This essay concerns the interiorisation, inhabituation and predilection of humans for causally re-processing neurological abstractions such as physical laws into the form of thIngs, concrecities, or hypostatisations.

Metaphorically speaking, in our *mind's eye* so to speak, we are observing a linguistically clad human operator, with the word *IS* emblazoned on his tee-shirt and a black x symbol on his hat, sitting in a fiction-factory. He is seated at the head of a production line, rather like Charlie Chaplin in *Modern Times.* He is pouring a mixture of past actions, happenings, memories, dualisms, opinions, non-entities, numbering systems, symbols, categorisations, sets, laws (both natural and legal) and other metaphysical immateriality into semantic moulds which jiggle along the cognitive conveyor-belt and drop off at the other end as concretised bricks.

From those bricks a version of reality is built which is then labelled and packed as the *being* of its constituent non-elemental ingredients and is shipped out of the factory door labelled as:

"The laws of physics are as old as the world they govern. It is their recognition, i. e. formulation, i. e. reification that can be given a birth date, that of the day in which each law has been discovered and put into a scientific formula. Reification thus becomes a means by which a law governing the world - be it a law of either physics or economy and biology, or of human communication itself, it does not matter -- can be acknowledged and therefore, to some extent let's hope, controlled. In short, by means of our self-conscious and responsible understanding of our own connatural reificational modality (not just the reified entity itself) , we humans could and should more advantageously control the world in which we find ourselves better than before.” [1] (Rossin. 2008.)

Why do humans like us do this sort of thing? What's *in it* for us? How does the process work? How and why should such a loss of reality-contactedness be seen as being beneficial? More importantly and more intriguingly, why should Mother Nature select for such behaviour and deem *ontological falsification* as having a beneficial genetical pay-off for human liars?

Later I will toy with the idea that reification is not species specific and that with the possible exception of warning, territorial  and mating calls, although animals do not verbalise reification, they may be said to corporealise strategy in the form of pigmental and morphological camouflage, hunting tricks, sugar-traps, spider-webs and even modify their own bodies by shape-shifting and electro-chemical colour change  in the manner of squids and other creatures as reificative response mechanisms, in order to survive in the evolutionary jungle in which they exist.

Dr. Rossin continues:

Because encouraging comments have come from people I respect, both as human beings and as serious thinkers, it has reinforced my hope that my General Theory of Reification may have wings, and that it may be allowed to fly in *the real world* rather than patrol round and around in tautological circles in an interior, incestuous domain of academic or pseudo-academic speculation which I have inhabited for so long.

                                      The Causes of Reificative Inhabituation.

Human organisms, like other life forms on our planet, thrive on habit and environmental predictability. Instincts and the compendium of self-referential reflexes upon which we draw in order to respond to anticipated events in an effort to stay alive, eat, learn, survive and reproduce were once survival strategies that were innovative products of genetical mutation, individual discovery and generational happenstance.

That such originally diffuse and variegated attitudes became successful responses with regard to the survival of the individual, the group, the tribe or the nation and became concentrated into their essential survivalist elements as "the names of things" rather than regularised actions, into which they were categorised and labelled, into such metaphysical objects as "battle, death, love, peace, matehood or marriage, etc., shows the inevitability of such an occurrence in organisms which are the product of evolution within the framework of the natural Darwinian order of things as it is now generally accepted. For in the selection of suitable attitudinal response mechanisms, where rapidly retrieved reaction rules, reification renders ready responses.

Are such retrieval mechanisms still relevant in the modern world? Or was it only in the dangerous jungles, wide vulnerable savannas and rocky outcrops of the cave country of our ancestors that ready-made reificata was required? The prolixity and growing ubiquitousness of reification answers that question, for though unless you are a member of the military, a policeman, a criminal or a coal-face worker or are engaged in some other high risk occupation you don't need ready-made reification to initiate your responses, and most conversational interaction consists of prolix, boring verbosity rather than short, sharp answers, there is no doubt that reification continues to flourish, and (apart from the debatable existence of homosexuality) Mother Nature seldom makes mistakes - so it might be that reification is here to stay?


One observer of the ongoing financial crisis made the following observation:

This analysis is pure reification and ontological poppycock. *The ultra-low short-term US interest rates* *caused* zilch and were not to *blame*.

We still live with the priestly-inspired connection betwixt *cause* and *blame* which to a large extent is responsible for the confusion that still attaches itself to the whole philosophical mess which is: the classical, traditional version of Theory of Causation in its intertheorectical and antitheoretical versions, all of with various forms regard causation as a form of pseudo-entity the elements of which can be blamed for the eventual outcomes. 

Are we anthropocentrically or personificationally correct to *blame* a falling telegraph pole, which crashes down in a high wind and crushes a car and its occupants to death? No, but a court would identify the pole as being the cause of the deaths without actually blaming the pole itself.. Then the telephone company would be sued by the insurance company, and because the telephone company do esnot exist as a real entity (being only as a so-called: *business entity) the man who ordered the timber from which the pole was made, or the man or men who erected the pole, or the man held responsible for the regular inspection of telegraph poles (you know, those lumps of mobile thinking-meat things in overalls called humans, who know about wood) would be held to account, sacked, perhaps sued.

