>> It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth
>> has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the
>> immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to
>> unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of
>> human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of
>> Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion
>> into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the
>> criticism of politics.
>
> The above doesn't convey any clear meaning to me.
The meaning is found in the term "self-estrangement." Marx has taken from Hegel the idea of the human essence as "freedom." The meaning of "freedom" here is the developed capacity to perceive truly including the developed capacity to perceive values truly and on this basis make actual life "good." The ethical essence of a good life is relations of "mutual recognition" - "love."
Human history is understood as an "educational" process through which this capacity develops. Prior to its full development we are "estranged" from it. Since it constitutes our "essence," these prior states are states of "self-estrangement." They are also states in which perception involves illusion to some significant degree, illusion from which it is very difficult to escape.
Like all other "being," human being is understood to be active being. This ontological idea underpins the epistemological doctrine of "praxis"; the doctrine that explains how human experience provides a basis for true perception.
Partly for this reason, both the capacity to perceive truly and understanding based on it develop within the labour process. The model here is Hegel's account of the effect of slavery on human consciousness and understanding. The master/slave relation, like the capitalist/wage laborer relation, is a relation of self-estrangement which, while producing illusions, also eventually produces both an increased capacity for understanding and increased understanding. This includes an increased capacity to understand these relations as self-estrangement and based on this to refashion them to make them consistent with the human "essence" and the realization of the "realm of freedom."
This treatment of human being is based on ontological - "metaphysical" - premises different from those that have dominated "science" since the 17th century. Among other things, the latter have no logical space for the idea of human being as a being able to perceive truly.
The ground for these claims are "phenomenological" in the sense of Husserl, i.e. the ground is direct experience - the "intentionality" of consciousness - freed from interpretation and illusion (such as that present in the passage from Hume I quoted recently).
This idea of phenomenology differs from Heidegger's. He associates the capacity to perceive human being truly with mystical insight expressed as mythology and claims on this basis, and in contrast to Hegel and Marx, that, though we now live estranged from it, the human essence - human "authenticity" - was actual at the beginning of history. That essence is "violence-doing."
Here he is elaborating this as an interpretation (mystical presumably) of an ode from Sophocles' Antigone:
"We have already alluded to the fact that this [the ode] is not a matter of describing and clarifying the domains and behavior of the human, who is one being among many; instead, this is a poetic projection of human being on the Basis of its extreme possibilities and limits. In this way, we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest *is* what it is *because* it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (*das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende*).
"The inexplicability of this inception is no defect, no failure of our knowledge of history. Instead, the genuineness and greatness of historical knowing lie in understanding the character of this inception as a mystery. Knowing a primal history is not ferreting out the primitive and collecting bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science, but, if is anything at all, it is mythology." ( Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6)
"The first two verses cast forth what the following ode as a whole will seek to capture in the details of its saying, and which it must fit into the structure of the word. The human being is, in *one* word, *to deinotaton*, the uncanniest. This saying about humanity grasps it from the most extreme limits and the most abrupt abysses of its Being. This abruptness and ultimacy can never be seen by eyes that merely describe and ascertain something present at hand, even if a myriad such eyes should want to seek out human characteristics and conditions. Such Being opens itself up only to poetic-thoughtful projection. We find no delineation of present-at-hand exemplars of humanity, no more than we find some blind and foolish exaltation of the human essence from beneath, from a dissatisfied peevishness that snatches at an importance that it feels is missing. We find no glorified personality. Among the Greeks there were no personalities yet [and thus nothing suprapersonal either]. The human being is *to deinotaton*, the uncanniest of the uncanny. The Greek word *deinon* and our translation call for an explication here. This explication is to be given only on the basis of the unspoken prior view of the entire ode, which itself supplies the only adequate interpretation of the first two verses. The Greek word *deinon* has that uncanny ambiguity with which the saying of the Greeks traverses the opposed con-frontations of Being.
"On the one hand, *deinon* names the terrible, but it does not apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish, and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call something 'terribly cute.' The *deinon* is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it *can* keep its overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more harmless but only *more* terrible and distant.
"But on the other hand, *deinon* means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence - and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein." (pp. 159-60)
Ted