Abstract
Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of Enlightenment’s descent into utility, absolute freedom, and terror lacks an adequate concept of capital. Utility emerges from the form of consciousness that Hegel calls pure insight. Pure insight finds only itself in God and material things; it leaves the barren residue that Hegel calls utility. Without content, utility collapses into the unhinged freedom that ends in terror. Where Hegel identifies utility as the caput mortuum of pure insight, Marx regards utility as a pseudo-concept that disguises value and surplus value. Value is the supersensible residue of the practical abstraction of labor completed by the sale of commodities. The abstraction involved in market exchanges establishes the social basis of Hegel’s pure insight. Marx demonstrates that generalized commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital. Because it is the truth of commodity circulation, capital, which Marx identifies with terror, is the truth of utility.