Living Distinctions over Atrophied Oppositions: Hegel as Critic of Reification

1

Table of ContentsIntroduction 3The inversion of subject and object 10The objective-subjective structure of reification 15The authority of appearances and the untruth of apparent knowing 19“Sense-certainty or the “this” and meaning something” 22The reified structure of sense-certainty 29“Individuality, which in its own eyes is real in and for itself”

35“The spiritual realm of animals and deception; or the thing that matters [die Sache selbst]” 38The reified structure of the individual real in and for itself

47Conclusion 54

2

I. Introduction

One need only glance at the daily commentaries of economic

analysts to herald the urgency surrounding a critique of the fetishism

of economic forces. Indeed, foundational for most narratives in

circulation on either end of the neoclassical spectrum, whether

laissez-faire or Keynesian, confer upon the economy and its calamities

an almost omnipotent status, one in which financial capital and

markets are afforded spectral reverence and trepidation1. In this

sense, the fetish of the economy entails its elevation above and

against the social relations and processes that are constitutive of its

dynamics. When world growth dramatically decelerated with

declining rates of productive investment in the early 1970s, the

recourse for deferring a falling rate of profit had been an increased

pattern of speculation in financial markets through, for example,

currency trading, derivatives, and the securitization of various forms

of debt in order to gamble on the future fluctuations of asset prices.

This massive shift toward speculative uses of liquidity cultivated

unprecedented financial wagers stimulated by the profits of interest-

1 As a recent Wall Street Journal article inadvertently expresses the supernatural detachment of market forces from the real social forces that reside at their foundation, “"Markets are doing their job," said IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. "They scare policy makers into doing the right things…I'm relatively optimistic that we'll get there. How we get there, whether it's completely smooth or not, we'll have to see."” S. Reddy, B. Blackstone and B. Davis. “Global Finance Chiefs at Odds” Wall Street Journal 15 Oct. 2012. 18 Oct. 2012 <online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443624204578055850552706848.html>.

3

bearing capital within the financial sector. The current crisis therefore

appeared as a financial crisis only to the extent that finance was the

most dynamic sector of the economy at the time, a dynamism

instigated in fact by the precarious returns on productive investment

taking place since the 1970s.

Thus the fetishism of the economy at present can be expressed

by the obscurities surrounding the source of profit. As Marx states in

his Theories of Surplus Value, “the form of revenue and the sources of

revenue are the most fetishistic expression of the relations of

capitalist production.”2 In the case of the current economic crisis, the

realm of production, specifically with the extraction of surplus value,

becomes eclipsed as the source of profit, and instead, the sphere of

finance substitutes a declining rate in profit through its various

speculative investments on debt. The result currently unfolding on a

globe scale illuminates the following passage from Capital: Volume 3:

“The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most

fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. We have here M — M',

money creating more money, self-expanding value, without the

process that effectuates these two extremes.”3 For Marx, this

effectuating process resides in the sociality generated by the

contradictions between capital and labor, a conflict receded from view

2 Karl Marx. Theories of Surplus Value (Prometheus Books, New York, 2000) 453.3 Karl Marx. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 37, Karl Marx: Capital, Vol. III (International Publishers, New York, 1998) 388.

4

by most contemporary economic discourse in which finance is

represented “as an independent source of value, of value creation, […]

a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in

which the result of the capitalist process of production — divorced

from the process — acquires an independent existence.”4

The critique of the fetishism of economy therefore yields an

exigency even exceeding Marx’s own day.5 Through Marx’s

foundational analysis of social relations mediated by commodity

exchange within the capitalist mode of production, the fetish

characteristics of the economy become lucid. When one turns to the

opening pages of Capital: Volume 1, commodities are unfolded and

assigned the social function as mediators of production relations –

that is, through the production and exchange of commodities,

relations between people are inverted into relations between things

while inversely, relations between commodities are projected to

possess animate qualities operating independently of their producers.

This seminal theme within the work of Marx is subsequently theorized

under the concept of reification [Verdinglichung], or ‘thingification’,

most notably with the work of György Lukács in his book, History and 4 Ibid, 390.5 Before proceeding, it must be noted that while the example described at the outset refers to the fetish of capital, Marx does maintain respective structural differences in each of the fetish forms of commodities, money, and capital. However, for the purposes of what is to follow, it will only be necessary to concentrate on the characteristics of the fetish of commodities explicated at the beginning of Capital: Volume 1, since for Marx, it is in the commodity that the relations of bourgeois society are expressed in their most elemental form.

5

Class Consciousness. Lukács’ analysis of the fetish form attempts to

historicize the phenomena of reification along the specific changes in

the modes of production and consumption of commodity society, and

elaborates the commodity form as a universal mode of social

mediation, one outside of the direct exchange relation in which an

increasingly rationalized, specialized, and fragmented world comes to

reflect the principles of the commodity form.

The work of Lukács in extending the theory of reification

proceeds by grounding Marx within the German philosophical

tradition of G.W.F. Hegel, and as such, takes seriously Marx’s warning

within the afterward to the second German edition of Capital: Volume

1 not to treat Hegel as a “dead dog”. It is particularly in accordance

with Marx’s method for dialectically unfolding the categories of

political economy that the influence of the Hegelian dialectic begins to

emerge. This methodological inheritance consists in the movement

from the most simple and abstract immediacies, proceeding through

their own immanent wealth of determinations for disclosing a complex

and concrete totality. This logic proceeds from the most immediate

categories, wherein their own internal determinations conflict with

their appearance and warrant the necessity of superseding their

initial configuration, whereby the determinations of a concept become

both separated and unified. As such, the intrinsic determination of a

single category, one sublated through its own non-identity, or with a

6

negativity emerging through its own internal deficiencies, will, for

Marx, systematically yield a dynamic totality of social relations

constitutive of a society dominated by the capitalist mode of

production. For Marx, categories of bourgeois society are thereby the

expression of its own concrete social relations, and thus to begin with

how things appear to be, rather than how they actually are, allows for

the penetration into a more developed whole. As such, the thought of

bourgeois society comes to reveal the being of bourgeois society in

accordance with the fact that the being of bourgeois society

determines the thought of bourgeois society. It is this aspect of his

dialectic, namely the interrelatedness of thought and being – whereby

epistemological modes are themselves constitutive of their own

object, or that how one knows is not independent from what one

knows – that Marx inherits from Hegel.6

Of course, it is no secret that Marx himself lauded Hegel on a

number of occasions, despite his own criticisms of a pan-logicism.7 6 As Lukács aptly states: “The question of the internal structuring of the problem leads us back to the central issue confronting the dialectical method: to the right understanding of the dominant position held by the concept of totality and hence to the philosophy of Hegel. On this essential point Marx never abandoned Hegel’s philosophical method. And this was at all times – and most convincingly in The Phenomenology of Mind – both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history. For the Hegelian – dialectical – identification of thought and existence, the belief in their unity as the unity and totality of a process is also, in essence, the philosophy of history of historical materialism.” György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 33.7 As Marx writes in 1873 within the afterward to the second German edition of Capital: Volume 1: “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.” Karl Marx. Capital: Volume 1 (Penguin Books, London, 1976) 103.

7

For instance, the capacity of the Hegelian dialectic to illustrate a

process by which reality comes to know itself and call into question all

extrinsic otherness through its own internally contradictory modes of

existent knowing, thereby revealing all acquired knowledge of the

world to be a knowledge of oneself, is for Marx, aptly illuminated

within the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Even as early as 1844,

Marx writes:

“The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour.”8

As Marx here recognizes, it is through Hegel’s dialectic that the

content of even the most abstract categories with the Phenomenology

will yield a dynamism whereby, as Lukács remarks in The Young

Hegel, “all the problems of both objective reality and man's subjective

knowledge form the subject-matter of this logic and, finally, that only

in and through this logic could the problems encountered by classical

German idealism in its efforts to overcome metaphysics be finally

resolved.”9

Indeed, the investigation of Hegel’s Phenomenology

accompanies the journey [Erfahrung] of consciousness through

8 Karl Marx. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 3 Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (International Publishers, New York, 1975) 332.9 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 442.

8

phenomenal knowledge towards true knowledge, or science

[Wissenschaft], along the way assuming various shapes and stages

[Gestalten] laid out by its own nature and intrinsically contradictory

determinations, essentially illustrating an experience with itself. It is a

negative path, or a “path of despair” as Hegel describes it, one in

which consciousness experiences a loss of itself as it expands its truth

through a knowledge of itself. In other words, all of its untruths

contain a truth to the extent that each new result is apprehended as

the result of consciousness’ own activity.

It is this progressive insight into the untruth of its phenomenal

knowledge and immediate appearances [Erscheinung] that

consciousness comes to be revealed as its own standard, whereby the

truth of the object in-itself is compared with the truth of the object for

consciousness. This dialectical process discloses the activity of

consciousness to be a comparison of consciousness with itself, one

whose movement proceeds by way of an examination into whether its

concept corresponds to the object and whether the object corresponds

to its concept. As such, what for consciousness may appear as a

distant objectivity of the world, for example, is in fact constitutive of

its own mode of knowing and being. It is through this general

framework that Hegel collapses any rigid separation between

epistemology and ontology, or rather unfolds both a logical and

historical progressive realization of the complex identity of the two,

9

and for which “everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the

truth not merely as substance but also equally as subject.” (¶17)10

This general philosophical theme, by which a subject proceeds

to supersede its own immediacies and reveal itself to be intrinsically

related to its own object, rather than simply taking refuge within the

appearance of an object’s otherness and thereby reifying it, pervades

the work of both Hegel and Marx. It will be this thread that the

following work will modestly attempt to explore.

It is undoubtedly the case however that such a broad narrative

pervades the Phenomenology of Spirit in its entirety, one in which an

individual recognizes oneself as the both the subject and object of

social praxis, that is, the dialectical sublation [Aufhebung] of

immediacy and of sequestered otherness into a process whereby the

objective world becomes integrated by the subject of experience. As

Lukács states, “Hegel's logic shows on the one hand that the objects

which seem to be so fixed and rigid are in reality processes, and, on

the other hand, it regards the objective nature of the objects as

products of' ‘externalization’ on the part of the subject.”11 It will be

the aim of the following work however to demonstrate and make

10 G.W.F. Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Within the following work, all selections from the Phenomenology will be procured from Terry Pinkard translation, as yet to be published and available here: http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html. The quotation itself will always be followed by a pilcrow to indicate the exact location within the Phenomenology.11 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 532.

10

explicit the structure of reification within Hegel’s Phenomenology in

its most perspicuous moments.

To accomplish such a task, it will be first necessary to outline a

particular understanding of the phenomena of reification itself,

specifically as theorized by Lukács and thereby establish a framework

for investigating choice sections of the Phenomenology. As will

become clear, this framework will consist in both an objective and

subjective schematic for grasping the condition of reification

constitutive of commodity society – that is, the extent to which

capitalism, through its fetish forms, structures both the objective

conditions of subjective experience and the subjective conditions of

objective experience. Such a logical distinction will enable one to

distill two sections of the Phenomenology as exemplary of the reified

social life constitutive of commodity production and its contradiction.

To interpret Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a critique of

reification is however, admittedly, to pose numerous problems. Most

glaringly is the suggestion that the conditions of reification

themselves are capable of being extracted out of logical dynamics

independent from the historical specificities constituting a society

dominated by commodity production. If indeed reification is a

condition that cannot be reduced to an abstract logical analysis

irrespective of historical configurations, the extent to which a theory

of reification extracted out of the Phenomenology becomes plausible

11

can only be in accordance with the categorial methodology for

illuminating the logical preconditions of a reified consciousness,

rather than the phenomena of reification as an historical event.

