to read and understand.

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Answer 2

Hegel Alienation

Answer 3

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Hegel's view?
What is alienation and Hegel's view of alienation?