Reification: The Suppression and Quantification of Mystery (Part 1)

The way the economic marketplace encourages us to quantify human value and how this is symptomatic of a wider cultural tendency to explain away the ineffable

 Critical Theory is a school of Marxist philosophy that suggests that capitalism is not only an oppressive economic structure but also an oppressive ideological structure. These thinkers suggest that capitalism does not only alienate us from our labor in the marketplace but also alienates us from the value of life itself by conditioning us to value our time, our bodies, and our lives themselves, primarily based on the way they can produce a value in the market place. Critical theorist Georg Lukacs refers to this process as reification; the process by which qualitative value is reduced to quantitative value.  

An experience, object, event, or person is valued in a qualitative way when we value the immediate experience it generates in us rather than the way the phenomena could help further the aims of a later goal we have in mind or fit into a social structure. We could simply say to value something qualitatively is to value it on its own terms; not society’s terms or the terms of our mind’s interpretation. We do not value the beauty of nature or art, intimate connections with friends, or our relationship with God based on the way those experiences fit into our overall plan for success in life or the way they can be productive in the marketplace. These qualitative experiences of meaning gain their value by connecting us with something difficult to capture and understand in a neat, linear way. With qualitative value, there is an intuitive knowing that we are in communion with a force that is inherently and inexhaustibly meaningful, but it can be difficult to pinpoint what exactly that force is. Lukacs suggests that this intuitive and indeterminate way of valuing is jettisoned to the periphery of our lives in a capitalist economy because capitalism encourages us to value ourselves, our time, and our experiences based on their ability to produce measurable and quantifiable results in the market place. Whether our motivation is a good grade on a test, a college degree, the learning of a professional skillset, or securing a certain job, Luckas would claim most of our core day-to-day motivations can be traced back to the value they will ultimately produce in the marketplace. I agree with Luckas but I think that this reduction of value to function in the marketplace is not the only or even the primary domain in which reification occurs. Rather, I see this capitalist form of reification as one instantiation of a more fundamental form of reification that seems to be present in many all domains of our modern Western culture: an attempt to neatly manage, quantify, and even explain away, mysterious and ineffable wherever it appears.

Let me explain with a personal story. Although I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening at the time, looking back, I see now that it was a spontaneous confrontation with an intangible and mysterious dimension of my experience that inspired my interest in philosophy. To the great despair of my rational mind that thought it had a pretty good grip on life, it began to instinctively dawn on me that there was a dimension of my experience that always exceeded and overspilled any form of conceptual knowing. It is hard to describe this experience for reasons I will shortly explain but as a first approximation, we could say that it seemed that there was a dimension of immediate experience that was so simple and basic that the complex mechanisms of the conceptual mind simply glided right over it, failing to penetrate its nature. As a budding philosopher who had been learning to make use of the rational mind to penetrate deeper into the truth in many dimensions of life, the discovery of something that seemed to be a black box to the intellect was very frustrating. 

  One particularly direct philosophical description of this kind of experience can be found in the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger draws a distinction between Being itself and what he refers to as beings (the distinction lies in the uppercase vs. lowercase B). For Heidegger, we turn the indeterminacy of Being into a determinate being when we use our conceptual capacity to define what we essentially are. When we claim that we are fundamentally a biological animal, a soul, a rational animal, or an actor in an economic marketplace, we turn ourselves into a particular type of being. However, Heidegger claims, that all these descriptions of what kind of being we are, though helpful in certain domains, initially arise out of the more indeterminacy of Being itself; and if we take them too seriously end up concealing this more fundamental aspect of who we are. While we are often taught that truth is something that must be articulated and communicated with language, Heidegger suggests the opposite, that we only uncover this deep dimension of Being through silence. As he writes, “But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say”

Of course, some of you may be a bit confused, unsettled, or even frustrated with me at this point. You might be thinking, what the hell is Being? What is this guy talking about? I thought this was supposed to be a philosophy blog not a bunch of mystical mumbo jumbo. If you find yourself having thoughts like this run through your mind, my first suggestion would be to reflect on your own experiences of qualitative value such as the ones I gave earlier: experiences of intimacy or of witnessing beauty. I think most of us could agree that this is something deeply profound in looking at a beautiful sunset or simply being vulnerable with a friend that the linear, rational thought can’t quite grab a hold of and explain neatly. I would suggest, and I am quite certain Heidegger would agree, that these are moments where we make some contact with Being. Second, I would claim that a response of confusion or even frustration at the serious discussion of anything ineffable is a symptom of reification; a symptom of a tendency of the mind conditioned by modern Western culture to take any experience that seems mysterious and either quantify and fix it within a conceptual scheme, or reject it as unreal. I see this more general temptation as the fundamental nature of reification of which Lukacs’ discussion of the reification in the context of the marketplace is just one example

This reduction or rejection of any phenomena ungraspable by the rational mind is not culturally universal. Several indigenous tribes from North America refer to the essence of life as Wakan Tanka or The Great Mystery. Thus, suggesting that contact with the mystery of life as a mystery brings us into the heart of life. Similarly, in Mahayana Buddhism, the essence of all things is sunyata, meaning empty, intangible, and dream-like. Maybe most straightforwardly the Tao De Ching, a seminal text of Taoism opens with the lines “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” Neither is Heidegger the only Western thinker to acknowledge the limitations of thought. Plato, Wittgenstein, Hegel, and even Isaac Newton spoke of dimensions of experience that overspilled the realm of the conceptual. For this reason, amongst others, I do not think this attempt to quantify and conceptually grasp every element of our experience of life is a natural movement of our rational mind but something closer to a cultural bias, a basic element of the particular cultural context in which many of us were raised. Many domains of our culture encourage those within them to purge their understanding of the human being and the cosmos of all aspects of mystery. We see this not only in the encouragement to value human beings based on their productivity in the market but also in the more general trend of trusting science, mathematics, and rational thought as that which has true access to truth as opposed to myth, art, or our immediate experience of being alive.

In the next post, I will further explore this concept of reification and its presence in our cultural ethos by exploring some other domains in which I see it functioning. I hope you can tune in! (even though the next post is a paid post please feel free to sign up for the 7-day free trial if you are interested and don’t want to pay)  

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.