Therefore, with a strict emphasis on Hegel’s methodological insight

for combating a rigid separation between subject and object,

appearance and essence, substance and subject, truth and falsity,

abstract and concrete, immediacy and the mediated etc., the purpose

of the paper will be to establish not an anachronistic analysis of

reification bereft of its origins within the commodity social form, but

instead the logical groundwork best suited for comprehending a socio-

historical pathology that subsequently comes to be instantiated only

with Marx in the critique of political economy. Indeed, Lukács, writing

in History and Class Consciousness, describes modern philosophy,

culminating in the work of Hegel, as unable “to do more than provide

a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois

society. It is only the manner of this deduction, namely the dialectical

method that points beyond bourgeois society.”12 It is therefore

ultimately the aim of the following work that by grasping the

dynamics of the Phenomenology, a text arguably written at the dawn

of capitalist society in its fully developed form, the historicity of

Hegel’s methodology will emerge. Put simply, since the contemporary

pathologies of a reified social life must have their origin within the

12 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 148.

12

reified consciousness of bourgeois thought, the Phenomenology wields

a distinctively historical perspective for grasping the intellectual roots

of reified consciousness itself, even if the concrete conditions of

commodity production as a universal mode of social mediation are still

yet only nascent.13

II. The inversion of subject and object

Without submerging into the depths of Marx’s systematic

critical analysis, let it briefly be stated that capitalism, in what

follows, shall be fundamentally understood as a totality of social

relations which are mediated by objective forms that, while

constitutive of social practice, attain an autonomous existence from

those practices, and in turn, instantiate them. It is through this

interpretation that capitalism comes to be understood as a form of

domination by real abstractions – or objective domination [sachliche

Herrschaft] as Marx refers to it – that is, human activity becomes

structured by objective forms of social mediation, specifically that of

abstract labor, which is constituted by determinate modes of real,

13 It should therefore be explicitly stated that the present work makes no claim to the extent that Hegel possessed insight into the concrete aspects of the phenomena of reification. Rather, it can be argued that Hegel implicitly addressed reification’s philosophic expressions, insofar as the latter originate not solely within the technological development of economy, but also within the metaphysical accomplishments of modern western philosophy, ranging from Cartesian dualism to a subjectivity bequeathed the omnipotent capacity of constituting its own object, culminating in the work of Kant. As his Elements of the Philosophy of Right clearly demonstrate, Hegel was not, therefore, a thinker of reification when it came to the concrete structuring of society.

13

concrete practices and objectified through the categories of

commodity, money, and capital.

It is through such a structure that the fetishism of commodities

asserts itself. Because all human labor is congealed within the

commodity, social relations between people become mediated by the

exchange relation between things. As such, Marx posits an inversion

of subject and object whereby relations between people resemble that

of things while the relations between commodities appear as relations

between animate entities. Such is the fetishistic character of

commodities viewed from their “metaphysical subtleties and

theological niceties”14: commodities are the expression of human

activity which, grasped in their immediacy, seem to operate

independent of human activity, socializing within the realm of

exchange, a realm which has banished all concrete activity under the

regime of abstract labor. The purpose of human activity thereby

becomes the purpose of capital, that is, production becomes

production for exchange, rather than for the satisfaction of needs. As

such, “the purpose of commerce is not consumption, directly, but the

gaining of money, of exchange values.”15 As a result, the satisfaction

of needs becomes mediated by the demands of wage labor and

thereby, in a fetishistic manner, elevates the demands of the

commodity over and against the needs of its creators.

14 Karl Marx. Capital: Volume 1 (Penguin Books, London, 1976) 163.15 Karl Marx. Grundrisse (Penguin Books, 1973) 149.

14

Taking the fetish character of the commodity social form to be

the pivotal and most essential component of the sociality constitutive

of capitalism, György Lukács, within his collection of essays under the

title History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

(1919-1923), seeks to expand the structural implications of commodity

fetishism over time, specifically through the category of reification.16

Predominantly investigated in the essay “Reification and the

Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), Lukács outlines the

increasing fragmented, rationalized, and specialized system of

commodity production to influence social relations by instilling the

qualities and attributes that mirror the developments of commodity

production itself, and as a result, become articulated through all other

facets of social life. The commodity form thereby emerges, for Lukács,

as a universal mode of social mediation, one outside of the direct

exchange relation and which is expressed through a reified

consciousness exemplified within various social institutions. The

16 While on the surface it might seem as if Lukács affirms an undifferentiated use of and conflates the categories of ‘fetishism’ and ‘reification’, a closer inspection will reveal important distinctions. While the differences between the categories of ‘fetishism’ and ‘reification’ for Lukács are beyond the scope of the present paper, it will suffice, for the purposes of what is to follow, to qualify reification as continuous with the condition of the fetish of commodities, with however the important stipulation that the former is not constrained to the social practices within the actual production and exchange of commodities. Instead, the category of reification refers to the extent at which the commodity social form, through the fetish of the commodity itself and thereby with its principles of rationalization and fragmentation, universalizes itself upon all other modes of social mediation. More specifically, reification is the extension of the commodity fetish into all aspects of social life, an amplification and generalization most suitable for the argument of the present work.

15

examples offered by Lukács – specifically demonstrative of the

influence of Simmel and Weber – consist of the form of the state and

jurisprudence with its increasing calculative administration of justice

and the subordinating dominance of bureaucracy with its formal

standardization. Even examples such as the division of cognitive

faculties, journalism, and marriage are all scrutinized for their

development under the universal commodity form. Lukács thereby

identifies the core of reification as follows:

“Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”17

As such, characteristic of the reified consciousness is a series of

pathological modes by which both the self, the world, and their

relation are constituted, most notably through an extrinsic separation

of subject and object; a static and ossified dualism which obscures the

nature of social reality and replaces living and interrelated

distinctions within a concrete totality for atrophied and petrified

oppositions under a reign of immediacies.18 As a result, the relation

between individuals and the result of their own activity become

expressed as a one-way causal sequence of two otherwise

17 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 83.18 Lukács describes the severity of the domination by semblance or appearances as such: “In them the relations between men that lie hidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the relations between men and the objects that should really gratify their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither recognised nor even perceived.” Ibid, 93.

16

unchangeable objects upon each other, dominated by a principle of

commensurability of which isolated entities are uninterruptedly

reconciled. Thus the manner by which capitalism asserts itself as

eternal and ahistorical, by which the dynamic and transitory nature of

all social forms are jettisoned and of which “its determinants take on

the appearance of timeless, eternal categories valid for all social

formations”19, can be deciphered from the very core of the commodity

social form and through the proliferation of its reified mode of

thought.

What emerges as fundamental to the condition of reification is

therefore the mystifying reduction of dynamic and contradictory social

processes and relations unto a level of thinghood20, or more

specifically, as Marx himself writes when elaborating the fetish form

of the commodity, “It is nothing but the definite social relation

between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic

form of a relation between things.”21 Here, Marx’s description of the

19 Ibid, 9.20 As Lukács appositely states, “The fetishistic illusions enveloping all phenomena in capitalist society succeed in concealing reality, but more is concealed than the historical, i.e. transitory, ephemeral nature of phenomena. This concealment is made possible by the fact that in capitalist society man’s environment, and especially the categories of economics, appear to him immediately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each other. Instead they appear as things and the relations of things with each other. Therefore, when the dialectical method destroys the fiction of the immortality of the categories it also destroys their reified character and clears the way to a knowledge of reality.” Ibid, 14.21 Karl Marx. Capital: Volume 1 (Penguin Books, London, 1976) 165. My own italics.

17

fetish character to assume “for them” appears to suggest the fetish of

the commodity to be an epistemological dilemma, one in which a

subjective ignorance as to the nature of the object seems to be the

central issue. However, the fetish character cannot simply be

identified by an error of knowledge, but is more accurately

constitutive of an objective mode of being, specifically that of the

activity of commodity production. As Marx makes clear shortly after,

“To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their

private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as

direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as

material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations

between things.”22 Thus the inversion of subject and object – through

which things become personified and persons become thingified –

while essentially illusionary, cannot be merely epistemological, an

erroneous “false consciousness” or cognitive blunder, but is rather

expressive of an historically specific mode of being. Lukács

emphasizes this fundamental concrete component of reification when

he writes,

“these manifestations are by no means merely modes of thought, they are the forms in which contemporary bourgeois society is objectified. Their abolition, if it is to be a true abolition, cannot simply be the result of thought alone, it must also amount to their practical abolition as the actual forms of social life. Every kind of knowledge that aspires to remain pure knowledge is doomed to end up granting recognition to these forms once again”23

22 Ibid, 166. My own italics.

18

Thus to refer to the reifying character of capitalism is not to refer to a

mere epistemological mystification, but rather to an actual inversion

of subject and object. The subject, i.e. labor, becomes ‘thingified’ or

rendered into a “phantom-like objectivity”, as the object, or

“appendage” as Marx calls it, through which capital reproduces

itself.24 In turn, the object of production, i.e. the commodity, while

constituted by human labor, becomes ‘personified’ into a subject that

subordinates its human producers to the logic of accumulation and to

the market.25 It is as such that “the direct forms of appearance of 23 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 177.24 No doubt my categorial analogy of subject and object to that of the relation of labor and commodity above all other categories of the critique of political economy warrants qualification. Specifically, the former set of general ontological terms may, arguably, not be the best suited for representation by the two specific entities of labor and commodity. The question becomes whether or not the fetishism of commodities is itself capable of being demonstrated through a rigid subject/object dualism, even if that framework inverts its polar relation, and more specifically, to what extent are other intrinsically-related categories expressive of a totality, such as labor-power, money, capital, and value, lost in the reduction of the fetish form to a subject/object duality of labor and commodity. Such an investigation, whereby labor and commodity are argued to be the most fundamental ground level of subjectivity and objectivity, constitutive of all other categories of the totality of self-valorizing value, is unfortunately beyond the scope of the present work. 25 The theme of a merely epistemological transgression will remain integral for illuminating the manner in which Hegel’s Phenomenology can be grasped as a critique of reification. If the epistemological error is not merely contained within a deficient mode of thought, but is itself an untruth constitutive of a mode of being, and thereby a moment within the contradictory process of truth, i.e. experience [Erfahrung], then the critique of reification must reside in the refusal of consciousness to remain in its discord between truth and certainty, which is itself a refusal grounded in its own internal and essential movement. A renunciation of appearances [Vorstellung] therefore cannot by itself amount to a critique of reification, nor would a simple overcoming of the immediacies of semblance within the realm of thought. Since the appearance itself is constitutive of the essence, the movement against appearances must also be a movement against a particular mode of being. As such, the manner in which appearances are

19

social being are not, however, subjective fantasies of the brain, but

moments of the real forms of existence.”26

III. The objective-subjective structure of reification

In his seminal essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the

Proletariat”, Lukács writes that “the universality of the commodity

form is responsible both objectively and subjectively for the

abstraction of the human labour incorporated in commodities.”27 With

the basis of reification to be found therefore in the production of

commodities under the reign of abstract labor, one is capable of

describing the phenomena of reification structurally in the following

twofold and simultaneously manner:

1.) the personification of things2.) the thingification of persons28

criticized in the Phenomenology corresponds to a critique of reification to the extent that reification is not merely a process of "veiling" or "mystifying" a true reality hidden underneath appearances, but rather phenomena which are constitutive of a social form and mode of production. Hegel’s definition of knowledge itself implies a truth of actualization. Through such an observation, one is able to witness Lukács echo the movement of consciousness within the Phenomenology when he writes: “consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object.” György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 178.26 György Lukács. A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (Verso Books, New York, 2002) 79.27 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 87.28 It should be clarified that the respective terms of ‘person’ and ‘thing’ can essentially be separated through Hegel’s own most frequent treatment of the terms Person and Ding, not in terms of how his specific usages might inform the implicit critique of reification within the Phenomenology, but rather how Hegel’s general conceptual distinctions may elucidate the structurally dynamic relation between ‘person’ and ‘thing’ under the

20

Such a schematic refers to both the objective and subjective aspects

of reification, of which each side expresses the phenomena of

reification grounded in the fetish character of the commodity. From

the first objective aspect, of which things become personified, a world

of objects and the relations between them arise into beings of which

laws generating their own power confront man in his activity. In

contrast to this, the subjective feature of reification, by which persons

become thingified, entails that the estrangement of man’s activity

from himself, which is transformed into a commodity subject to an

objectivity independent of man, consist in a precondition by which

man enters into social relations with others as an isolated and private

individual bearing only the property of his own labor-power.

