
6 Reification
Kant critiqued a posteriori, empirical knowledge as incapable of providing knowledge of the “thing-in-itself” (Ding-an-Sicht), because it was mediated by a priori, mental (transcendental) aesthetic (perceptual) and analytic (conceptual) categories He failed to address Vico’s verum factum principle that the “norm of truth is to have made it,” i.e. that facts are made not found, determined prior to consciousness.) Hence, the idea of a “thing-in-itself” might be considered a locus classicus of reification and of the “myth of a given,” of “things” themselves existing a priori.
Marx applied Feuerbach’s insight that man created God and then “alienated” or reified his own creative power to a “creator” to the economic sphere, arguing that “commodities,” once appropriated by capital, are attributed an independent existence (“fetishized”) returning to confront their makers (workers) as an “other.” Heidegger sought a “primordial” or “ontologically-given” human essence, prior to merely “ontic” or “mind-created” concepts and the “attributed being” of metaphysics. His ontological Neanderthal, Dasein, “being-there” or “being-here,” not only led him to embrace a brutish politics but blinkered him to the possibility that, insofar as humans are conscious beings, human ontology might of necessity be ontic or “self-generating” consciousness. This line of argument is elaborated by “constructivist (sometimes social) epistemology” associated with Piaget, Papert, Bachelard, J.L. Austin and Charles Taylor, inter alea.
Buddhist and Hindu ontologies have been frequently faulted for nihilism and, hence, as self-refuting on the grounds that if nothing exists, how can the idea of nihilism exist or be thought? Even if everything were an illusion, illusion itself would still be real, indeed, the only “reality” of which humans had any evidence. In this view, the idea of the “non-manifest” is the unwitting reification or negation of the manifest. Wallace Stevens (1880 -1955,) one of the few poets to take epistemology seriously, described humans or conscious beings as the “supreme fiction” because consisting of nothing but fictions (mental experiences) to be believed, not as facts, but as conscious constructs and states.