Therefore, in grasping the positive significance of the negation which has reference to itself, even if once again in estranged form, Hegel grasps man's self-estrangement alienation of being, loss of objectivity, and loss of reality as self-discovery, expression of being, objectification and realization. In short, he sees labor -- within abstraction -- as man's act of self-creation and man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being as the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.
(b) But in Hegel, apart from or rather as a consequence of the inversion we have already described, this act appears,firstly, to be merely formal because it is abstract and because human nature itself is seen only as abstract thinking being, as self-consciousness.
And secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the supersession of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. In other words, Hegel sees this movement of self-creation and self-objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement as the absolute and hence the final expression of human life which has itself as its aim, is at rest in itself and has attained its own essential nature.
This movement in its abstract form as dialectic is therefore regarded as truly human life. And since it is still an abstraction, an estrangement of human life, it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man. It is man's abstract, pure, absolute being (as distinct from himself), which itself passes through this process.
Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject comes into being only as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols of this hidden, unreal man and this unreal nature.
Subject and predicate therefore stand in a relation of absolute inversion to one another; a mystical subject-object or subjectivity encroaching upon the object, the absolute subject as a process, as a subject which alienates itself and returns to itself from alienation, while at the same time re-absorbing this alienation, and the subject as this process; pure, ceaseless revolving within itself.
First, the formal and abstract conception of man's act of self-creation of self-objectification.
Because Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the estranged object, the estranged essential reality of man is nothing but consciousness, nothing but the thought of estrangement, its abstract and hence hollow and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, hollow supersession of that hollow abstraction, the negation of the negation. The inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity, an abstraction which is then given permanent form as such and conceived as independent activity, as activity itself. Since this so-called negativity is nothing more than the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can only be a formal content, created by abstraction from all content. Consequently there are general, abstract forms of abstraction which fit every content and are therefore indifferent to all content: forms of thought and logical categories torn away from real mind and real nature. (We shall expound the logical content of absolute negativity later.)
Hegel's positive achievement in his speculative logic is to present determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence of nature and mind, as a necessary result of the universal estrangement of human existence, and thus also of human thought, and to comprehend them as moments in the process of abstraction. For example, being superseded is essence, essence superseded is the concept, the concept superseded is... the absolute idea. But what is the absolute idea? It is compelled to supersede its own self again, if it does not wish to go through the whole act of abstraction once more from the beginning and to reconcile itself to being a totality of abstraction which comprehends itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the abstraction, and so arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. Hence the whole of the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, and that only nature is something.