Both components of reification ultimately concern the category

of labor. Labor, rather than being able to secure the means of its

subsistence directly through its own activity, is compelled to instead

reproduce itself through the mediation of money. Through this

requirement, the ‘objectivist’ component of reification asserts itself

phenomena of reification. Within his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), a Person is not merely a human subject, but a willful subject of juridical rights and duties, most notably that of the ownership of property. A Person is thereby an abstract and paltry rendition of a human subject, one characterized by mere legal personhood and frequently associated with the citizenry of imperial Rome, reduced to isolated bearers of property rights, and without the inner depth of a moral subject or of a substantial ethical life [Sittlichkeit]. Conversely, while Hegel wields no singular definition of Ding, it can be said that generally the term is used to convey a sense for contingent, worldly things; not merely an object, but one without a will, which can thereby be utilized by subjects for the expression of a negative freedom, or autonomy.

21

through the producer’s relation to the product as external: it is not

possessed directly but only in the form of wages. It is thereby through

the form of labor concretized in the abstract that externally confronts

the proletariat and obliges him to pursue his activity in the first place.

Labor thus, as the objective form of social mediation constituting

capitalist society, is both the expression of man’s activity, as an

objective need that imposes itself upon him. The activity of the

proletariat is rendered into a hostile force, which stands over and

against the subject. Capital functions to enact and yet expands

through this activity of labor. The proletariat’s activity is turned

against itself, and as Marx states so eloquently, “the alien and

independent character in which it presently exists vis-à-vis individuals

proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of then

conditions of their social life, and that they have no yet begun, on the

basis of these conditions, to live it.”29 The social existence the

proletariat is therefore immediately placed wholly on the side of the

object: he appears to himself immediately as an object and not as the

active part of the social process of labor. It is through this condition

that the source of man’s activity perpetually eludes him.

Alternatively, as the “fragmentation of the object of production

necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject”30, the ‘subjectivist’

29 Karl Marx. Grundrisse (Penguin Books, 1973) 162.30 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 89.

22

aspect of reification refers to the mercy of one’s own private intention,

a condition constitutive of the bourgeois individual by which he

engages in the sociality of commodity exchange. As purely individual

reactions against social reality, “the autonomy and the power of

individuality – the very principle which displayed the superiority of

modern society over that of antiquity – finds expression here in the

fact that, on the one hand, self-interest constitutes the immediate

reality and the subjective validation of individual consciousness, and

on the other hand, without either knowing or wishing it, it is the

primary motor of modern civil society.”31 As a unity of separation, the

atomization of the individual is the expression of an obscurity by

which the immediacies of an individual’s actions eclipse the

fundamentally social significance of those actions. It is thereby the

consciousness of this individuality, itself expressive of an

individualized and fragmented social mode of existence, which takes

itself to be the truth of all reality, regardless of the fact that “the

implicit social nature of individuality is the truth concealed by the self-

deception of the individual consciousness.”32

It is the truth of reification, as a social form, to oscillate

between these two poles of what I am referring to as both an

“objectivist” and “subjectivist” component of reified social life.

Trapped between these two extremes, consciousness becomes both a

31 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 481.32 Ibid, 482.

23

passive observer moving in obedience to laws which it can never

control, as well as a consciousness which regards itself as a fortified

individual, at odds with the rest of the world and expressing its

freedom only through the exchange of its property. It will be this

logical schematic of a reified mode of experience that will be utilized

in grasping the movement of consciousness within Hegel’s

Phenomenology as a critique of reification.33 The sections of the

Phenomenology of Spirit to be investigated will thereby be those most

conducive to a framework which expresses “the impulse to overcome

the reified disintegration of the subject and the – likewise reified –

rigidity and impenetrability of its objects”34

The oscillating truth of the phenomena of reification

“Objectivist” “Subjectivist”Thing Person

Personification of things Thingification of personsConsciousness Self-consciousnessObject-oriented Subject-oriented

The world The selfExternal imposition

inwardInternal projection

outwardEmpiricism Rationalism

33 By no means should this framework be brandished as the exclusive means for potentially grasping a structure of reification within the Phenomenology. It is undoubtedly one among many potential avenues for approaching a complex theme and ought to be identified merely as a heuristic device for engaging with the material.34 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 141.

24

IV. The Authority of Appearances and the Untruth of Apparent Knowing

Through the framework of which the phenomena of reification is

grasped as both the personification of things and the thingification of

persons, a relation between appearances and reality is asserted

whereby an authoritative claim is made strictly at the level of

appearances. For example, the prices of commodities appear to

originate directly from their intrinsic composition and as such, the

amount of wage labor required for their purchase also appear as

structured by the qualities of the commodity, rather than to be the

result of the total social relations engaged within the process of

production, specifically in the contradiction between capital and labor

through the dynamics of exploitation. The phenomena of reification is

thereby grounded in the suspension of human activity within the

realm of appearances and immediacy, not however as a mere

epistemological illusion, but through a domination of appearances

constitutive of the practical activity of commodity production. It will

therefore be the general relation of appearance and reality that will

be integral grasping Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a critique of

reification.

25

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit imparts the journey of natural

consciousness as it proceeds towards true knowledge [Wissenschaft],

charting the ways in which it takes different shapes [Gestalten] that

are developed through its own nature. It is with this experience of

itself – an acquaintance of what consciousness is in-itself – that Hegel

offers a vicious critique of immediacy, itself grounded in the tradition

of German Romanticism, and of which an examination into the

mediated determinations of appearance [Erscheinung] are unfolded.

This authoritative claim of immediacy will, for consciousness, through

its voyage in the Phenomenology, lose its justification and disclose a

wealth of determinations of which no immediacy is successful in the

deceptive semblance of the unmediated.

It is however integral to recognize that the untruth of

immediacy is constitutive of the experience of consciousness. While

immediate knowledge entails disclosed mediated conceptualizations,

new immediacies arise with every new stage of consciousness, only to

thereby further deepen both its consciousness of the world and of

itself. For Hegel, philosophical truth as such contains both the true

and the untrue at the same time, a process by which the true is

brought to light by the deficiencies of the untrue, not through an

abstract negation, or simple rejection of the false, but rather through

a determinate negation of which the implicit truth contained within

the untrue is made explicit. It is as such Hegel does not make any

26

effort to venerate any “true reality” hidden underneath appearances,

nor will he deny the deceptive significance of appearances

themselves. Indeed, as Quentin Lauer writes in his seminal

compendium, “the whole of the Phenomenology is a prolonged effort

to overcome one by one the erroneous certainties in which

consciousness finds satisfaction with regard to reality.”35 Instead,

Hegel seeks to repudiate the authority of respective appearances in

their claims of a legitimate and robust explication of subjective

consciousness and its relation to the world. Through this process, the

reality of appearances is in fact affirmed. However, it is through the

activity of consciousness that this reality reveals certain deficiencies

that negatively prompt consciousness, a disruption which emerges at

every moment in the Phenomenology, into calling into question the

mode by which the appearance of reality is apprehended. “Thus, only

a phenomenology which is resolutely bold has any chance of

succeeding, one which does not mistrust but comes to terms with the

very fullness of appearing.”36

The dialectical process by which this revelation takes place

consists in natural consciousness proving not to possess true

knowledge, but rather within the coming-to-be explicit inadequacy of

its own concept [Begriff]. This disparity however between certainty

35 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 29.36 Ibid, 30.

27

[Geweißheit] and truth [Wahrheit] is only revealed retrospectively. In

its varying moments, consciousness apprehends its immediate object

to be true knowledge, a certainty which, pummeled against the

realization of its own concept, propels consciousness into a loss of

itself; a loss of its truth, and as such a “path of despair” against its

own apprehended naturalisms. It is thereby through the conscious

insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge that consciousness

experiences a progressive maturation retrospectively attained from

the standpoint of true knowledge. As Hegel writes in his introduction,

“The goal lies at that point where knowledge no longer has the need

to go beyond itself, that is, where knowledge comes around to itself,

and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the

concept.” (¶80) The object of knowledge gained by consciousness will

therefore not be something that externally acts upon consciousness,

but instead eventually disclosed to be structured by an acting self-

consciousness.

The Phenomenology proceeds to come to terms with different

modes of what appears to be the activity of knowing, progressively

negating the inadequacy of the appearing, and thus going beyond that

inadequacy. Apparent knowing therefore, while partial in its

grounding of consciousness’ awareness of itself and the world,

nonetheless is capable of pointing beyond itself. “It will not develop,

28

however, unless it becomes more than mere appearance [Schein] of

knowing by turning against […] what is merely apparent in it”.37

V. “Sense-certainty or the “this” and meaning something”

It is the approach of consciousness to at first always distinguish

something from itself and relate itself to that object. At the outset, the

object for consciousness is therefore posited as existing externally and

it is through such a structure that the fundamental structure of

consciousness operates by way of a distinct subject/object framework.

The first sections of the Phenomenology indeed proceed by way of

consciousness gravitating in a predominantly object-oriented manner.

These sections, under the title of “Consciousness”, include “Sense-

certainty”, “Perception”, and “Force and the understanding”. Within

these sections, consciousness locates truth within the object of

apprehension, a knowledge to be attained “out there” and has yet to

reflect upon its own practical modes of knowing. As Terry Pinkard

writes in his commentary on the Phenomenology, “Hegel wishes to

show [within the first three sections of the Phenomenology] that the

basic candidates for such knowledge logically lead to and culminate in

what we can call the subject/object model of knowledge and practice:

a picture of our epistemic practices and our various practical

37 Ibid, 31.

29

endeavors that interprets them in terms of a subject, an independent

object, and a representation [Vorstellung] that supposedly serves as a

metaphysical intermediary between the subject and the object.”38

It is the section of “Sense-certainty” [sinnliche Gewißheit] in

particular that will take up the first portion of the Phenomenology

under examination. The importance of the section for the purposes of

distilling a critique of reification from the text in its entirety concerns

the relation of consciousness to its object, a relation nowhere else

within the Phenomenology dominated by immediacy in is most

elemental form; an absolutely minimal form of knowledge in which the

object apprehended stands over and against [Gegenstand] the

knowing subject. Hegel’s point of departure from the perspective of

consciousness relinquishes presuppositions of any logical deduction

and instead begins from the immediacies of phenomena whose

content will eventually be the interrogation of the immediacies

themselves.39 A beginning without presuppositions therefore allows

for the relation of immediacy to the grasped in its most simplified and

direct form: a subject accosted by the appearance of thoroughly

38 Terry Pinkard. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994) 21.39 It will only later however be disclosed in the Phenomenology that even within the supposed absence of presumption lays the faith that consciousness is, and can become, a receptacle void of its own content. Hegel’s point in abandoning the strictly epistemological viewpoint is to highlight the insight that the dominant epistemological views of his time, rationalism and empiricism, are already highly mediated and complex social and historical ways of being in the world, rather than the clean slates they purport to be.

30

foreign and imposing object. Additionally, because the negation of

immediacy takes place at every subsequent Gestalt of the

Phenomenology, to outline this process in its most rudimental form

potentially enables one to grasp the reified core of all stages of the

Phenomenology in which the immediacy of appearances declares

universal authority.

