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For Hegel, what all human beings have in common – what makes them human – is ‘mind’ (reason, thought). Moreover, the categories of thought are the same for all human minds. Hence in Hegel the world becomes the creation, the product, of these universal categories of thought.

Hegel had a particular way of speaking about all this which involved the use of two of his most important concepts — objectification and alienation. According to Hegel, all human history is a process whereby ideas objectify themselves in material reality. Thus, the idea of ‘shelter’ is objectified into houses, the ideas of ‘communication’ and ‘transport’ are objectified into roads, railways, buses, cars, telegraph wires, etc. And the idea of a ‘general interest of society’ is objectified into the institutions of the state.

However, this process of objectification is also, for Hegel, a process of alienation. Because as mind objectifies itself into innumerable different material products and social and political institutions (the family, the occupational group, the state) it fails to grasp that these things are its products, its embodiments, its manifold objectifications. Hence it treats them as things separate (‘alien’) from itself. In fact this was how Hegel explained empiricism, empiricism was the expression, in the realm of philosophy, of mind’s alienation from itself.

The linked concepts of objectification and alienation bring us to the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of history. For Hegel, human history is the process by which mind first alienates itself through objectification and then, gradually and in stages, recognises these objectifications as its own products and comes, therefore, to understand these objectifications and its own achievements and potential.

For Hegel, the goal, the culmination of history is the overcoming of alienation and the final triumph of reason. This consists in mind’s total self-understanding and self-consciousness both of itself and thus (simultaneously) of the world.Hegel considers alienation only at the level of consciousness (stages of consciousness); as Marx points out, he ignores its external dimension. For Hegel, the problem of alienation is important only as a stage of consciousness. Therefore, in contrast to the modern use of the term ‘alienation’, for Hegel, it has a positive meaning. In this sense, even though Marx took the concept of alienation from Hegel, there is a significant difference between the Hegelian understanding of alienation and Marx’s conception of alienation.

Peter Critchley Being and Space