Rethinking Reification

By now this essay has accumulated over twenty alleged meanings, senses, or aspects of reification; there seems not much point in listing them.Well, maybe, in a footnote: 1) Misapprehending a human relationship as a thing (Lukács); 2) Recognizing what had been taken for a human relationship as a thing (implicit in O.E.D.); 3) The coming into being of a world of commodities and their movements on the market (Lukács); 4) Realizing a “mental image” in an artifact (Arendt); 5) Forming a mind in such a way that it tends to take human relationships for things (Lukács); 6) Misapprehending a person as a thing, in the sense of denying capacity for agency (O.E.D., Lukács, Berger and Luckmann); 7) Misapprehending a person as a thing, in the sense of denying moral status (O.E.D., Lukács, Berger and Luckmann); 8) Recognizing as a thing what had been mistaken for a person (O.E.D.); 9) and 10) (Mis)apprehending an abstraction as a person (Lukács, possibly Berger and Luckmann); 11) Misapprehending an abstraction (abstract concept?) as a thing (O.E.D., Woodard, Quine); 12) Recognizing as a thing what had been mistaken for an abstraction (abstract concept?) (implicit in O.E.D., Quine); 13) Misapprehending an abstraction as real (Woodard); 14) Deciding what is real (Quine); 15) and 16) (Mis)apprehending something humanly made as natural (Berger and Luckmann, probably Lukács); 17) and 18) (Mis)apprehending temporary or contingent regularities as eternal, universal laws (Marx on fetishism, possibly Lukács, possibly Berger and Luckmann); 19) and 20) (Mis)apprehending human conventions as sacred (Lukács, Berger and Luckmann); 21) and 22) (Mis)apprehending what is humanly changeable as humanly unchangeable (Lukács, Berger and Luckmann). If one further divides each of these categories between the reification of inhabituation and that of naiveté, their number will double. But perhaps that distinction will not actually fit all of them; I have not pursued the matter. Some of them are mutually consistent, almost overlapping; others are incompatible. Some are in accord with the dictionary definition, others not. With some, the sense in which some entity is being converted into a res is evident; with others, try as I might, I cannot find such a sense. The dictionary entry itself is rather slipshod, and interpreters have expanded the term's meaning almost indefinitely beyond it. The main ways in which Lukács and Berger and Luckmann use the word do not fit into the dictionary definition at all. They make the meaning of reification dependent on concepts like “can” and “could” that are themselves heavily dependent on the particular context of their use. Lukács's and Berger and Luckmann's discussions are confusing and very probably confused. The whole thing is a swamp.