Hegel begins by proceeding only with a knowledge of that which

is immediate, that is, of what merely is, a natural or naïve

[natüraliches] awareness of oneself and objects within a non-

inferential and pre-reflective mode of knowledge. Indeed, “if there

were to be any knowledge that is independent of social practice or

history, such immediate knowledge would be it.”40 The immediacy of

such an awareness evokes an absence of any active endeavor on the

part of consciousness for conceptual abstraction or reflection, and

instead passively adheres to a truth of the mere existence of an

external object, apprehended in its mere appearance. As Hegel begins

the section, “Knowledge which is our object at the outset, that is,

immediately, can be nothing but immediate knowledge, knowledge of

the immediate, that is, of what is. Likewise we ourselves have to

conduct ourselves immediately, that is, receptively.” (¶90) The

certainty coddled by consciousness here at the beginning of the

40 Ibid, 23.

31

Phenomenology therefore consists in an immediate sensual

apprehension that supposedly promises a knowledge of the object.

The structure of sense-certainty constitutes an individual

sensorily aware of an individual object. This awareness consists of a

direct acquaintance with the object in its mere immediate existence,

devoid of any ascribed predicates, and whose truth is to be located

only within its bare singularity. As Hegel writes,

“For sense-certainty this is what is essential, and this pure being, that is, this simple immediacy constitutes its truth. Likewise, as a relation, certainty is an immediate, pure relation. Consciousness is I, nothing further, a pure this, and the individual knows a pure this, that is, he knows the individual.” (¶91)

At first, the concrete content of immediate knowledge appears as an

infinite wealth, whose proximity to truth is expressed by the

immediate object in all its fullness, unspoiled by the exclusions of

conceptual comprehension. However, this certainty will eventually

reveal an impoverishment, particularly as its truth is reduced to mere

being, rather than in accordance with the movement and development

of social practice or historical context constitutive of modes of

knowing.41

41 It should here be clarified that the above contrast of social practices and historicity do not, at this early moment in the Phenomenology, emerge as objects for consciousness in any explicit manner. In the criticism of sense certainty, Hegel does not evoke any notion of sociality or historicity to unravel the claim made by the vulgar empiricist, but instead utilizes simple logical arguments. In fact, within the Phenomenology, before the arrival Spirit [Geist] the failure of consciousness as a mode of knowledge is not its speculated asocial or unhistorical implications, but rather that it does not take into account the role of an active self-consciousness, without which the whole idea of distinguishing, relating, and explaining objects makes little sense. The social and historical elements for which consciousness is to

32

The articulation of sense-certainty, an “It is”, locates truth in the

being of the object, the this, and as such, seeks to establish a

knowledge of the object in its completion. Additionally, since this

consciousness is just its direct acquaintance with the singular object

and nothing more, both consciousness and the object are in a

corresponding fashion reduced to a pure this, a singularity wherein

the certainty of the object is in no way on account of any manifold

existences it may possess in itself, and likewise, that the certainty

consciousness possesses of itself does not express a rich collection of

cognitive activities. As Lauer explains, utilizing ¶91 of the

Phenomenology, “Out of this model of immediacy, in fact, arises the

very first distinction which makes it possible for consciousness

effectively to look into itself, to see itself as it first "appears," i.e., as

separated into subject and object" this as I and this as object" (p.

80/150/92).”42 Sense-certainty merely expresses that which is, a pure

being whose truth does not extend beyond immediacy. As Pinkard

concludes, “Thus, the kind of immediate knowledge of which we are

speaking must be (1) knowledge of pure individuals, and (2)

knowledge construed as the immediate presence of an object to

reconcile emerges rather in the movement from Reason to Spirit. However, any supposedly premature use of sociality and historicity as hidden components at this early stage in the Phenomenology nonetheless remain expedient aspects of the present work’s central thesis, that is, highlighting the fundamental quality of a reified consciousness whereby a mode of knowing drowning in immediacy, by default, precludes any self-conscious reflection on its own social and historical existence.42 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 47.

33

consciousness. Consciousness taken as sense-certainty is the

awareness only of the being of things, and beyond that, we can say

nothing about it.”43

Since “the object is what is authoritative in this relation of

knowledge”44, difficulties nonetheless emerge when one tries to

characterize the immediate knowledge of an individual entity and to

articulate exactly what this knowledge consists of. As is to be

expected, Hegel maintains that there is more occurring within this

certainty of pure being than first appears. Indeed, the pure immediacy

of sense-certainty evokes a claim to plurality rather than one of

singularity, or as Hegel describes it, an example among many. This

revelation first emerges when Hegel situates the this of the object’s

being within the twofold indexical demonstratives of the “here” and

“now.” Beginning with the now, Hegel offers an answer to the

question of “What is the now?”: “The now is the night”. However, in

the effort at preserving the truth of what the now is, the now becomes

stale as soon as it is no longer night. “To be sure, the now itself

maintains itself but as the kind of thing which is not the night.” (¶96)

The now thus maintains itself but only in a negative fashion, always

altering by virtue of an other, a mediated now never static, but rather

always in flux. The now exists through its negation, the non-identical

43 Terry Pinkard. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994) 25.44 Ibid.

34

not-this indifferent to any particular being, refusing to be restrained

under one particular or singular state. As Lauer writes, “This means

that the term which was employed to designate the immediate is itself

not immediate but mediated and, therefore, cannot do the job. If

"now" is equally applicable to any time I choose to designate, it is

indifferent; it is universally applicable.”45

It is through such a development, through the ineffability of

referring to particularities of an object that the truth of sense-

certainty reveals itself to be a universality, one in which even the

sensuous is expressed as universal: being as such, or one among

many. Thus while one may intend to utter the pure essential sensuous

existence of the object through the linguistic demonstrative, a

universality is instead articulated. It is in language, Hegel explains,

that although one may mean [meint] to articulate solely the

singularity of the object, what is accomplished conversely is the

articulation [sagt] of its universal character:

“In language, we immediately refute what we mean to say; and since the universal is the truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is, in that way, not possible at all that we could say what we mean about sensuous being.” (¶97)

For Hegel, it is similarly the case for the here, particularly in that, for

example, if the “Here is the tree” and one turns around, the here is no

longer the tree, but instead the house. As with the now, the truth of

the here consistently evades a static being and escapes into its 45 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 49.

35

contrary. The indexical demonstrative this presupposes a not-this.

This becomes an example of many and thereby elicits a universal.

Additionally, the individual I of sense-certainty implicitly pronounces

itself in distinction to all other consciousnesses. As such, it also wields

a universality of the I. It is this claim of universality disclosed through

the indexical demonstratives of sense-certainty which will bring it into

despair and reveal the contradiction residing within sense-certainty’s

claim to truth. Sense-certainty is consistently saying the opposite of

what it means: a linguistic revelation of universality within a certainty

grounded in bare singularity. Hegel describes the contrast between

the universality of linguistic expressions and the particularity of their

mere intentions as such:

“That is to say, they say of them merely what is universal; thus, what is called the unsayable is nothing other than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely fancied. – If nothing more is said of a thing than that it is an actual thing, an external object, then it is only expressed as the most universal of all, and what is thereby expressed is its sameness with everything instead of its distinctiveness. If I say: “An individual thing,” then to a greater degree I say something entirely universal about it, for everything is an individual thing.” (¶110)

While at first it appears as if the apprehension of an object by

consciousness consists solely within both their mere singular

existences, removed from the contexts of space and time, it is

subsequently revealed through their articulated demonstratives that

the claim of knowledge in sense-certainty is a claim to universality. As

such, and this is a theme which traverses the Phenomenology in its

36

entirety, apprehension is not possible without some mode of

conceptualization, and that here Hegel begins to demonstrate the

necessity of mediated knowledge. As Pinkard states, “Hegel is arguing

that we are driven to the conclusion that we cannot be cognitively

aware of these qualitative individuals in any non-inferential fashion;

we are aware of them only as mediated through certain universals

found in linguistic expression.”46

Such is the case that the pure being of sense-certainty loses its

immediacy, with negation and mediation becoming essential aspects

of its truth. The universality of its essence involves an abstraction

from the particular and individual this, which is meant by sense-

certainty, although never articulated. The object in its mere being,

which, for sense-certainty, initially was supposed to be essential, now

emerges no longer to be the sole component, and in turn, the

mediating or active function of consciousness at the mere level of

apprehension is now equally essential. Additionally, as a result of the

object unable to offer the richness it initially promised, the emphasis

must switch to the knowing subject, or the I. It is the knowing subject,

in particular what the object is for me, that will come to elucidate the

reality of sense-certainty.

While the truth of sense-certainty was initially located within

the immediate awareness of the object, it turns out that the content of

46 Terry Pinkard. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994) 26.

37

this experience cannot be held firm in a singular definite moment, and

that what might be meant as a particular individuality, concedes to

the pluralities of what is said. The I in turn emerges as a universal

whose apprehension is mediated by the manifold of the this. As a

result, the essence of sense-certainty comes to encompass a universal

rather than any mere particular moment.47 While attempting to find

refuge in the pure immediate intuiting activity of the articulated “Now

is daytime”, this certainty ignores the transformation from day into

night and its truth resides in its immediate relation to a self-limited

now or here. However, to subsequently take up this truth, its meaning

would be lost and in the case of now, emerge as what has been. The

now is indeed elusive and possesses no truth of being, its fleeting

propensity instead leaving a trail of sublated moments.

As reflected into itself through this movement, the this is no

longer immediate, but a movement of mediated nows, “and pointing

out is the experience of the “now” being a universal.” (¶107) As

natural consciousness attempts to grasp the here, its definitive state

constantly evades a singular being and expresses itself as one among

many. The immediate this is revealed to be the negative this, forever

resistant to one particular state of affairs elevated to an authoritative

47 It can be remarked here that despite its injury within “Sense-certainty”, the empiricist consciousness does not give up quite so easily. In “Perception”, for example, consciousness will come to inquire what constitutes an individual thing, if not the thing’s given individuality itself? That is, what holds together the attributes of an individual entity and how does one reconcile both its many attributes and its singularity?

38

certainty. Thus the experience of sense-certainty is precisely this

dialectical movement, a history in which natural consciousness

convinces itself that is has harnessed the object solely in its particular

existence. Here, Hegel briefly mentions the Dionysian festivals of

antiquity as an example of a wisdom in recognizing the emptiness of

particular sensuous objects.48 For Hegel, it is in language that sense-

certainty reaches an impasse at expressing particulars, for such

articulations cannot help but express the universality of as such.

VI. The Reified Structure of Sense-certainty

It is now, only after having followed consciousness through its

own contradictory experiences with sense-certainty, whereby the

impossibility of expressing the immediate or the merely individual has

been exposed, that the logical structure of reification can be distilled.

In order to grasp the logically reified structure of sense-certainty, it is

first necessary to recall that the first three sections of the

Phenomenology constitute a unit that has been described as

“Objective Consciousness”. In the particular case of sense-certainty,

the authority of truth for consciousness resides in a mode of

48 As Hegel writes, “In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous things. Rather, he is brought to despair of the doubt itself; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves.” (¶109)

39

awareness entirely dependent on the object in its petrified and

undifferentiated singularity. It is therefore important to recognize that

Hegel utilizes the German word Gegenstand rather than simply

Objekt. As Lauer reminds us, the imposing character of the object is

indeed disclosed in the very opening words of the section: “Das

Wissen, welches zuerst oder unmittelbar unser Gegenstand ist …”

(¶90). Here, the object is taken to be external to consciousness and

contain a totality accessible through sensual apprehension. The

immediacy of this mode of knowledge prides itself on adding nothing

to the passive reception of the object whereby it “appears as the most

true; for it has not omitted anything from its object” (¶91).

