Brecht’s Reading of the Early Marx: The Alienation of Labor and the Dialectic of the Familar and the Strange

Summary

In exile, Bertolt Brecht read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx while developing his ideas on Verfremdung (estrangement, distantiation, or making strange) and Entfremdung (alienation). His reading of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik ( The Science of Logic) informed his practice of Verfremdung or “distancing” as a method of critically presenting what is familiar and enabling a rethinking once something is presented anew in its strangeness. For Hegel, this is part of the process of thinking, of the movement of thought

In a section of Wissenschaft der Logik marked by Brecht in his own copy, Hegel argues for the need to re-examine familiar ideas and concepts, concepts such as war, a people, an animal, God, love. To be of any use in critical thinking, familiar concepts have to be made to seem unfamiliar so as to overcome any unwillingness to think again about what is presumed to be known, as “so ist … was bekannt ist, darum nicht erkannt, und es kann selbst die Ungeduld erregen, sich noch mit Bekanntem beschäftigen zu sollen” (“That with which we are simply familiar, is for that very reason not intelligently apprehended … and to have to occupy oneself with what is familiar can even arouse impatience”). The categories we use in our thoughts seem to be the most natural because they are so frequently and unquestioningly repeated, but it is exactly the most familiar concepts that need to be re-examined by distancing them from familiar contexts, separating them from their common usage, and seeing them as having not only an abstract identity but also particular and contradictory applications.

Rather than being at the mercy of the categories of thought in our apparently “natural” way of thinking, we can start to free ourselves by abstracting from these common usages. We cannot stand outside of the nature of things or think outside of the given concepts of thought, but we can become more active, critical thinkers and concentrate on the “Tätigkeit des Denkens,” the activity of thought. Normally, we are unconsciously busy in our thoughts, but the task for Hegel is to see how these forms of thought can be brought to critical consciousness.