Reification: The Repression and Quantification of Mystery in Modern Culture (Part 2)

The various ways in which our culture encourages us to reduce the mysterious and the inexpressible to the rational and the explainable

This is a follow-up to last week’s post. I recommend reading that first. You can find it here (https://recontextualize.substack.com/p/reification-the-suppression-and-quantification) However, I will do enough of a recap such that this post can stand alone.

Georg Lukacs along with a group of like-minded thinkers known as the Critical Theorists pointed out the way a capitalist society not only structures our economic and professional lives but also encourages us to value ourselves, our time, and human life itself in a particular way. Lukacs claimed that capitalism, often subconsciously, encourages us to adopt a moral system that values our own life primarily based on the way it produces quantifiable value in the marketplace. Luckas refers to this process as a reification, claiming that it encourages us to measure and quantify that which many alternative moral, religious, and ethical systems claim to be the qualitative measure of value itself, human life. 

In my previous post, I suggested that this process of reducing the worth of human life to its market value is one manifestation of a more fundamental cultural trend that takes anything that has a primarily felt, intuitive, and immediate value and reinterprets it as only having worth if it can fit into a larger, measurable system that can be grasped by the intellect. This more general conception of reification takes something mysterious yet meaningful and valuable in many people’s experiences and attempts to demystify it by making it easily graspable by conceptual, linear thinking. In this post I want to point to three other cultural domains in which I see this process of reification occurring to substantiate the claim that this process of demystification is a dominant element of our cultural spirit, first in the realm of metaphysics, second in that of interpersonal relationships, and in that of third medicine.