Alienated from the social system, they do not know that their desires are system-determined and system-determining. And there is the alienation of those who do not identify with the institutions of their own society, who find their society empty and meaningless. And there is also for Hegel the alienation which develops in civil society between the small class of the wealthy and the growing discontent of the large class of impoverished workers. The most profound alienation of all in Hegel's thought is the alienation or estrangement between my consciousness and its objects, in which I am aware of the otherness of the object and seek in a variety of ways to overcome its alienation by mastering it, by bringing it back into myself in some way.As for Marx, we have seen that in the split between the two Marxisms, the young Marx is focused upon the concept of economic alienation. As a worker I am alienated from myself, from the product of my labor, from the money-worshipping society, from all those social institutions-- family, morality, law, government-- which coerce me into the service of the money-God and keep me from realizing my human creative potentiality. In mature Marxism, alienation is expressed through the division of labor and its many ramifications.
How, then, do existentialists use the concept of alienation? Apart from my own conscious being, all else, they say, is otherness, from which I am estranged. We are hemmed in by a world of things which are opaque to us and which we cannot understand. Moreover, science itself has alienated us from nature, by its outpouring of highly specialized and mathematicized concepts, laws, theories, and technologies which are unintelligible to the nonspecialist and layman; these products of science now stand between us and nature. --by T. Z. Lavine
