Without Hegel, everything is Bouville or Mudtown. See Sartre’s “Nausea” set in “Bouville”.
The bourgeois paradise: Bouville.
I think Goethe had a little ditty about the orange that Hegel quoted. The rind and the core. Get to the core. Don’t be fooled by appearance. We can think of Kant in reading off the appearance. But we don’t want to be hard on Kant because he was well aware of the problem.
There is a forgetting in pure reification. Look at these beautiful old buildings!! NO. See through the buildings to the dead labor that built them. Get to the core of the situation.
These things, the buildings, can be a fetish too because we “just forget” man himself.
Marx used the orange too, I believe. We use it for an example today!
Aristotle and Hegel were the great rascals who enable us to see things for what they really are. And Goethe.
Plato has frozen forms, Aristotle moves, opens the door to history including the history of the object ... A is not A. Not really.
The thing qua thing is the frozen object. Pristine self-identity. The fetish. This is peace, this is mother, a dream world of bourgeois safety. Plato.
You can see a lot of this in the masterpiece of Diego Rivera. The Flower carrier. Notice how the man is pushed down almost to the ground under his load. Almost forgotten. https://www.diegorivera.org/flowercarrier.jsp The flowers are now only a pure object for sale. A commodity. Totally objectified. Reified. Thing like. And when bought, they can sit pristine in the vase with man and broader nature forgotten.
Notice how it is painted so the eyes go immediately to the object for sale. Man is obscured.
Please note again English property law. To alienate is to transfer property (sell or convey). Nature is alienated of its flowers, Man of his labor, or what could be his self owned creativity, all to produce the pristine self-identical non-historical object that can be “worshiped” in isolation.
You could say that these series of alienations, particularly in a capitalist economy, result in “thingification” or reification where certainly the history of man’s input is forgotten, and nature’s too, to produce the isolated “thing” or things which can end in a fetishism of the thing (commodity etc )
PS keep in mind English (modern) Capitalism was first to develop. This is what Hegel studied, also Marx in more detail.