Hegel e il lato positivo del lavoro

“Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy (14). He grasps ‘labor’ as the ‘essence’ of man – as man’s essence in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labor (15). Labor is man’s ‘coming-to-be for himself’ within ‘alienation’, or as ‘alienated’ man. The only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is ‘abstractly mental’ labor. Therefore, that which constitutes the ‘essence’ of philosophy – the ‘alienation of man in his knowing of himself’, or ‘alienated’ science ‘thinking itself’ – Hegel grasps as its essence; and he is therefore able to gather together the separate elements and phases of previous philosophy, and to present his philosophy as ‘the’ philosophy. What the other philosophers did – that they grasped separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, and indeed of abstract self-consciousness – is ‘known’ to Hegel from the ‘doings’ of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute” [Karl Marx, a cura di Dirk J. Struik, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1964] [(14) Hegel mentions political economy in Sect. 189 of his ‘Philosophy of Right (…); (15) In the ‘Deutsche Zetischrift für Philosophie, 4 (1956), 6 (1958), the question is discussed whether Hegel did not, on occasion, see the negative side of labor (…)]