Abstract

This book is a translation of the original Hungarian edition published in 1971. It belongs in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, and would be of interest to those appreciative of that tradition. The book begins with a discussion of the general distinction between appearance and reality. According to the author, the distinction has at most a rudimentary application to nature below the social level, but is crucial for understanding society. So the book is primarily concerned with social appearances, where the notion of "being-forothers" has a clear application and accounts for the fact that appearances can have objectivity, a quasi-reality, and play a role in the process of historical development. The author "hazards" the thesis that "the individual person in the present of every age necessarily orientates himself in 'false', illusory bodies of thought". He criticizes the "bourgeois" phenomenological and neo-positivist notions of appearance as subjectivistic abstractions, divorced from social praxis. "Man encounters first the individual mass of things rather than phenomena. These data become phenomena only through practical work, when, by the aid of practice, science and technological progress, a systematic division is achieved in which we can discern what is 'behind' the thing immediately in front of us, i.e. essence".