4.6.6. Immanent Transcendence
The notion of immanent transcendence as the dialectic of essence and existence is based on Hegel’s notion of truth and actuality as correspondence of essence and existence. ‘Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence, or of inward with outward’ (Hegel 1830, §142). Not all existence (Sein) is actual (Wirklichkeit). Only existence that is reasonable corresponds to its essence and therefore has become true and is therefore actual. Marx saw the lack of control of the means of production, the labour process, and the results of labour by the immediate producers as an alienation of society and humans from their essence.
Estranged labour turns thus man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being (Marx 1844, 76).
Marcuse (1932) was one of the first critical scholars who had in the twentieth century seen the logic of essence as foundation of immanent transcendence:
The fact from which the critique and the interpretation set out was the alienation and estrangement of the human essence as expressed in the alienation and estrangement of labor, and hence the situation of man in the historical facticity of capitalism. This fact appears as the total inversion and concealment of what the critique had defined as the essence of man and human labor. [...] Regarding the situation and praxis from the standpoint of the history of man‘s essence makes the acutely practical nature of the critique even more trenchant and sharp: the fact that capitalist society calls into question not only economic facts and objects but the entire ‘existence‘ of man and ‘human reality‘ is for Marx the decisive justification for the proletarian revolution as total and radical revolution, unconditionally excluding any partial upheaval or ‘evolution.’ The justification does not lie outside or behind the concepts of alienation and estrangement – the justification is rather precisely this alienation and estrangement itself (Marcuse 1932, 104, 91).
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Critical Theory of Communication