On The Alienation Theory Of Marx And Fromm

It has been about two hundred to three hundred years ever since Rousseau firstly revealed the inner contradiction between social progress and individual's development. During this period, human society has more and more material wealth, meanwhile deeper and deeper test from alienation. At the same time, alienation has absorbed people's attention as a philosophy item in wider and wider range. Marx and Fromm both investigate the beginning, development and prospect of alienation from different view of people's living practice in external world and human's sense and psychological regularity. Both of them suggest the basic theory of alienation for us.The dialectics factor of German classic philosophy clearly existed in the transcendence of Fichte over Kant's Dualism. Fichte's self-consciousness internally includes difference principle by identity principle, which means affirmation contains negation tendency, realized and then surpassed in ontology's activities. After that, Hegel explicitly defined the character of ontology's self-negation as "alienation". After the criticism on Hegel and revealing the alienation of religion, Feuerbach changed the subject of alienation from ontology to people which made alienation transform from previous neutral objective concept to value-judging concept with negative characters. Based on these, Marx complemented Feuerbach's abstract people to concrete people carrying out living practice, further more; Fromm added psychological regularity into it. The mentioned process leaded to two transitions in alienation research: alienation subject changed from ontology to people and the investigation angle of alienation returned from theory to living practice. The contradiction character of Fichte's self-consciousness has shown the generation of alienation for us, human's contradiction nature as alienation's main body. It is Rousseau who firstly noticed the phenomenon of alienation and traced the generation of it back to human's self-improvement ability that makes human different from animals. Under a series of external things' affect, self-improvement could express both malign and benign characters which make alienation possible. According to Marx, the contradiction between human's naturalness and transcendence,human's individuality and sociality compose human's dual existence. While from Fromm, living and death, finite and infinity, independence and loneliness make up the antinomy of human's existence. Here the difference on investigation angle between Marx and Fromm showed as: former one focused on individual's activity, later one paid more attention to human's sensitivity. So human's contradiction character is human's essential feature, whose specific expansion contributes to human's contradictive real life and psychological experience, forming the base of alienation's generation.Marx analyzed labor's alienation from the angle of human contradiction nature's objective expression. Labor, which serves as media of both human's nature and reality's nature, logically includes the possibility of alienation. When human's natural character keeps people remain in the media of labor, which means labor is regarded as means of getting materials, alienation turns this possibility into reality. Besides, the process of labor's historic expansion is also the real generation of alienation. Marx analyzed this process from both labor division and private property. Based on human's natural difference and potential realization, labor division came into being in specific history stage by the development of social productivity. The benign cycle between labor division and development of productivity promoted the productivity, however it limited everybody's activity, which made it impossible for people to realize all the potential abilities, blocking human's development to some extent. This is logic paradox caused by human's contradiction nature. One factor of labor division means limited production make exchange necessary, so the dependency relationship is common throughout the entire society. This is the reason why labor division is regarded as the direct cause of alienation. The other factor of labor division is the distribution of production materials among laborers, and in turn the unequal allocation of goods. The alienation labor caused by the separation of capital and labor generate private property and then solidify it. Once the private property, it forms a mutual relationship with alienated labor. So private property is the power to promote alienation. After the alienated labor, it promotes the alienation of social life in other domains which is the major current situation of history development. These two reasons predict the two efforts of discarding alienation: eliminating spontaneous labor division and private ownership simultaneously, replacing with voluntary labor division and production material public ownership. This process must happen throughout the entire human society at the same time.Fromm researched the psychological alienation from the angle of human's contradictive character, introspection. Rationality and self-awareness compose human's essential feature. But rationality at the same time urges people of independence, and in turn feeling lonely in the independence mode. These are the major representation of the paradox for human's existence. Fromm inspected human's psychological regulation by analyzing the originally blurred concept of freedom. Once people acquired independence, he must be faced with loneliness; people might acquire negative freedom by breaking away from bondage, however the positive freedom could be only achieved through free development. It is inadequate for real freedom by breaking away from social bondage; the bondage freedoms on three levels, Fromm inspected the generation of psychological alienation. Human come into being by an individual process of getting rid of the initial bondage with the world and acquiring independence. Therefore, trivial people would suffer from loneliness and discomfort by separating from the powerful external world. There are two possible choices for eliminating loneliness: one is free development which rebuild the relationship with external world through inner potential power, the other is to abandon self-awareness, which makes people recess to original common by submitting. The later one could never solve problems in that it is an escape from freedom, showing psychological alienation. The reason why psychological happens is that the society failed to