Reification

Abstract

Generally, “reification” denotes the case in which an object that does not possess thing‐like characteristics – for example, the human psyche, a person, his/her consciousness, abilities, social relations, and so forth – is regarded as a thing. For some philosophers, reification has a mainly epistemological meaning. For Marx and his successors within the wider critical theory tradition, epistemology is dialectically connected with social theory and transformative practice. Marx explicates reification as the “mystification” of social relations that appear as “things” because of their immediate coalescence with the material conditions of production. Georg Lukács further developed this view by locating the specifically modern cultural form, namely calculative rationality, the universal implementation of which brings about the phenomenon of reification. He regards reification as the concealment of the historical character of established social relations. Theorists of the Frankfurt School further developed Lukács's theory in the form of a critique of instrumental reason, without, however, offering a clearly contoured concept of reification. Consequently, in his late work, Theodor Adorno confined the use of the term to consciousness and cognition. Similarly, Jürgen Habermas attempted a radical reformulation of the “problematic of reification” in terms of the imbalance between the communicative processes of the modern lifeworld and the functionalist reason of the social system. Finally, in recent years, Axel Honneth proposed a new interpretation of Lukács's theory of reification in the context of his anthropological theory of recognition. In his view, reification represents the “forgetfulness of antecedent recognition,” that is, the forgetfulness of an ontogenetically necessary presupposition of the constitution of human subjects.