Vexillology seems pretty niche.
Hello! I have been studying reification, but I am having trouble finding real world examples of things that have been reified. I think I get confused because there are so many definitions of reification. Overall, reification (from what I know) is to make the abstract concrete, but I have trouble thinking of examples of this concept, and I have trouble seeing how reification operates in our daily every day lives.
Could anyone help provide examples of reification that affect people and society? I’m hoping to understand reification better. Thank you!
Critical Based Theory #3 | The Phenomenon of Reification
Thomas discusses the conceptual origins of reification, its relationship to identity politics and how it can be a useful tool for conservatives.
https://www.lotuseaters.com/video-critical-based-theory-3-or-the-phenomenon-of-reification-15-12-21
https://preview.redd.it/fnaz8tug9q581.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd54ff58f6bcec6f4c6cf4d9cce3742cacaf27e5
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.
In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory". Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.
From Latin res ("thing") and -fication, a suffix related to facere ("to make"). Thus reification can be loosely translated as "thing-making"; the turning of something abstract into a concrete thing or object.
Hello. I just read Adorno’s essay “On the Fetish Character” and I intend to dive in to his sociopolitical critique. I am trying to understand his concept of reification and fetishization better. I need help in finding specific texts/block quotations where he defined those two concepts.
Thank you so much!
so I'm on a roll recently and burning through Georg Lukács. Coming at him from the angle of reading everything by the situs (and much much of the zummi reco list), it's a WILD, WILD ride.
as I owe this accursed place of blessing me with understanding, it is my duty to give back a short field report.
I'll try to make big and complicated words smaller and less complicated, so if you in for a schizo-literature piece, sorry but not today.
ready - steady? GO
reification
dumb big hard word. our man Georg lurches from Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and alienation, and he makes it a step further. the basic gist is that by the mode of capitalism we don't recognize objects as a result of human behaviour (eg. someone made this chair), but as results of the system, we do a retarded mental leap backwards: we think that the state of things are a result of something "natural".
this is not a mental error, this is like water is for the fish (sniff zizek ideology). it determines how we view the world around us, and it explains quite a lot of why we act like subjects with no power to change the world. (in Lukács's terminology it's in reverse: we look at ourselves as the objects of history, much as we view a chair, not the subjects of it, as someone who makes the chair.
if you aggregate this effect - meaning you don't just talk about an individual worker looking at his work as something alien, and not a product of his labour - you get to the state where the entire society seems like an alien object. it's just there, it's given: you can't change it, so there's no reason to really talk about it. it just happens and worsens, seemingly without a cause, it's something that you have to bear with.
Lukács's example is that of the university: the university seems like an institution, an object, when in fact we know it's actually a product of a lot of people doing daily work, and that work can be changed if the people who work there actually decide to (or... are forced to) change that work. The example scales to every and all organizations obviously.
But this alienation is not just an illusion. It stems from an objective feeling of reality, in the sense that we have no say in how things should go. We experience this as workers and as citizens and as consumers, that we're not listened to, we're just cogs in some alien machinery.
But this objective reality has certain limits that we are not aware of: that the machine can
... keep reading on reddit ➡Reification is a weird term but it can be roughly defined as taking an idea that exists only to describe something and then making it into a seperate thing that can act on the world. In this case turning BPD from a list of behaviours in the DSM into a disease they don't control and that causes behaviours I cannot hold them accountable for because BPD "made them do it".
From my abuse at someone diagnosed with BPD they would often "reify" their diagnose, i.e when they did something harmful the argument would be "You can't blame me for that, I didn't do that, my BPD did it". The label of BPD they had was used as a blugeon, treated like an external disease that had nothing to do with the person "underneath" the BPD and that by calling them out for their abuse I was merely bigoted. In fact, not only should I not be calling out the abuse I should instead actively allow it be facilitated because BPD was a part of their identity that I had no right judging. I've seen mirrors of this kind of justification of behaviour in BPD spaces and I find it very troubling. There's this attempt to seperate themselves from BPD, all the good things they do are "the real them", the bad things are the "BPD" and if I really loved them I'd see past the BPD and only judge them based on what "the real them does".
This particular path of abuse is something I struggled to stand up and did for years afterwards and only after coming across the idea of "reification" did I have a name for it, and it would be good to see if its something others can relate to.
What are the essential books/essays on the topic?
Thanks!
Recently I read an article for my study about the 'reification' of mental disorders, that seems to get all the more prevalent nowadays. Reification is a term from philosophy that means "to make something into a thing"/"to bring existence to something". How that applies to mental disorders, is that one comes to think that what they are diagnosed with isnt a description of one's (personality) condition (which it really is), but that people view it as something they have that causes their symptoms. For example, that someone blames their ADHD for being hyperactive, borderliners blaming their BPD for their mood swings, etc. The article funnily mentioned some Israelian guy who actually was the overt version of an edgelord self-diagnosed psychopath, who seemed to believe that he 'had' psychopathy and believes that he behaves antisocial/unlawfully because of it.
How reification applies to ASPD, is that ASPD is not a mental illness that is the "cause" of antisocial behaviour. It is really purely a descriptive term for antisocial behaviour and symptoms that are deemed to have crossed the boundary of normality. Someone doesnt 'have ASPD' (except as a diagnosis), but is antisocial to a disorderly degree. And that is the way to think about the diagnosis.
