Let's think a chair, shall we?

A bizarre turn of phrase has become widespread among second-rate philosophers these days, so widespread that it is quite annoying. Where we would usually expect the formulation "think about object x", we are hit over the head with the abomination "think object x". The people writing in this manner obviously missed the introductory course to philosophy, where they would have learned about two philosophical positions on the relationship between subject and object that were held by some unenlightened spirits in the dark ages. At one end we have naive nominalism, which states that subjective concepts have no equivalents on the level of the object; Hume, while living after the end of the dark ages - but who was still pretty much untouched by the light of reason - was a proponent of this view: he held that things like causality are purely subjective phenomena and do not exist objectively. At the other end we have naive realism, which states that there can and does exist an unmediated relationship between object and subject, that the object is transparent to the subject. This is the problem that Adorno adressed when he was talking about the non-identical: about that, which can not be subsumed under the concept. Some proponents of positivism - who are, to be fair, like Hume a product of the post-dark-ages, but whom we have to thank for the contemporary "eclipse of reason", as Horkheimer put it - can be counted as members of this camp. What both camps would agree upon is that the formulation "think object x" is quite felicitous. It can be understood in two ways: when we say for example "think democracy", this might imply that democracy is a pure phantom of the mind, without any correlate in the real world. This belief lies at the heart of bourgeois morals: ideals are to be thought about, not acted upon. Another way we can understand the formulation "think democracy" is that, to put it bluntly, I take the object as it is, stick it into my brain and let it swirl around a bit in there. This is the belief at the core of the bourgeois work ethic, it is what Marx meant with the term commodity fetishism and what Lukacs meant with the term reification: the misapprehension that sees subjective phenomena - social relationships - as objective, as somehting pertaining to the commodity itself. To "think democracy" is therefore the purest manifestation of the deformations democracy has undergone in capitalist societies, it is the point at which we can see even language itself bent and twisted by the untrue society, proving the value of the marxist idea of base and superstructure.