Abstract 

　　In grounding critique in the historically situated and concrete, sensuous external object, Marx both preserves and transcends the form of critique present in the work of not only the Young Hegelians, including Proudhon, but the titans of German Idealism—Kant and Hegel. By centering the external object, Marxian critique mediates concrete historical change between the subject and the world of appearance. The aim of this article is to differentiate Marx’s form of critique from his predecessors on the grounds of the external object. This article is broken into two sections, the first being an examination of the thought of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach, and each theorist’s relation to the thing-in-itself. This initial section aims to reveal the abstract and ahistorical manner in which “bourgeois thought” engages the external world of appearance. The second section explores the way “bourgeois thought” eradicates motion and mediation in theorizing the external object of bourgeois society—the commodity. The latter section illustrates how the process of reification [Verdinglichung] hypostatizes the categories of bourgeois society into ‘natural’ categories that are then applied to the world of appearance. 

　　Keywords: Materialist critique; thing-in-itself; German idealism; reification; sensuousness; bourgeois thought 

　　From: Critique 2024 52 (4) 

　　Editor: Wang Yi