Can We Perceive a Chair?

Near the beginning of Value in Capitalist Society, Paul Cobben is explaining Marx’s use of Hegelian themes and turns of argument when he summarizes Hegel’s notion of Perception, a level of knowing beyond “Sense Certainty.” Cobben writes:

Perception does not assume to have immediate knowledge of objective reality. This knowledge is mediated through the
perception of properties. The question is, however, whether this cognitive criterion is sufficient to have knowledge of the objective reality, a reality which is
in it-self, which can be accepted as a substantial one. Hegel concludes that this is not the case. To identify the thing with many properties, it is insufficient to
perceive only properties. One needs a criterion to determine which properties
belong to one thing and which to another. Only then it is possible to identify
one thing in distinction from another. The problem is, however, that this criterion does not correspond to the cognitive criteria of Perception: the unity of the
thing cannot be sensually perceived; the unity of the thing is not itself a sensual property. To clarify this with an example: we can have knowledge of a
chair, because we can perceive the sensual properties of the chair. But we can
only identify the properties we perceive as the properties of a chair if we
already have the concept ‘chair’ at our disposal. Therefore, Hegel concludes
that Perception cannot acquire objective knowledge. On the one hand, the
knowledge of the thing of many properties is based on objective input, namely
the perceived properties, but, on the other hand on subjective input, namely a
conceptual unity which is linked to a specific language or a specific culture. A
perceiver who is not familiar with the concept ‘chair’ cannot perceive a chair.
In this sense, Perception has no cognition of objective reality. (15-16)

One can see the dilemma: We perceive properties, but to know that they are properties of X, we need to know X as a unified thing-with-these-properties. But we can’t know X in this way by mere perception of X. Thus, Hegel says, something has to be added to our knowledge of the properties—which is knowledge of the objective reality of the thing—and that something is a “subjective” element, the concept “chair.”

But this seems odd and wrong. The chair is a chair, not merely a null thing with certain properties. Were we vulgar Platonists, we’d say that the chair has a quality of chairness, and that this is an objective property of the object. Or, more Aristotelianly, it has form. 

However we might do the metaphysics, the form-of-chair is something one perceives. Hegel seems to be treating the perceived properties as isolated perceptibles rather than as an assemblage of properties, an assemblage that together constitute the meta-property of being-a-chair. When someone who has never seen a chair sees an object with chair-like properties, it’s not that he knows “objectively” all that can be known objectively, and needs only to add a “subjective” element. Rather, though he perceives properties, he simply doesn’t perceive the thing. He doesn’t recognize the assemblage of properties for what it is.