The Lecture compares Georg Lukács' analysis of reification in History and Class Consciousness to the story of a gardener who refuses the adoption of new technologies in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. The first part reconstructs reification processes from the perspective of fragmented intersubjective as well as world relationships. A particular focus will be on the loss of individual control and the role that new technologies play in this process. The second part compares reification in the form of technologization to the conception of the machine heart (jixin機心) in classical Chinese thought. By way of conclusion, the lecture develops preliminary ideas on how to combine the critical task of diagnosing current pathologies of reification with the therapeutic task of practically addressing these pathologies from a perspective that draws on both Western Marxism as well as Eastern Daoism.