The thing-in-itself is a false problem rooted in bourgeois contemplative stances.

Evidence

For Lukács, however, this dilemma of classical philosophy, to which Kant’s system is a monument, derives from an even more fundamental, prephilosophical attitude toward the world which is ultimately socio-economic in character: namely, from the tendency of the middle classes to understand our relationship to external objects (and consequently our knowledge of those objects) in static and contemplative fashion. It is as though our primary relationship to the things of the outside world were not one of making or use, but rather that of a motionless gaze, in a moment of time suspended, across a gap which it subsequently becomes impossible for thought to bridge. The dilemma of the thing-in-itself becomes, then, a kind of optical illusion or false problem, a kind of distorted reflection of this initially immobile situation which is the privileged moment of middle-class knowledge. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Lukács’s deflationary diagnosis: the noumenon is a distorted reflection of a socio-economic posture (contemplation, not making/use), not a real metaphysical gap.
• XREF: Prefigures Marx’s 1844 critique of contemplation and later Heidegger’s ‘Zuhandenheit’—also resonates with Sartre’s praxis-based epistemology Jameson treats elsewhere.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a seeming metaphysical limit of all thought (Kant’s noumena) is really the optical illusion of a historically-specific class posture is the crux of dialectical critique—dense, paradigm-shifting, resists summary.