Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 8, 2021

Negative Dialectics: Exploring the Externalization of the Subject, the Alienation of Objectivity and Its Sublation—An Interpretation of Marx’s “Excerpts from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” 

(Abstract)

Zhang Yibing

Karl Marx wrote “Excerpts from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” in 1844 when the first phase of his economic research almost finished. In this important thematic intellectual experiment, he completed a leap in methodology and epistemology through his revisit of a particular text, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Marx profoundly grasped the alienation of Hegel’s negative dialectics, consisting of the externalization of labor—alienation of objective material existence and its sublation, and the critical epistemological theory of falsification of material presentation. This constituted the logical framework of the entire theory of alienated labor in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.