MAN AS A REIFICACIOUS ANIMAL
The following excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy provides
An interesting example of some 18th century
uneasiness with reification
Burke's unwillingness:
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to give praise or blame to any thing which
relates to human actions, and
human concerns,
on a simple view of the object
in all the
nakedness and solitude of metaphysical
abstraction
(RRF, Langford 1981-, vol. viii,
58) |
is a practical judgement that implies
a conceptual
counterpart like Berkeley's view that
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When we attempt to abstract extension and
motion from all other qualities, and consider
them by themselves, we presently lose sight
of them, and run into great extravagancies.
(Berkeley. Principles of Human Knowledge.
vol.ii, 84.) |
In both cases, philosophical wariness
matched
a distaste for considering aspects
of objects
in permanent isolation from the other
aspects
with which they were essentially connected.
Mark Twain wrote;
*Man is a Religious Animal.*
and there is no doubt that religion
is universal
feature of human life, but corporeal
sickness
is also a universal feature of life
and the
finality of death from disease is no
less
terminal than death suffered as a result
of religious terrorism or internecine
or
inter-religious wars that have blighted
mankind
for millennia. Mark Twain added that
man…
| Has made a graveyard of the globe in trying
his honest best to smooth his brother's path
to happiness and heaven. |
The World Christian Encyclopedia (2001): a book which is the standard reference
work for religious statistics of all kinds,
and both Britannica and the World Almanac cite from has a single page [http://gem-werc.org/gd/gd16.pdf]
estimating the number of martyrs since
the
origin of each religion: as 160,000.
This
does not include those who perished
in religious
wars or those who were killed in more
local
or individual acts of murder. Whether
diseases
of the body or transcendentalist disturbances
of the brain were responsible for more
deaths
is difficult to say - but on even cursory
examination of the statistics it is
impossible
to put an overall figure on either
cause
of death for the purposes of making
a comparison.
One thing is startlingly obvious however
- we would be far better off without
both
of them.
There's a difference between a "universal"
feature of human life and an "essential"
one. Most people who think they've
given
up religion have done nothing of the
sort
-- they've simply substituted one set
of
reificative superstitions which they
believe
to be essential for another. One of
the distinctive
features of religion is a faith in
the existence
of some mystically interpreted phenomena
and most people who finally reject
religion
mistakenly believe they have successfully
given up transcendental belief altogether.
In other words they remain irrationally
committed
to a residual form of religious dualistic
reality-type left over from there childhood
indoctrination phase.
The classical and most crudest form of dualism
is most dramatically demonstrated by the
Cartesian cogito together with its so-called
proof of the existence of God, but its post-religious
or *secular version* stripped of a god-head is known as object-action
reification, which is usually defined
as:
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Reification (also known as hypostatisation,
concretism, or the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness,
is a fallacy of ambiguity, when
an abstraction
(abstract belief or hypothetical
construct)
is treated as if it were a concrete,
real
event, or physical entity.
For Marx reification is a characteristic
of economic value as it manifests
itself
in market trade, i. e. the inversion
in thought
between object and subject, or
between means
and ends. The term hypostatisation
refers
to an effect of reification which
results
from supposing that whatever
can be named,
or conceived abstractly, must
actually exist,
which is an ontological and epistemological
fallacy.
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Such is the dictionary definitions
of the
neurological glitches imprinted during
the
religious phase which manifests itself
as
a conviction that there exists a dichotomous
interchangeability between an active
object
and its action, which are often separated
out and expressed as non-existent processes
or events such as: *movement, speed,
agency,
change, transfer,* etc. Such reifications
are then referred to as disembodied
quasi-entities,
no differently and with no less an
intransigent
belief in their existence than the
faith
held by a religious worshipper in discorporate
*spiritual beings* with supernatural
powers
that control human destiny.
Ostensive (rather than dictionary)
examples
of reification which involve a distortion
of consciousness and reality-disconnectedness
can be seen in practically any book,
film,
newspaper, religious sermon, TV dialogue,
internet discussion group, classroom,
university
lecture hall - indeed in any scientific
or
natural language conversation which
one experiences
or observes.
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