Religious alienation

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Religious alienation is a term some use to describe how religion creates an impediment to human self-understanding.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Although the roots of alienation lie far back in the

Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807) that alienation occupies a central place in his writings.

In the opening sections of the Phenomenology, Hegel attacked the views of

Absolute Knowledge
.

Bruno Bauer

Hegel had created a system; and all his followers believed that it was the final one. However, when it came to applying the system to particular problems, they conceived his system to be ambivalent. The fact that alienation seemed to them to be a challenge, something to be overcome, led them to put the emphasis on the concepts of dialectic and negativity in Hegel's system; and thus they challenged, first in religion and then in politics, his view that the problem of alienation had, at least in principle, been solved. The foremost among these radical disciples of Hegel, Bruno Bauer, applied the concept of alienation to the religious field.[1] Bauer, who lectured in theology and made his name as a Gospel critic, considered that religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity, caused a division in man's consciousness by becoming opposed to this consciousness as a separate power. Thus religion was an attitude towards the essence of self-consciousness that had become estranged from itself. In this context, Bauer promoted the use of the expression "self-alienation" that soon became current among the Young Hegelians.[2]

Ludwig Feuerbach

For

species-being, as innate to the human species.[3] This position would later be examined by Karl Marx in his "Theses on Feuerbach
".

References

  1. ^ Moggach, Douglas. "Bruno Bauer". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  2. McLellan, David (1973). "ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX". In Philip Wiener (ed.). The Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Archived from the original
    on 2009-09-07. Retrieved 2009-09-28.
  3. ^ Worldsocialism.org Alienation study case