Throughout this section, Hegel employs an archetype of the pure or

vulgar empiricist, one which attempts to preserve the truth of an

immediate singularity and, more importantly, undermines itself on its

own terms through its own claim to truth which ends up shattering

both the extrinsic separation between thought and the world posited

by sense-certainty, as well as the essentially atemporal and ossified

character of its initial efforts at locating the truth of the object. The

fundamental dynamism to this first section offers a critique of

reification as it shatters the essentially ahistorical and ossified

character of consciousness’ initial efforts at locating the truth of the

object. As such, sense-certainty can be grasped as an archetypical

form of reified consciousness, specifically in its limited capacity in

40

apprehending the intrinsically relational and mediated aspects of

modes of knowing.

The immediacy of sense-certainty demands that both

consciousness and its object must be apprehended in their isolation,

one in which “Consciousness is I, nothing further, a pure this, and the

individual knows a pure this, that is, he knows the individual.” (¶91)

As such, the certainty of immediacy possesses no movement, and

therefore is incapable of recognizing itself as undergoing experience

[Erfahrung]. Instead, it is under the illusion that it needs nothing

beyond the immediate singularity of itself and its object in order to be

complete, thereby destined to engage in a tragic conflict with an

externalized reality. This reality for consciousness is abstract and

incoherent, one in which the external structure of the world ordains

its singularity upon an equally singular and abstract consciousness. As

Lukács comments in The Young Hegel:

“In Hegel's view the individual consciousness stands opposed to an unknown objective reality. This appears to be fixed and alien because the determinations and mediations which are what make objective social reality and the role of individual consciousness in it what they are, have not yet crossed the threshold of consciousness. Implicitly (an sich), however, they are already present and effectual.”49

It is for this ordinary and naïve individual consciousness that the

world appears as an already established and undifferentiated datum,

merely existing independently of oneself and as an objective reality.

Here the ‘objectivist’ component of the phenomena of reification

49 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 472.

41

reveals itself through the narrative of sense-certainty, particularly

through the external and indifferent relation of consciousness and

world.

The claim of knowledge within sense-certainty is structurally

prohibited to comprehend its own historically situated form of social

practice, a truth which will admittedly only emerge later in the

Phenomenology. As Pinkard reminds us, “If there were such an area

of mental awareness that could be known non-inferentially, then it is

conceivable that the contents of that awareness might remain the

same whatever the state of the world might be; our experience of

seeing a chair that actually exists might be qualitatively the same

even if the chair were not to exist.”50 Sense-certainty therefore

consists of an assertion of knowledge independent of social practice,

one which serves as an authoritative standard for apprehending the

world. Its declarations however “both undermine themselves and lead

to a conception of knowledge as historical.”51 Indeed, the ahistorical

untruth of sense-certainty is destroyed by the universal contained in

the demonstrative now. As Hegel writes:

“The now is pointed out, this now. Now: It has already ceased to be since it was pointed out; the now that is is an other than that pointed out to us, it is what has been. This is its truth; it does not have the truth of being. It is nonetheless true that it has been. However, what has been is in fact no essence; it is not, and the issue at stake had to do with what is, with being.” (¶106)

50 Terry Pinkard. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994) 27.51 Ibid, 22.

42

As the now becomes the now that has been, a continuum of temporal

mediation is inaugurated within the realm of thought as time here

refuses to stand still. “The “now” and the pointing out of the “now”

are therefore composed in such a way that neither the “now” nor the

pointing out of the “now” are what is immediately simple. Rather, they

are a movement which has various moments in it” (¶107); any now

turns out to be a succession of nows. The universality disclosed by the

activity of sense-certainty therefore reveals a union of an interrelated

multiplicity of instances in both space and time, a universal

dynamically in process. As Lauer remarks, “Sense certainty, then,

which initially presented itself as the isolating of a "this-here-now"

object, has turned out to be a process of experiencing an object which

is also a process.”52

Sense-certainty offers an instance by which a rigid formalism

characterized by an immediate apprehension of an alien world

externally imposed upon a thinking subject, is rendered thoroughly

untenable. The reified structure of sense-certainty – grounded not in

the constitution of the object of consciousness, but rather in the

latter’s own existent mode of awareness – collapses within its own

claim to totality. While at first sense-certainty appears to promise the

most concrete form of knowledge, it fails the moment it attempts to

enunciate any particularities and is thereby thrust into an expedition 52 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 52.

43

whereby “consciousness pushes itself ever forward towards its true

existence [wherein] it will reach a point where it sets aside its

semblance of being burdened with what is alien to it”. (¶89)

The vulgar empiricism characteristic of sense-certainty offers

the means by which the logical structure of a reified consciousness

can be made lucid. As Lukács describes the immediacy constitutive of

the reified existence of the proletariat:

“This inner dialectic makes it hard for the proletariat to develop its class consciousness in opposition to that of the bourgeoisie which by cultivating the crudest and most abstract kind of empiricism was able to make do with a superficial view of the world. Whereas even when the development of the proletariat was still at a very primitive stage it discovered that one of the elementary rules of class warfare was to advance beyond what was immediately given.”53

It is the social existence of the proletariat that is placed wholly on the

side of the object, wherein its own objective appearance confronts the

proletariat immediately as a commodity, not as an active part of the

social process of labor. Again, while it is not the social-historical

element that is explicitly problematic for sense-certainty at this stage

in the Phenomenology, the impossibility of accounting for particulars

within a framework of bare immediacy without turning attention to

universals renders the prospect for consciousness to reflect on its own

socially constitutive modes of historical knowing and being are

structurally prohibited, thereby illuminating the immediacy of sense-

certainty to be logically contained within a reified social existence.

53 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 72. My own italics.

44

The reified forms of objectivity occasion therefore unmediated modes

of knowledge in order to make the phenomena of capitalist society

appear as ahistorical and eternal. Grounded within a falsity of

extreme nominalism, the immediacy of sense-certainty mirrors the

reified mode of consciousness. The untruth of the reified structure of

sense-certainty reveals itself precisely through its own articulated

indexical demonstratives of the here and now, expressions which

cannot help but point beyond themselves. Lukács therefore aptly

concludes the structural similarities of a corrupted certitude when he

writes the following: “the habits of thought and feeling of mere

immediacy where the immediately given form of the objects, the fact

of their existing here and now and in this particular way appears to be

primary, real and objective, whereas their ‘relations’ seem to be

secondary and subjective. For anyone who sees things in such

immediacy every true change must seem incomprehensible.”54

Unlike the progression of consciousness within Hegel’s

Phenomenology however, the phenomena of reification as an

historical condition of a society dominated by commodity production

remains perpetually idled and has yet to explicitly demonstrate its

own immediacies to be constitutive of a mediated social existence.

Ensnared within the elemental untruths characterized by the

immediacies within sense-certainty, the reified social life of

54 Ibid, 154.

45

commodity society is “unable to discover further mediations, unable

to comprehend the reality and the origin of bourgeois society as the

product of the same subject that has ‘created’ the comprehended

totality of knowledge […] its ultimate point of view, decisive for the

whole of its thought, will be that of immediacy.”55

VII. “Individuality, which in its own eyes is real in and for itself”

Turning now towards what has been described above as the

‘subjectivist’ component of the phenomena of reification, one is

reminded of its fundamental features to emit from the individualism

cultivated by bourgeois social relations. It is the self-reliant and

solitary individual, at odds with the social world and the collective

demands it might infringe upon private activity which corresponds to

the system of commodity exchange generally. Indeed, a society

dominated by commodity production wields as both its result and

presupposition an aggregation of isolated individuals, all bearing the

capacity to sell their labor power within a division of labor. Within

such an environment, the primacy of subjectivity eclipses the

objective and social character of all individual activities, and as such,

55 Ibid, 156.

46

the immediacy of an individual’s activity appears to be solely the

result of private intention and self-interest, rather than the expression

of a socially-integrated whole by which individual subjective activity

self-consciously articulates an objective truth. Instead, the self-

interest of the individual constitutes immediate reality and the

subjective validation of individual consciousness. It is within such a

context that the ‘thingification of persons’ can be unfolded: the

process by which the social form commanded by the exchange

relation reduces individuals to appendages of commodity production

and thereby dissociates them from one another within a network of

exchange.

It will be with this theme of the vanity of the individual, a

subjectivist prejudice by which the social world is grasped as

estranged, that the next section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

will be approached. Since the subjectivist aspect of reification

concerns an individuality ignorant of its own social presuppositions,

the analysis of reification extracted from the Phenomenology must

highlight a form of bourgeois individuality – that is, a purely

introspective and egoistic individual grounded within an extrinsic and

absolute separation between itself and the social world.

After having established the structure of reification in its most

elemental form – as the domination of immediacy in obscuring the

mediated and relational dimensions to all claims to truth – by

47

elucidating the limitations and contradictions of sense-certainty

wherein the capacity of differentiation is wanting within a reduction of

determination to an abstract homogeneous isolated singularity, the

following section will proceed to a more concrete instance by which

one is able to extract a critique of reification from the

Phenomenology. By making an abrupt leap into the later section of

“Individuality, which in its own eyes is real in and for itself”, with a

particular focus on “The spiritual realm of animals and deception; or

the thing that matters”, the dynamics of what has been described

above as the ‘subjectivist’ component of reification within Hegel’s

Phenomenology will become lucid.

Once consciousness proceeds from its object-oriented efforts at

grasping truth, it is propelled to engage with itself under the sections

of “Self-consciousness”, sections under which authority for

consciousness becomes self-authority. Self-consciousness, having

comprehended its modes of knowing the world to warrant a

knowledge of itself, subsequently returns to the world within the

sections under “Reason” [Vernunft], specifically with the intention of

establishing its standard of rationality upon the world, manifested as

the individual rational activity of consciousness. Within “Reason”,

consciousness remains subject-oriented in its search for truth,

whereby different expressions of subjectivity are each poised within

an opposition between the self and the prevailing social world, an

48

individual consciousness on an arduous, and often harrowing, pursuit

for its own identity. Within the final section of “Reason” however, the

world has become a mirror for individual consciousness, one that

reflects the latter’s own rational activity; the reality of this new world

consists only in the I of consciousness. As Judith N. Shklar adds to this

self-centeredness, “the rational ego that is intuitively certain that

there is a perfect harmony between it and the world it surveys is an

entirely isolated self.”56 Here, self-consciousness becomes subjectively

certain of itself through its own individual activities, and thereby

attains its own objective truth, while conversely, the individual

activities of self-consciousness procure its own subjective certainty.

Further, rational consciousness approximates the world without

realizing how it has been achieved and therefore approaches the

world with a kind of forgetfulness. Indeed, rational consciousness, in

denouncing any independent reality which does not in principle admit

of intelligibility, emerges as an orientation to the world with a series

of expectations in what it will find, searching for an identification of

reality adequate to itself.

Described by Shklar as “socially incompetent individualities”,

the impotence of this pure subjectivity, or “autocracy of the

subjective” as Hegel refers to elsewhere57, is expressed by the 56 Judith N. Shklar. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge University Press, London, 1976) 97.57 G.W.F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) 477.

49

emergence of a world in which the truth of all reality is the self, or

more specifically, the immanent rational activity of the individual

consciousness is its own authority, rather than any objective world.

Within such a certainty, the individual consciousness and its activity

are regarded as self-sufficient and complete. As such, through its own

activity, individual consciousness will come to know itself.

VIII. “The spiritual realm of animals and deception; or the thing that matters (die Sache selbst)”

As rational activity itself emerges as the truth of reason, rather

than from any alien or external object, individual consciousness

begins to wield a vague awareness of its own universality, one that

equips its individuality with expression.58 Its own individuality

however, as it actually expresses itself in the world, does not yet

possess any specific content which might assist in differentiating this

universality. Instead, the purity of its thought presides over any actual

employment in the world. At its foundation, individual consciousness

places itself within a ‘spiritual animal kingdom’ of which all activity

derives from an originary natural existence [ursprüngliche Natur] of 58 “Self-consciousness has now grasped the concept of itself, […] namely, that in its certainty of itself, it is all reality, and its purpose and essence henceforth consist in the self-moving permeation of the universal – of its gifts and abilities – and individuality.” (¶394)

50

which the individual seeks to maintain itself as its surroundings are

treated only as a means for its survival. The determinate limitations of

this natural existence, cannot limit the free activity of individual

consciousness, and so while all of its activity may derive from this

originary nature, it actively imposes itself upon the world around it.

