Comparison Of Marx And Hagel’s Self-consciousness

Marx’s research on self- consciousness was early reflected in his doctoral thesis "The difference between Democritus’ nature of and Epicurus’ nature of philosophy". Then Marx frequently contacted with young Hagel and his description of self-consciousness, with Hagel’s idealistic tendency, was considered to be influenced by Bruno Powell. It is inevitable that Marx’s self- consciousness philosophy was influenced by Hagel’s "The Phenomenology of Mind", which enabled Marx to focus on the world of consciousness and decrypted it. Thus he defined the world of consciousness as the dual world of human world and attached importance to the people who has dual behavior. Finally, in people’s object activity(labor) of consciousness, he made people realize the possibility and reality of self-consciousness.Firstly, this paper began with comparing their theoretical source of self consciousness: Hagel’s self-consciousness is obtained from sensibility, perception and intellectuality of cognition and certainty of consciousness, which is human’s abstract performance. It eventually evolved into the abstract ration and absolute knowledge, which finally developed into absolute concept and absolute spirit. In Marx doctoral thesis, he showed self-consciousness activity by using three motion modes of atoms and explained the sameness of objective and subjective self-consciousness with atoms’ self-being and self-making. Secondly, their comparison is also reflected in the correlation between self-consciousness and human being. Hagel replaced human’s subjective practice and development with the self definition and self expansion of absolute truth, in which human is virtualized by ration and human’s development in practice becomes a representation of rationality. Marx defines self-consciousness as dual self, in which human is the virtualized self and the virtual world cannot do without the real world. The existence of human is the basis for self-consciousness philosophy and human group existence is a source of self-consciousness philosophy. Finally, based on Marx’s description of labor consciousness and labor relations, this paper analyzed the possibility and reality of self-consciousness and grasped the intrinsic link between Marx’s self-consciousness and historical materialism.