Bernardo Bárzana

Bernardo Bárzana

Doctoral DAAD Fellow

Period at the center: August 2024 - September 2025

Research Project: Hegel and Marx on Nature, Labor and the Human Being

Email: bernardobarzana2025@u.northwestern.edu

Bernardo Bárzana is a PhD student in Philosophy at Northwestern University. Before that, he received an M.A. from the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a B.A. from Yale University. He has also spent time at UNAM in his hometown in Mexico City, and at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris. His main research interests are in Hegel, Marx, Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and contemporary Eco-Marxism.

Research Project

Hegel and Marx on Nature, Labor and the Human Being

My dissertation traces the systematic interrelation between these three concepts in the work of these two thinkers. I begin by showing how Hegel theorizes labor as the transformative activity that both negates nature and preserves it, but also as irreducibly social: in labor, one produces for another, must therefore learn to recognize the needs and desires of the other, and must learn to mold and shape one's own laboring activity accordingly. Hegel goes so far as to claim that the abstract category "human being" first develops in the context of the system of needs in civil society, where the subject counts not as a particular this or that, but generally as a needy and desirous consumer, as well as an active producer. Labor for Hegel is thus a crucial category that mediates a complex quadrangle: between individuals and nature, among individuals, and with the universal category of the human.

With this background I turn to the early Marx's critique of Hegel. Marx approves of Hegel's characterization of labor as the essence of the human, but considers that Hegel puts the cart before the horse in viewing nature as a mere attribute or predicate of self-consciousness, and not as an essential characteristic of the human. While this aspect of his critique in my view misses the mark, it enables Marx to adopt a different methodology, one that begins with empirical facts and develops contradictions from there, rather than heavy-handedly recognizing the ontological structure of the Idea everywhere. This is particularly relevant, and has political implications, in the way Hegel theorizes the relationship between civil society and the state. I conclude by arguing that this recovery of Marx's critique of Hegel presents an important corrective to contemporary critical and social theory, especially to help us think through the crisis-laden relation between modern capitalist societies and nature.