Consciousness must not therefore grasp its own activity as the activity

of a nature. Rather, this originary natural existence is merely a

moment in which his individuality unfolds, not what constitutes his

individuality itself; individuality is constituted in nature, rather than

by nature. The activity of individual consciousness consists firstly in a

subjective aim or purpose against the given reality, secondly in a

process by which this aim is achieved in actuality, and finally, in a

realized end which stands independently from the acting subject.

Each of these individual moments become, for individual

consciousness, moments within its own lucid identity. While its

originary nature is admittedly the first aspect of its activity in which

the external reality, with all of its variable circumstances, structure

the individual’s goals, it is only within activity itself that individual

consciousness becomes aware of its own aims, and as such,

actualized.59 It can therefore more accurately be stated that none of 59 “The actuality opposed to consciousness, has sunken to that of a merely empty semblance. By determining itself to acting, this consciousness thus does not let itself be led astray by the semblance of the actuality on hand, and it likewise has to stick to the originary content of its essence instead of aimlessly roaming around in empty thoughts and purposes. – To be sure, this originary content is for consciousness by consciousness having actualized it. However, what has fallen by the wayside is the distinction between a

51

these components of activity are independent of one other, but are

rather each moments in a singular conscious operation.

Hegel refers to the wholly subjective experience of being

‘interested’ [Interesse] as that which the individual will produce

through its activity. The interested activity of the individual

consciousness is thereby both the productive of an actualization, as

well as an activity of immanence that procures the individual itself –

that is, the individual in the process of coming-to-be of which “his

doing is his being”60. As Hegel writes on this interrelation, “in the

means, the former (talent) represents the aspect of acting, while the

latter (the nature of the item), represents the aspect of content. Both

are individuality itself as the permeation of being and doing.” (¶401)

Hegel’s distinction here between being, as the framework of natural

processes, and doing, as the framework of individual or spiritual

processes, constitutes a movement by which the individual

consciousness, through the latter, negates its merely natural

existence, asserting itself above such an originary and wholly

determinate nature and through its activity, affirms the individual not

as simply the result or product of a natural process, but instead

standing above the limits of nature in this negativity of self-reflective

rational activity – that is, natural existence developing into a free

content which is only for consciousness internally and an actuality existing in itself which is external to consciousness.” (¶401)60 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 190.

52

existence. It is as such that the rational activity of the individual

consciousness is at once individual and universal, and it is the relation

of the result produced to the activity producing it that is immanently

related to the developing consciousness of the individual. As Hegel

poses the activity of self-interest, “the interest which the individual

finds in some particular thing is the answer already given to the

question: Whether he should act and what is here to be done?” (¶401)

To grasp the work as an expression of the individual divorced

from the activity of the individual self-consciousness is therefore to

abandon the essential content of the individual. The universal

character of an individual’s activity however can nonetheless be

distinguished from any of its singular expressions, and it is the result,

product, or work [das Werk] of an individual’s activity that renders

explicit this universality of its consciousness. As such, it is “the

essence of the work, which is to be a self-expression of an

individuality” (¶402), and that,

“The work is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is for himself what he is in itself, and in such a way that the consciousness for which the individual comes to be in the work is not a particular consciousness but rather universal consciousness.” (¶404)

Within the work, all of the circumstances of its production, whether

the intention, means or process of its procurement, are each

extinguished and become, within actuality, an alien object to the

subject. Within the work however, the individual places himself

53

outside of himself and within a universality; a “space of being which is

utterly devoid of determinateness.” (¶404)

The individual consciousness has produced a work which has a

life of its own. It is not merely however the expression of its own

individuality, but must, in its objectivity, escape its individual grasp,

with other individuals to become aware of it and possibly appropriate

it to make use of it for their own self-expression. It thereby becomes

accessible to all other individuals. As a result, the work now appear as

transitory, fleeting, and not strictly his own, with a depravation

settling upon the individual consciousness as it experiences now a

separation between doing and being in which its activity becomes

subject to failure.

While the identity of doing and being seemed to eradicate the

emptiness of an undifferentiated universality, and thereby achieve full

reality for individual consciousness, the various elements mentioned

above consisting in the production of the work are now inclined to

emerge in discordance, for example, as the intention might not yield

the desired result, or that a goal might not express the individual’s

originary nature. Such is the case that the essential unity of an

individual’s activity may contradict itself, and so the possibility of a

contingent failure within actuality lurks around every corner within

these distinct moments of activity, most notably as the work takes on

a life of its own, simply out there for others to judge, rather than what

54

stringently characterizes the individual. The work thereby ostensibly

becomes a misrepresentation of the individual itself.

Regardless of the success or failure of a work’s existence within

actuality however, what persists within self-consciousness is the

awareness that the individual consciousness at least made an attempt

wherein intention and execution remain conjoined. It therefore

becomes impertinent whether or not the realization of a work’s

intention is successfully accomplished. The work itself thereby

emerges as indifferent to its own failure, and instead, what, for Hegel,

becomes crucial is the task as such, or the ‘thing that matters’ [die

Sache selbst];“to see the activity precisely as activity which produces

no result other than itself”61

The individual’s recourse then is to affirm “what really matters"

[die Sache selbst] not to be located in the work produced, but in the

activity wherein the individual develops. As Lauer writes, “the

individual comes to consciousness of self as individual not through the

thing he produces but through the conscious activity which

characterizes him.”62 The work of the individual is therefore only a

moment of its essential reality, wherein a distinction is made

“between the mere "actuality" characteristic of a "thing" [Ding] and

the "reality'' which characterizes "what matters" [die Sache].”63

61 Ibid, 191.62 Ibid, 194.63 Ibid, 195.

55

The ‘thing that matters’ is the thing of practical life, combining

intention with execution, as well as circumstances and medium with

the product itself. Through the ‘thing that matters’, self-consciousness

becomes real within a singular operation. It is the achievement of the

‘thing that matters’ of uniting subjective individuality with objective

reality, possessing goal, method, process, and product all as its

dependent moments, each differentiated within a unity of individual

activity. The work therefore, is only the individual witnessing its own

universal activity objectively. As Hegel writes,

“The thing that matters thereby expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments are sublated as valid on their own, and therefore valid merely as universal moments, and in which the certainty that consciousness has of itself is, to consciousness, an objective essence, a thing that matters.” (¶409)

Here, the individual grasps objectively its own individuality, or an

objective view of itself, not however yet as a subject in the full sense,

that is, as a universal subjectivity, but rather only the universality of

its substance, or as a predicate of itself. Because such dependent

moments are not subjectively generated out of itself, but are rather

contingent, the universality of this individual consciousness remains

abstract, without injecting any subjective prejudice into its

objectivity.64

It is here that Hegel introduces the honest consciousness in

64 As Hegel here makes clear: “The thing that matters is not yet the subject. Rather, those moments count as subjects because they fall within the bounds of singularity as such, but the thing that matters is at first just the simple universal.” (¶410)

56

order to demand that the ‘thing that matters’ articulates the

individual subject’s most favorable efforts, regardless of whether or

not it succeeds, and with the solace that it at least made the effort and

contended with the ‘thing that matters’. Even if the subject

ineffectively procured its intended goal and the external world has

nullified its work, it has nonetheless effectively confronted the ‘thing

that matters’ by demonstrating an interest in it.

The honest consciousness is completely subordinated to its

activity, whereby its work is venerated as an end in and of itself; an

aim divorced of any individual specific work, elevated above the

producer as the predicate of any activity. All that matters for the

honest consciousness is that it wills a goal and that “there is no

subjective interest to dictate more than that.”65 As Skhlar comments:

“The pure, abstracted, wholly impersonal ‘matter at hand’ is both the

aim of human exertion and the source of all its worth.”66 This aim is

divorced of any individual specific work, elevated above the producer

as the predicate of any activity. In doing so, individual consciousness,

purports to give up his egoism and ascribe a public aim to its activity,

investing it with validity outside of a mere self-expression of his

individuality, thereby acquiring an objective validity.

However, as it happens, the honest consciousness is not as 65 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 195.66 Judith N. Shklar. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge University Press, London, 1976) 126.

57

forthright as it first appears. While it appears that the honest

consciousness is only concerned with objectivity, its enthusiasm is

disclosed to be more subjective than objective; an interest in being

disinterested. Its concern with the ‘thing that matters’ is revealed to

instead be a regard for strictly its own performance, some ‘thing that

matters’ or reality, rather than the ‘thing that matters’, and as such, is

of little concern for the activities of others. Hegel describes the

honest consciousness’ lack of commitment to objectivity in the

following manner:

“The pure activity is essentially this individual’s activity, and this activity is likewise essentially an actuality, that is, something that matters. […] Since in his eyes, what seems to be his concern is only the thing that matters as abstract actuality, it also the case that he is concerned with it as his activity. However, as in his eyes it has just as much to do with what engages and absorbs him, he is likewise not really serious about the whole affair.” (¶414)

Deceptively ardent in its venture for accomplishment, the honest

consciousness is thereby deceitful, whereby other individuals

witnessing its activity are misled by its egoistic intentions from which

it seeks to benefit. This individual thereby frustrates others around it

in demonstrating that its activity is only advantageous and worthwhile

if conducted by itself and in isolation. As Hegel writes, “the thing that

matters is in his eyes the very unity of his decision and reality; he

asserts that actuality could be nothing else than what matters to him.”

(¶412)

Here, there remains no interrelation between self and the world,

58

or that between subjectivity and objectivity. Since the individual

consciousness refuses to be judged by standards outside of itself, and

therefore only wields an interest in the self-expression of its own

individuality, the attempt of the individual to give universal

significance to the immanent activity of its own consciousness

amounts to a deception. The dishonest of the honest consciousness is

thereby twofold: “the general dishonesty consists in having two

attitudes to all work, one private and effective, the other public and

submissive. We cannot act without involving our individuality in our

tasks and to deny that or to demand such a denial is dishonest.”67 The

fraudulence of the honest consciousness arises from the ignorance

against the real, social significance of acting. As Lauer reminds us,

“what the individual gives out as purely disinterested objectivity turns

out to be pure self-interest.”68 Against its objective posturing, the

honest consciousness “in his eyes […] is concerned with a thing that

matters and that thing mattering as his own. Since finally it seems to

be a issue of merely willing what is his thing that matters and merely

willing his activity, he once again is concerned with what is the thing

that matters itself, that is, with an actuality that persists in and for

itself.” (¶414)

This egoistic consciousness is preserved under the treacherous

67 Ibid.68 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 196.

59

umbrella of a pseudo-submission to the ‘thing that matters’, a

maneuvering revealed by the fact that one can still remain alone in

one’s work so long as it is regarded as an end in itself. The blindness

of the honest consciousness is the disinterested participation taken up

in the validation of his work, a perspective from which it is only his

attitude to his cause that matters to him, an activity reflective of his

self-absorption; “the self playing with itself”69 and not yet risen above

its own egoism. As Hegel clarifies:

“A consciousness that opens up such matters learns from experience that others come hurrying over like flies to freshly poured milk, and they too want to busy themselves over the matter. Likewise, those others then likewise learn from experience that he is not concerned with such a matter as an object but only with it insofar as it is his concern.” (¶417)

As it turns out however, the dismay of others in witnessing the self-

centeredness of this egoistic consciousness alternatively reflects their

own egoistic and private concern with their respective activities, and

so they share in the quality of the deceptive consciousness a similar

disregard for the objective ‘thing that matters’. Hegel describes the

sociality of dishonest consciousness as such,

“Since within this alternation consciousness has one moment for itself as essential in its reflection, while it has another merely externally in consciousness, or for others, what thus comes on the scene is a game individualities play with each other. In this game, each is deceiving himself as much he is finding all to be mutually deceiving each other.” (¶415)

69 Judith N. Shklar. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge University Press, London, 1976) 128.

60

Each individual consciousness are convinced they are acting with a

disinterest for others, however, because the ‘thing that matters’

emerges regardless of which individual acts, and that they must

nonetheless submit the work of their activities to the daylight of the

socially objective world, they must also contradict themselves in their

supposed denial of the ‘thing that matters’.

