Objectification is good

I find myself in opposition to the Frankfurt School in a way, and ultimately this may put me at odds even with Lukacs - perhaps even with my beloved Situationist International.  Because I went back and read Hegel.  And ultimately, I think all of these people got Hegel wrong.  A thread throughout Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, and the Situationist International is that reification is bad.  They think we should just fight against reification.  Just hold it back.  Stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!"  But I think one way to put Hegel in a nutshell is: Hegel was saying that reification is good, actually.  That's his whole point.  Reification is good.  If you like, you might put it this way: Hegel thought objectification is good.  Of course, this might put me at odds with certain feminists, people who simply assume that objectification is always bad.  And some animal rights activists will talk about the objectification of animals, and so on.  But notice - not all feminists have such a simplistic conception of objectification!  Martha Nussbaum, who is, to my mind, the feminist philosopher of objectification, actually had very interesting things to say - she points out that sometimes objectification can be benign, or even positive.  And Nancy Bauer has an even more complex and nuanced attitude towards objectification.  And I think Marx was a better reader of Hegel on this point than Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, or the Situationist International.  I think that Marx understood, in his own distinctive way, that reification, or objectification, is good.

Of course, Hegel understood the argument that objectification, or reification, is bad.  He understood it deeply.  He understood it a lot better than a lot of contemporary people do, in my opinion.  This contention that reification is always bad is a romantic argument, an argument of the romantic school in philosophy.  Actually, before that, it begins in Kant, or even before that, in Rousseau.  But it's really the essence of romantic philosophy, and it probably reached the highpoint of its development in the work of Schelling, although there are many other thinkers who made huge contributions to this philosophy, notably Schleiermacher and Schlegel.  

To perform an immanent critique of romanticism means to show how romanticism itself goes beyond romanticism.  Romanticism must move forward, in self-transformation, or else it ceases to be romanticism.  Hegel understood romanticism, and appreciated romanticism, but he also recognized the ways in which romanticism went beyond itself.  Romanticism is essentially the search for the transcendent, or the yearning for transcendent.  And that's wonderful.  In the work of some romantic philosophers and poets, there is a positive, hopeful attempt to capture the transcendent, or even a claim to have captured it; in the work of others, there's a sense of frustration, loss, and despair, and pure longing in the face of their inability to capture it.  But what unites them all is the desire for the transcendent.  Hegel appreciated this, but took it further, and saw the ways in which romanticism inevitably leads to its own transcendence, to the transcendence of romanticism itself.  In this sense, he performed the immanent critique of romanticism.

Hegel understood the argument that objectification is bad, but his point is that the entire process, in which pre-reification negates itself, through reification, and then is, itself, negated, is the ultimate good.  Each of the moments of the development of this process is, in a sense, bad, but the inner necessity, that connects them all and leads inevitably to the negation of each and the development of the next, is the Absolute, is good, is God.  What is positive is nothing other than the double-negative, the negation of the negation.  Objectification is necessary - it is a necessary part of this process, and this very necessity is the good.  What is good is the necessity of the process that includes objectification as a moment.

Hegel was really critiquing Schelling and his friends, but - perhaps in order to spare Schelling's feelings (unsuccessfully) - Hegel frames this as an argument against Spinoza.  Hegel's argument against Spinoza parallels Leibniz's argument against Descartes.  In Leibniz's "On Cartesianism" (1679), he writes, "Descartes' God has neither will nor understanding, since according to Descartes he does not have the good as the object of his will or the true as the object of his understanding."  This is, mutatis mutandis, the same "objection" (so to speak) that Hegel levels against Spinoza.  His entire project is summarized in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: 

"In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject."

Hegel respected Spinoza, and indeed felt that the genuinely philosophical perspective must begin with a Spinozist perspective.  But this was not enough for Hegel, for Spinoza, in Hegel's view, only revealed the truth as Substance, but the goal was to grasp and express the true as Subject.  This meant, at the very least, passing through the moment of the presentation of the True in a dichotomous way - not merely romantically, in an abstract unity, but in such a way, as Leibniz had it, such that good is the object of the will and the true is the object of the understanding.  For the sake of determinate negation, we are not being objectified enough.  And Hegel also understood that there is ultimately only one way to achieve objectification: labor.