Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the Unhappy Consciousness. The Alienated Soul is the consciousness
of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory
being.” Hegel thought unhappy consciousness is like gazing
at one’s own self-consciousness in somebody else’s consciousness.
Consciousness was real yet somehow out there, elsewhere,
unable to understand either its own thinking or the conditions that
surround it. People exist in a mist-enveloped world, cut off from
themselves and other people. In such a context, thinking “is no
more than the discordant clang of ringing bells,” said Hegel, “or
a cloud of warm incense. … This boundless pure inward feeling
comes to have indeed its object; but this object does not make its
appearance in conceptual form, and therefore comes on the scene
as something external and foreign.” 8
Therein, reckoned Wahl, lay the pervasiveness of alienation
and the tragedy of human history. Wahl wasn’t interested in the
formalism of the Hegelian dialectic or in the “master–slave” contradiction
Alexandre Kojève illuminated a decade on; instead,
Hegel’s emotional and spiritual content shone through. In Wahl’s
eyes, Hegel was an antecedent of Kierkegaard and a kindred spirit
of Pascal; Hegel’s dialectic, Wahl believed, was first and foremost
intuitive and experiential, not conceptual and intellectual, something
felt rather than thought. “The dialectic,” Wahl wrote, “before
being a method, is an experience by which Hegel passes from one
idea to another. … It is, in part, a reflection of Christian thought,
of the idea of a God made man, which led Hegel to a conception
of the concrete universal. Behind the philosopher, we discover the
theologian, and behind the rationalist, the romantic. … At the root
of this doctrine, which presents itself as a chain of concepts, there
is a sort of affective warmth.” 9
Lefebvre recognized how the abstract, idealist basis of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit could be made more materialist—indeed
should be grounded in concrete history, in grubby actuality. Before
long, he’d put a distinctively political spin on Wahl’s religious
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