For those who have been diagnosed with ASPD or believe they fulfill the criteria, have you reified the disorder? Or do you think of it as purely a descriptor applied to who you are as a unique individual, like how it is meant to be seen?
I posted this a few days ago but felt it would be more appropriate to include some reasoning as shown below. My main confusions are below:
Let's start with alienation: even in a communist system, there exist workers who are alienated in multiple respects; with the product that is used ultimately by another person who the worker does not know in a way the worker cannot predict (there even exists a division of labor [via commodity fetishism] from worker A harvesting wheat, to worker B pounding grain, to worker C using it to make bread, even if there is no capitalistic incentive) and (for those who must labor in uncreative works) with their naturally-creative essence.
With reification, the above points support it. There is still commodity exchange to some significant degree even in an ideal communist state. Without a solution to alienation, there cannot be one for reification. The worker is still tied to whatever product he develops, despite this systemization and communist pro-individuality ideal.
I'm sure I'm missing something here, so hopefully, that clears up my thought process.
Thank you!
According to a Dzogchen retreat with Alan Wallace, i cannot simple de reify something by simply letting it go in the mind stream, it probably will reappear as object in my mind, so he said "you must use all of your intelligence as much as possible to determine that appearence does not exist as basis of object". Is he talking of a Vipassana investigation ? The intelligence he is pointing to be used bears relation to any knowledge from memory of past event of consciouness or from authoritative means such books of science or other books ? Or is it any intelligence related to your attention to the present appearence ?
Another aspect of meditative experience says that by sustaining vivid deep attention, one can experience as form and procede to note that form is empty. Is this a valid de reification method ? How can one sustain vivid attention ?
An example of meditation to clarify: Suppose i start to meditate resting in space of phenomena, right in front of me lies a lockroom wooden door, What method suits well to realize emptyness ? May i start a vipasyana using the intelligence as mentioned above ?
Seems that realizing emptyness of appearences is not the same as realizing non duality, as mentioned in another thread with an enlighted citation of Dudjom Lingpa, great beloved master.
A lot of questions ... Good will.
More from Youru's exceptional essay on Buddha nature.
Terms:
- Soteriological - Soteriology is the study of the doctrine of salvation.
- Deconstruction - The analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy
- Reification - Reification is attributing a concrete characteristic to something that is abstract. Good, evil, enlightenment, freedom, truth, etc.
> The Hongzhou masters both reconstructed and deconstructed Buddhist themes, notions, and concepts. On the one hand, they ceaselessly deconstructed all terms including their own; on the other, they never stopped using positive terms.
>...The Hongzhou masters did not attach themselves to deconstruction or any negative strategy. They can even deconstruct deconstruction, if their practice calls for it. The principle for them is to meet the challenges and requirements of all flowing situations.
> The move and development of situations calls forth both the continuous use of positive language for soteriological purposes- to liberate the human mind from all forms of attachment and fixation- and the continuous use of deconstructive language for the same purposes.
> The Hongzhou masters were always aware of this call of practice. They echoed it and did both at all times without hesitation.
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ewk note: One benefit of labeling Zen as purely deconstructionist or nihilist, as many Buddhists often do, is that the Zen reconstructions of Buddhism and the Zen positive language can be marginalized and ignored that much more easily. The goal of Japanese Buddhism in the last century in the West may not have been to isolate and delegitimize Zen's history, but the outcome was certainly useful in fundraising.
So in music theory the term reification refers to when a piece of music loses nuance and starts to have a singular meaning. This is what you see with national anthems that began as nuanced musical pieces but eventually became synonymous with pride in being from '*insert country here*'. I am no expert in music theory but I think this is a part of why WT music feels so terrible. They deliberately reify their music by making their lyrics very explicit in their meaning and then constantly repeating . Then whenever they (or on the Sunday meeting the speaker) feel like reinforcing a message that they can pick one that fits the theme and use the constantly repeated "song" that all JWs have hard wired into their brains to their advantage. This repetition in meetings makes the songs even more reified by connecting them to the set ideas presented in talks. If they composed nuanced and interesting music the ideas expressed by that music would be subjective to each person's experience and would . Watchtower doesn't want to make good music what they want is a standardised way of getting their BS into people's heads.
Writing a paper on the identity mobilization of Hindutva fundamentalism that led to the destruction of Ayodhya's Babri Masjid, a doubt arose about the risk of reification. By continuing to use the concept of "community" to expose the conflict ( from the hindutva point of view) between those who are Hindus and Muslims, we risk defining these religious and cultural identities as stable and involuntarily declaring clear boundaries between them. How then is it possible to express this, avoiding contributing to the reification of the identities taken into consideration?
Thank you!
Edit: I'm not referring exclusively to this specific case. I believe that this risk of reification is in general very common when speaking of identity conflicts. Are there bibliographical references to recommend in this regard? Thank you!!
For reference, the seven heavenly virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity. The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth
Hello! I have been studying reification, but I am having trouble finding real world examples of things that have been reified. I understand that reification is making the abstract concrete, but I have trouble thinking of examples of this concept.
Could anyone help provide examples of reification that affect people and society? I’m hoping to understand reification better. Thank you!
Having a hard time understanding how it does. After all, aren't workers still alienated from their product (and in some cases each other)?