provide corresponding conditions for individual's development and in turn suppressed one's free development. Besides, under the affection of specific social culture, people would sometimes abandon individual free development and turn to anti-production character. The third, limited by society, people are lack of correct knowledge of reality. Suck kind of unconsciousness is another expression of alienation. As far the alienation elimination is concerned, Fromm regards sound society mechanism might realize individuals free development. At the same time, perfecting human's rationality, getting rid of the chain of illusion by rational knowledge would both contribute to positive freedom by breaking through inner bondage.This paper inspects the alienation from both philosophy historic angle and philosophic angle, starting from comparing between the theories of Marx and Fromm:First of all, different from previous plane arrangement of Marx's alienation theory, the paper analyzed between Marx's and Fromm's, examination their inner structure, trying to excavate the essential meaning through "sympathetic understanding" attitude. By this research, try to cover all the possible view angles from Marx theory on alienation. Both Marx and Fromm regard the realization of human nature as the precondition and direction for alienation theory, so these two alienation theories share the same inner connection as humanism. Based on this, the paper deeply introspects the deviation during the discussion on Marxism Philosophy in 80's. Marxism Philosophy is more about the freedom and liberation of human beings than social development regularity. "Human's nature" of Marx is by not abstract but a real and historic realization process in social development. In fact, human's nature is recessive clue throughout the alienation theory and even the entire Marxism Philosophy. Hence, alienation theory is never the immature expression of Marxism Philosophy but an important problem which has never been neglected during Marx's whole life. In our past research, due to the partial understanding of Marxism Philosophy, human factor has never been paid sufficient attention to, not to mention to research human's awareness activities from philosophy angle. Fromm filled this blank for us. Humanism should not be limited to material satisfaction but inner positive life and inclination for real freedom. The common sense on "social development should be based on individuals" has been achieved, however, which kind of human nature and how to realize it are still to be finalized. During the process, the real understanding of Marx, Fromm, Humanism and alienation would be obtained.Secondly, based on those materials, the paper deeply inspects the alienation theory. Alienation as human's contradictive character has both expression in external world and realization in inner psychological world. All alienation is based on labor alienation and achieves corresponding psychological experience. As a sign of historic development, alienation would push the society move forward by upgrading human's intelligence and promoting social development through abandoning it. As alienation generates from human's contradictive character, it would last long as human's history. However, it achieved the deepest phase in capitalist private ownership. Alienation, anti-alienation and alienation compose the realization process for communist movement.The third, judgment on alienation should only persist on the bi-standard of value and history. The reason why Marx would regard alienation as "historic puzzle" lays in the phenomenon that human value's depreciation coexists with social development. If the judgment on alienation would be made either from value or history factor, it would be a paradox of partial negation for the other factor. Both Marx and Fromm contribute to this bi-standard. Marx persisted on both historic valuation of social development and valuation of individual's development. But because he focused more on life activities and in turn deeper illustration on historic valuation. He failed to tell the nature of inner bondage from external one for freedom. So, though both Marx and Engels regarded the elimination of exploitation as the medium for individual's free development, they failed to point out how to break through the inner bondage and achiever positive freedom on psychological level. Fromm completed the theory by reminding us: the last barrier for freedom is human's inner bondage. Unfortunately, Fromm neglected the inter function between society and humans by overemphasizing human value's realization on human's liberation forecasting. So he failed to pay suitable attention to private property which holds an important position in Marx alienation theory. Because of this, Fromm's humanism is regarded as incomplete. The bi-standard for alienation valuation is helpful for reducing the misunderstanding of humanism: the realization of humanism should be judged by the single standard of the human value's realization in former research. This standard is generally correct except lacking of concentration on social development. Such humanism would be controversial because of its empty. So we think real humanism could be judged only by valuation, its realization must accompany specific historic process.To achieve mentioned breakthrough, the thinking mode must be changed in advance, which requires us to replace intellectual mode with dialectical one. Human's nature, labor division, private property, alienation and freedom all have contradictive meanings. So if we should treat these questions with an attitude of either one or another, the truth could not be covered comprehensively. In 80's, Marxism is a social science about the contradictive regularity between productivity and production relation, economic basis and superstructure, about the revolution strategy for proletariat to demolish the capitalist government. We failed to understand that Marxism is more about realization for human's freedom and comprehensive development. In this mode, whether Marxism is about inspection on social development or realization of individual value is up in argument. In fact, Marxism has both characters as mentioned. But we should have such self-awareness as social science is the method of human's philosophy and human's philosophy is the purpose of social science. Social science is about specific operation for real purpose, human's philosophy points out the direction for those specific operations. Marxism is the union of operation and direction, ideal and reality.