It is true that all individuals in their self-authority desire to

constitute their activity and the objects produced therein as strictly

their own. However, the ‘thing that matters’ does not mean individual

self-interest. Instead, the ‘thing that matters’ is sought precisely

because it is of interest to everyone. In the unmasking of the honest

consciousness, the falsity of its perspective is revealed wherein it “is

only as a member of society, as a man among others that his actions,

works, facts and causes have any real significance.”70 The illusion of

the self-legislating ego is that while the individual acts in what it

appears to him as for his own self-interest, he inadvertently acts for a

common interest. As Hegel makes clear the truth of the dishonest

consciousness,

“still consciousness seems to be engaged with its own essence for itself and not for others, that is, to be concerned merely with activity as its own activity and not as the activity of others, and it likewise permits those others to do as they please with respect to the thing that matters for them. But they are mistaken again; that consciousness is already somewhere else than where they thought it was. In its eyes, this does not have to do with the thing that matters in the sense of its being something that merely matters individually to him as his own.

70 Ibid, 129.

61

Rather, it has to do with the thing that matters as a universal, something which is for everyone.” (¶416)

The truth of the deceptive consciousness emerges therefore with all

individual action amounting to social action, that is as collectively

instituted forms of mutual recognition. An objectivity posited as

separate from the subjective activity of an individual as well as a

subjectivity which presumes its actions to not be constitutive of an

objectively constituted reality are themselves both illusory and

untenable scenarios. As Hegel writes, “Rather it is an essence whose

being is the activity of singular individuals and of all individuals, and

whose activity exists immediately for others, that is, it is a thing that

matters. It is only that kind of thing insofar as it is the activity of each

and all, the essence that is the essence of all essence, that is spiritual

essence.” (¶417) Hegel subsequently concludes the section with the

question of where to find such a model of universality which is as

subjective as it is objective. It will be through the concept of the moral

law, that is, an objective law whose source is universal subjective

reason – an individual reason recognizing itself as universal of which a

binding force is extended to all rational beings – that the

Phenomenology proceeds to a critique of Kantian moral reasoning.

IX. Reified Structure of Individual real in and for itself

Within the section of the Phenomenology, “The spiritual realm

of animals and deception; or the thing that matters”, the individual

62

consciousness attempts to give universal significance to the immanent

activity of its own consciousness, essentially attempting to achieve an

identity between itself and the world through its own rational activity.

No longer suffering from the anxious compulsion to compare itself

with others, the individual consciousness remains momentarily

content with the universality of its abstract activity for its self-

realization. However, because this individual consciousness produces

both itself and objects in the world, its ego faces the problem whereby

if it is to have a purpose for acting in world, the result of its activity

risks standing in discordance with itself, thereby pulling it away from

itself. That is, in order to act, it must conceive of some end or purpose

that may or may not correspond to the circumstances of the world, for

which this supposedly strictly subjective experience of being

interested is called into question.

Similar to Marx’s ontology of labor71, Hegel here recognizes that

activity is necessary for the self-realization of self-consciousness.

However, because the self of the individual consciousness is in

conflict with its own externality in the world concretized in particular

works, individual consciousness is plunged deeper into its own

abstract and universal egoism, one in which gratuitous and insincere

gestures are made in accordance with its own omnipotent principle of

self-interest. This deceptive concurrence to objective reality however

71 See C.J. Arthur. Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel (Basil Blackwell, New York, 1986).

63

stands on precarious ground, specifically as it comes to reveal the

necessarily social character of individual activity.72 As Shklar remarks,

“to forget the primacy of work is the perpetual idiocy of the

independent consciousness.”73 It is with the unfolding and

supersession of the honest consciousness that the reified structure of

this section in the Phenomenology begins to emerge. As the

subjectivist component of reification reflects a mode of individuality

hostile to own social character, by which an extrinsic and absolute

separation between itself and the social world is torn asunder, “what

the acquisition of rationality means to the individual consciousness is

that he gradually comes to perceive that the real character of society

and history is something created by men together.”74

Hegel begins the section however with a phenomenological figure

at the center of the world, one whose activity remains resolutely

solitary and private:

“because the individual knows that he can find in his actuality nothing but its unity with him, that is, can find merely self-certainty in its truth, and because he thus always achieves his end, the individual can experience only joy in itself.” (¶403)

72 As Lukács writes in accordance with his description of the moment in the Phenomenology preceding ‘objective spirit’, “the individual's belief that he can construct his own reality on his own, by virtue of his own activity, is a self-deception whose tragic breakdown forms the theme of the first part of the Phenomenology.” György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 476.73 Judith N. Shklar. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge University Press, London, 1976) 123.74 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 470.

64

Such an individual at the outset of the section, springing from his

originary natural existence, resembles an isolated and self-sufficient

Robinson Crusoe of sorts, content to remain alone and moved only by

self-gratification, refusing to be judged by standards outside of itself.

The interest wielded by this consciousness is only its self-expression

as an individuality, against all external criteria.

Such a detached and empty individuality stands in opposition to

the world, grasping itself as an abstract universal which takes only

itself to be all of reality. This individual consciousness is as such

oriented towards its own immanent rational activity, that is, itself,

rather than any externally given world. Here, the activity of

consciousness becomes identical with consciousness itself, and it is

this reflection which accompanies the reified subjectivist prejudice by

which the social world is grasped as estranged.

This estranged quality at first derives from the objectivity in

producing a work. Regardless of the arrogant confidence in itself, the

individual consciousness has produced an object which has a life of its

own; it is not merely the expression of its own individuality, but must,

in its objectivity, escape its individual grasp, with other individuals

becoming aware of it and possibly appropriating it to make use of it

for their own self-expression. Here, the reified structure of the

individual consciousness emerges most distinctly in the objectifying

process of the work itself, for which external forces call into question

65

the freedom of its own individuality. If the subjectivist component of

reification concerns the extent to which abstract labor renders one’s

own individuality as an opposing force, an individuality concretized in

its thinghood in the case of commodity society, the very concrete

existence of the work heralds a denial of bourgeois subjectivity. The

work, or commodity, exist in actuality, that is, within a social domain

constituted by other individuals, and, in the case of the historical

specificities of commodity production, the domain of market forces.

The work is simply out there for others to judge, not what

characterizes the individual. As Hegel writes,

“The work is thus something utterly transitory which is erased by the counter-play of other powers and interests and which to an even greater degree exhibits the reality of individuality itself as disappearing rather than as achieved.” (¶404)

The validity of the work is thereby to be found solely apart from the

worker, within an inherent quality of the product as existing within

objective reality. The individual consciousness, however, still refuses

to regard its own activity as of a social process, and so the honest

consciousness arrives in an effort to reclaim the universality of its

individuality.

The honest consciousness, engaged in its activity strictly as an

individual, seeks its satisfaction in work for its own sake, not

necessarily for any particular work produced. This form of self-

consciousness remains severed from its sociality, taking itself to be, in

and of its own abstract activity, complete. It is through such a

66

rendering of itself that it becomes explicit for itself. By denying the

concrete specificity of the work, the honest consciousness seeks self-

realization in the abstract universality of its own activity,

independently of its work as real and actual, that is, a withdrawal

from the determinate quality of the work. When the work does take on

a concrete reality, it becomes an objective alien work, at odds with

the intention, aim, or result of the individual producer. Put simply, it

becomes an object which stands over and against the producer, no

longer expressing his individuality but governed by an abstract

objectivity; a separation of doing and being. The particular work

thereby constitutes an alien reality for the individual consciousness,

which propels him inward, into a deeper refuge of the egoistic

consciousness.

The honest consciousness is precisely that effort to attempt, for

a second time, a reconciliation with objective reality, as its first effort,

in producing a particular and determinate work, endangered its

fortified individuality. The turn to the ‘thing that matters’, in which all

of the distinct moments of activity, whether its aims, means, or object,

are dissolved into the predicate of an abstract universality, is

therefore the attempt to concede its diligent egoism so that the world

itself isn’t simply eradicated. Lukács aptly describes this process as

follows:

“In all these struggles and conflicts the particular 'configurations of consciousness' witness the disappointment of

67

their aspirations, the destruction at the hands of an unknown power, an alien reality, of all that their consciousness enjoins upon them as necessary. Only the detached observer is able to see the forces at work in what seem to be purely individual philosophical tragedies.”75

As the recourses of the individual consciousness reveal their

inadequacies for constituting a universal which is not barren of

determinacy, the socially objective conditions through which all

individual activity must express itself follows suit in the dishonesty of

the honest consciousness.76 Lukács indeed outlines the movement of 75 Ibid, 479.76 Within this section, Hegel is clearly taking aim here most notably against a mode of bourgeois individualism in accordance with the necessarily social character of work itself, a theme Marx himself recognizes in his 1844 manuscripts when he writes that, “the “unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle of the “noble and base consciousness”, etc., etc. – these separate sections contain, but still in an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc.” Karl Marx. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 3 Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (International Publishers, New York, 1975) 332. As Arthur, in his Dialectics of Labour, has noted, the phenomenological figure of the honest consciousness evokes the difficulties of alienated labor, and it is as such that one can grasp the reified structure of the honest consciousness and its deceit. However, within his 1844 manuscripts, Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s mystified rendition of labor seems to stall at precisely that moment before the dishonesty of the honest consciousness is revealed. For example, Marx appropriately grasps the deficiently abstract and empty character of the honest consciousness when he writes the following: “The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity – an abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as an independent activity – as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content produced by abstraction from all content.” Karl Marx. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 3 Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (International Publishers, New York, 1975) 343. While completely in accordance with Hegel’s illustration, what remains absent in Marx’s own account is Hegel’s next move by which the contradictions of the honest consciousness are revealed. Indeed, Arthur’s analysis reminds us of the puzzle with which Marx has left readers unsatisfied with diminishing Hegel to the caricature of a simple ‘idealist’, but rather as a thinker utterly committed to grasping all individual human activity in its self-reflective sociality. “This seems very pertinent to

68

the individual consciousness in terms of the seething sociality of the

proletariat, its activity, and its products, when he writes the following

passage, worth quoting at length:

“The individual can never become the measure of all things. For when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection. Only the class can relate to the whole of reality in a practical revolutionary way. […] And the class, too, can only manage it when it can see through the reified objectivity of the given world to the process that is also its own fate. For the individual, reification and hence determinism (determinism being the idea that things are necessarily connected) are irremovable. Every attempt to achieve ‘freedom’ from such premises must fail, for ‘inner freedom’ presupposes that the world cannot be changed.”77

Here, the fallacy of self-interest emerges analogously as the dishonest

consciousness consists in its disregard for the ‘thing that matters’

outside of its own self-interest, alongside the revealed dishonesty of

all other individuals, who are equally concerned with the ‘thing that

matters’ only to the extent that is the ‘thing that matters’ for them.

The interest of each is that the ‘thing that matters’ be their own

doing, and as such, “there is deception all around, because pure

objectivity is not really the motive on any side, and yet something has

been brought forth for all.”78

the idea of absolute negativity Hegel evolves at the beginning of this discussion. Instead of the universality of activity being celebrated in the wealth of its content, the content vanishes in the purity of absolute negativity. But did not Hegel himself find wanting such abstract universality?” C.J. Arthur. Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel (Basil Blackwell, New York, 1986) 87.77 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 193.78 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 196.

