(apples, trees, balls, cars, pots, music). He no longer has contact with the real world but only with his mental world, the world he created in abstraction through the appropriation of more and more objects being brought into his world through concepts.
It is even possible to understand how a person might view his actions as completely sensible but have them defined through false consciousness. Man would interact with things
out there in that realm composed of objects he created. They would be sensible to him, because he could quite literally feel and observe their distance; and he, unlike Kantian man, could epistemologically be assured they, in their essence, existed in their noumenal sense, as a ‘thing-in-and-of-itself,” because he was the reason behind their creation.
However, knowing there was also an existence denied, man’s epistemological certainty would also be thrown into doubt because the very premise underlying his world’s existence was abstracted from the real conditions in which they arose, creating if you will their phenomenal existence, as something other. It is in many respects a case of simple denial, the result of which is man and his identity become a slave to the objects in his self-generated world: “first, in that he receives an object of work, i.e., receives work, and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.”29
It is quite a conundrum. Without creating this self-generated world of differentiated objects, of thought things, man simply would not exist because there would be no means for him to realize personal identity as a thing differentiated from other things. “Thus, the object enables him to exist, first as a worker and secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this enslavement is that he can only maintain himself as a physical subject so far as he is a worker, and that is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.”30 Again,
the world creates the means for him to exist as a thing. He owes his existence in this respect to the objects he has created, causing a further sense of alienation from what would otherwise be, as he should realize, a natural relationship.
In this way, alienation grows exponentially:
The alienation of the worker in his object is expressed as follows in the laws of political economy: the more the worker produces the less he has to consume; the more value he creates the more worthless he becomes; the more refined his product the more crude and misshapen the worker; the more civilized the product the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work the more feeble the worker; the more the work manifests intelligence the more the worker declines in intelligence and becomes a slave of nature.31
In other words: the more man gives over his natural self to the purely intellectual production of things, the more alienated and unnatural he becomes.
This tension concerned Marx. His argument was political economy, the abstraction of abstractions reflecting the fundamental operations of the mind’s interaction with nature, hid a fundamental fact about human nature: “Political economy conceals the alienation in the nature of labour in so far as it does not
Fractured thinking, if you will, distorts common experience by allowing for an infinite expression of different products, abstractions produced by each individual mind operating on and appropriating objects in infinite directions.
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