69

The realization of an individual’s activity cannot take place but

within an objective world and never solely within the fortified

bourgeois ego. Hegel therefore “explains the dialectics of self-interest

and in particular that false consciousness which persuades the

individual to live in accordance with the principles of self-interest

while in reality his selfish actions are necessarily connected with the

labours of others and so flow into the stream of social, socially useful

species-activity of mankind.”79 In the Phenomenology, the sociality of

all individual activity occurs in its explicit form through the

contradictions of the individual positing an abstract, not fully

integrated, universality which cannot sustain the truth of its claim. As

Hegel writes,

“They pretend that what they are engaged in is something that exists merely for themselves and in which their sole aim is to bring themselves and their own essence to fulfillment. Yet since they act and thereby present themselves to the light of day, they immediately contradict by their deed their very pretense of wanting to shut out the daylight, to keep out universal consciousness, and to keep out everyone else’s participation.” (¶416)

The reified structure of such an untenable certainty reveals itself in

the disparity of the individual and society collapsing into one

another.80 Within this process, the rigidity of the individual and the 79 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 481.80 As was noted at the outset of the present work, the categorial distinctions between the objectivist and subjectivist components of reification are not to be structurally divided additively, or in aggregation to one another. Instead, it is only by grasping the interrelation of the two aspects within a single dynamic that the phenomena of reification can be illuminated. Lukács evokes such a perspective when he describes the objectivist aspect, wherein an estranged reality imposes itself upon a knowing subject, to be constitutive of the subjectivist position for which the world ought not

70

universality of its assertion are transcended as a false conception of

self-expression. The result, as Lauer writes below, procures a self-

consciousness hesitant of the perimeters of its own unyielding

individuality:

“Slowly but surely there is surfacing in the self-conscious individual a realization that any attempt to be nothing but individual is doomed to failure; neither genuine objectivity nor genuine subjectivity is possible at this level.”81

Transcending the self-sufficiency of the individual becomes the goal of

ethical life, that is, a justified sociality in which the freedom of others

becomes admittedly necessary for the freedom of the individual: a

freedom of a reciprocal recognition. While such a development does

not occur explicitly at the conclusion of this section in the

Phenomenology, the advancements within the “The spiritual realm of

animals and deception; or the thing that matters”, can be heralded as

a substantial move in this direction. “It is the universal, which is a

being only as this activity which is the activity of each and all.” (¶417)

Indeed, when rationality is no longer conceived of as an impersonal,

ahistorical, individual activity, but rather as actual modes of

institutionalized reflective social practice, Hegel’s Phenomenology has

entered the realm of Spirit.

encroach upon the strict universality of the individual: “What is at stake, then, is the tension between the individual and the social reality in which he finds himself, a reality which, as we have seen, appears to him as an enigmatic, uncomprehended necessity, alien to his praxis and, in extreme tragic instances, inimically disposed to his aspirations.” Ibid, 479.81 Quentin Lauer, S.J. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham University Press, New York, 1976) 196.

71

X. Conclusion

It has been the aim of the present work to demonstrate the

extent to which Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can be grasped as a

critique of reification. This was accomplished by first explicating the

phenomena of reification as constituting both an objectivist and

subjectivist perspective, by which the truth of a reified social

existence consists in the oscillation between the two, the former as a

‘personification of things’ wherein an ahistorical objective and alien

world imposes its structures upon the latter’s alternatively subjectivist

individual, one riddled with anxiety over the world’s intrusion into its

own egoism. Such pathological modes of existence become expressive

of a reified consciousness grounded in both an immediacy structurally

prohibited from grasping its own mediated composition of itself and

its object, as well as the diminution of social activity to an aggregate

of competitive self-interests. It has been these two aspects of

reification that the “Sense-certainty” and “The spiritual realm of

animals and deception” sections of the Phenomenology have sought to

illuminate.

However, as the overcoming of these deficient modes of

consciousness within the Phenomenology are attributable to the

specific and immanent contradictions of the categories themselves, an

aporia is recalled in the prospects for extracting a critique of

72

reification when considering the latter to be a condition characteristic

of a particular historical formation, that of commodity society in its

fully developed and universal scope, an historical condition largely,

though not completely, absent in Hegel’s day. Indeed, as an historical

development, the practical supersession of reification cannot take

place within the abstract categories of its theoretical apprehension,

but in the concrete movement of class struggle and in the self-

abolishment of the proletariat itself. Reification is not merely a

mistaken choice of philosophic commitment. Merely coming to

comprehend any calcified epistemological standpoint as erroneous

does not consist in the practical abolition of reification, but, at best,

only in a speculative formulation into the extent to which reified

consciousness has its origins not just within the technological

developments of the commodity form, but also within the modern

philosophical foundations on top of which bourgeois thought has

gained abstract universal ascendency. The latter task is, of course,

integral, and it is with this recognition that Hegel’s contribution to the

critique of reification should be taken seriously, despite his own

limited grasp of the contradictions of bourgeois society.82

82 Lukács traces the origins of this impediment to the following reflections within Marx’s early manuscripts: “Marx's statement that Hegel does indeed stand on the heights of classical economic theory and that he has a genuine understanding of work as the process by which man creates himself, but that he has no insight into the negative aspects of work in capitalist society since he only considers its positive sides. Marx's whole criticism of the fundamental concepts of the Phenomenology is based on this assertion: since Hegel does not see the negative aspects of work, he becomes guilty of false distinctions and false syntheses, of the mystifications of idealism. The

73

Indeed, so as to maintain its historical specificity, it has been

the importance of the dialectical method of the Phenomenology for

illuminating the phenomena of reification, rather than positing Hegel

as a critic of reification per se. This method, by which consciousness

becomes clear to itself by working through the partial forms in which

it encounters its own activity, takes aim at the authority of

appearances, and in doing so, “consciousness suffers […] violence at

its own hands and brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction.” (¶80)

As Lukács remarks, Hegel “had started with the immediate relation of

consciousness to a wholly alien world of objects and he carried it

through right up to the dawning realization that this societal world of

objects has its foundation in 'externalization'.”83 It has been the

purpose of the present work to demonstrate that by grasping the

dynamics of the Phenomenology, a text written at the dawn of

capitalist society in its fully developed form, the historical elements of

Hegel’s methodology will emerge, elements which can provide clarity

for the contemporary pathologies of a reified social life.

It indeed the intention of Lukács to draw important emphasis on

the inheritance between Hegel and Marx, specifically in accordance

with the dialectical means of articulating categories in order to grasp

discovery of the true dialectics of labour in capitalist society is the precondition for a materialist critique of the philosophy which developed a one-sided view of labour and made it into the foundation of a general philosophy of the evolution of the human race.” György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 550.83 Ibid, 487.

74

an existent concrete whole, one which is wrought with dynamism and

contradiction as each proceeds from abstract appearances to a more

concrete essence, grasping phenomena in their interconnectedness;

moments of a whole existing synchronically, although disclosed

sequentially. Is it for this reason that Lukács has been most apt in

illustrating the extent to which Hegel can be grasped as a critic of

reification, and that, “it becomes plain, in short, how Hegelian

dialectics were able to serve as the immediate prototype of materialist

dialectics.”84

It is with Lukács’ analysis of reification that I have attempted to

enrich the relation between Hegel and Marx, specifically by extracting

a critique of reification from Hegel’s Phenomenology through

consciousness’ journey towards true knowledge. Hegel offers a

protagonist who is frequently mistaking its own certainty for truth,

wherein its object appears as something distant and in an extrinsic

relation to itself, thereby misapprehending its own contribution to its

object and itself. Ultimately, the experience of consciousness is an

experience of itself, its truth residing in the entire process of its

coming-to-know itself and the world, wherein any moments of

discordance between truth and certainty are revealed as themselves

moments in the process of truth. Again, Lukács usefully formulates

this development in terms of the subjective and objective dynamic of

84 Ibid, 553.

75

overcoming the false consciousness of reification in the following

passage:

“As we have emphasized, the objective determinations of reality are effectively present, but for consciousness actively developing itself they are still unknown and hence fixed, alien things. Thus a movement is initiated within a 'false consciousness', the supersession of one configuration of 'false consciousness' by another. However, since objective categories of the development of society are at work behind this movement, and since they objectively constitute the societal activity of individuals who nevertheless remain in ignorance of them, it becomes evident that this process will tend to transform false consciousness into true consciousness, i.e. individuals will gradually become aware of the social character of their activity and of society as the total product of their activity.”85

Here the homologous movement of Hegel’s consciousness within the

Phenomenology, and that of the proletariat overcoming its own class-

belonging becomes clear, each engaged in the project of superseding

their own alien otherness to become at home in the world.86 It is the

pretensions of consciousness in grasping what it considers to be the

whole that propels it into a movement of anguish, wherein what is

momentarily taken to be truth proves inadequate, revealing a series of

fleeting certainties.87

85 Ibid, 474.86 Additionally, it is within the following passage in an 1843 letter from Marx to Ruge that the similarities between Hegel’s consciousness and its own implicit unfolding, not fully revealed until the section of “Absolute Knowing”, and that of the proletarian class moving for itself again resurface: “The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. […] It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality.” Karl Marx. “Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher”, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 3 Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (International Publishers, New York, 1975) 144.87 Unfortunately, beyond the scope of the present work, but which would offer much depth to the project of establishing the Phenomenology as a

76

The failures of consciousness by which it takes the immediacy of

appearance for truth undoubtedly pervades the Phenomenology in its

entirety, a process in which “only the historical process truly

eliminates the-actual-autonomy of the objects and the concepts of

objects with their resulting rigidity.”88 Each of its most perspicuous

instants can be argued to demonstrate a methodological homology to

the pathologies of reification, a process which unites objective forms

of truth with a knowing self. Lukács will go so far as to state that “if

critique of reification, would be to approach any contemporary discourse on the theme of reification that takes the phenomena in purely epistemological terms, rather than understood as an historical ontology of social labor constitutive of commodity production. It is Axel Honneth’s interpretation, in particular, that would be of much assistance, whereby reification is adapted to a theory of normative inter-subjective recognition, in which the concept of totality and the determinations of commodity production themselves, wherein reification would consist in the historically specific pathology of bourgeois society, that is, grounded in the social forms constitutive of abstract labor, are both effectively abandoned. See Axel Honneth. Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View (Oxford University Press, 2007). To contrast such a reading to the project of demonstrating Hegel’s Phenomenology as a critique of reification would be to interpret the movement of consciousness not just through a series of deficient modes of knowing, but also as problematic modes of being. As such and fundamentally, reification must concern problems of social practice of which problems of knowledge are constitutive. Additionally, it is from this comparison that the simple renunciation of appearances can be thoroughly dissociated from a critique of reification. Since the appearance itself is constitutive of the essence or, the process of experience, that is, truth, then the movement against appearances is a movement against a mode of being. As such, the manner in which appearances are criticized in the Phenomenology corresponds to a critique of reification to the extent that reification is not merely a process of veiling the “true” reality underneath appearances, but rather a phenomenon that is constitutive of an historic social form and mode of human activity. It would be of additional intrigue to investigate the extent to which both Hegel and Lukács operate with a similar social ontology, in which a self-determining and self-conscious social whole realizes its own freedom in the world, and in this process, reveals knowledge about the world to be constitutive of the very categories and structures of the world.88 György Lukács. History and Class Consciousness (The Merlin Press, London, 1971) 144.

77

we look a little deeper, we see that [Hegel’s] true subject is the

phenomenological dialectic of the commodity-relation, and that he is

investigating both its objective nature and its subjective implications

in its relation to the consciousness of man in capitalist society.”89

Additional sections of the Phenomenology would indeed yield insight

for grasping the social conditions under which the general suffering

induced by the domination of appearances expresses itself in the

formalization of empty abstractions and the fossilization of analytic

opposition.

89 György Lukács. The Young Hegel (The Merlin Press, London, 1975) 500.

78