The Laws of Hammurabi covered the same areas of cause and blame These ancient law codes, were divided into two types of law — the causal laws that appear in a: If such and such - then such and such scenario, and the other type in the form of  commands or directives such as thou shalt not kill. etc.   Evidence for this confusion of cause with blame ( and the unfair disparity of sentencing between aristocrat, citizen and slave) can be found in the bible [4] (Bible.Exodus 21:29) which prescribed the stoning to death of a goring ox, or, in the medieval interpretation, condemning a  guilty pig who had killed a child to death in a court of law then hanging it as a criminal.

The utter stupidity of this biblically inspired primitivism was not that the pig was killed, which was going to end up slaugtered anyway,  in order that the human flock could eat its dead body parts,  but (considering that the bible claim that animals lack  souls and therefore presumably intelligence and  intent  etc.)  the grisly ritual of trying the pig for murder and hanging it in the same way that a man might be hung for blasphemy or for cattle rustling should have taken place in a society which was capable of such acheivements in lierature, art, architecture, and learning.

And what about the wind - was that the *cause* - *blame?* What about God, who according to the bible was always kept busy causing a wind to pass over the earth, and the water and blow here and there, sometimes deliberately to cause wanton destruction and sometimes beneficially to help out one of his more favourite believers or tribe ... who created the earth and the wind that blows across its waters, and blows down telegraph poles that crush cars ? Was HE to blame? Is God more than just a *prime mover* is he not also a prime suspect?

I am coming to the conclusion that most of mankind is living in a reificational dreamworld and the stupid assocaition of *cause* with *blame* is yet another of the ontological Greek spin-offs that helps create this confusion.

The meaning of *aitios* is: author - you know, *author* ( lump of mobile, thinking meat often found with pen in hand )as someone who originates or causes or initiates something (see Strong's Number 159)

It is the human man or men (you know, those thinking meat things in smart suits) who decide, act and order the interest rates to fall into line with *so-called *market responses* or remain the same in the light of some other human (yes real live human) agenda.

I find it ironic that the very critics and commentators who admonish the stupid reificative behaviour of the fiancianciers fall into the very same ontological traps as the culprits they blame.
It makes sense to accept that whatever the temporal or environmental conditions ( sitting around a neolithic camp fire or faced with a gang of yobs in a modern McDonalds eatery, an organism must have ready-made action patterns, which because they need to, can be very readily accessed in a priori terms.

I now move on to address the genesis of reification of natural or physical laws – its sources and causes; and hope to provide at least circumstantial evidence to show the inevitability and the ubiquity of the reificatory tendency as a biological feature of the functioning of the human brain.

We may discern a natural preference towards reality-contactedness, which manifests itself not only in the lifetimes of individuals and groups, but in the greater dimension of human evolution itself. The very increase in human brain-size was driven by the need for more space for the neurological computations and memory involved in achieving a greater awareness of the hostile environment with which early man was surrounded. This led to constant changes and modifications in the direction of correction and refinement of reality-contactedness.

In one sense reification can be said to be the designation of the perceived relationships or states of affairs between objects – as objects in themselves. Thus to observe the factual state of affairs that at ground level water heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit starts to bubble and boil is interpreted by some as there is something called "boiling" that actually exists and that can be identified as "being present in the world" in addition to the heated bubbling water as an entity that Heideggerians call: "The ontological difference." A similar defective reificative duality was posited by Descartes, exemplified in his notorious reification: I think therefore I am" (sometimes translated as: "I think therefore I exist") which although it implies an evidential holistic ontological parity or necessary functional equality between acting and existing also implies a spurious ontological difference betwixt two existential modalities as later expressed as Descartes proceeded to the Wax Argument: In which he describes the way when a piece of wax melts, all the sense data you have about it changes character, yet it is still the same object. So to know what something is, is an act of the mind, not the senses, or as Descartes put it:

Antonio Rossin makes the point that whilst he agrees with Descartes on the faculty of judgment :

Such dualistic instantiation occurs in spite of the fact that there are no objective (material) correlates or nominata whatsoever to substantiate the actual existence in the world of the subjective existential human neurologically perceived reality thingified as "boiling" or "bubbling."

The reification of racial or cultural types of beauty, intelligence, superiority is another example of applied reification. Reification, in action, is utterly impatient of the dissenter, ruthless in its insistence upon conformity, and given to the single control technique of ordering-and- forbidding. Such postures have been witnessed by the arrogant behaviour of the British colonialists towards their subject races, or even worse by  the fanaticism of the Nazis or Japanese Shintoists and the religious fanatics of the contemporary world, who sacrifice their own lives and the lives of the innocent believing it to be the will of the mega-reificant that the religious call God being interpreted by soothsayers and priestly intermediaries who interpret The Holy Law.

Thus it is that such ontological projection, hallucination, and delusion are pre-eminently cases of mistaking what is subjectively real - as if it were objectively real. Traditional philosophical conjecture is riddled by linguistic ambiguities and by ignorance of important ontological truisms and has set forth various primitive, metaphysical systems of faith-based nonsense, grounded not upon rationality or logic, but upon half-grasped, occult philosophical fundaments.

This Greek incipience, vexed by reified forms of superstition, was originated by an ancient and noble people striving towards the light, brilliant as questioners, innovators and inventors and categorisors of the objects and phenomena with which they found themselves surrounded, but, mapped against the broad tapestry of human progress, had progressed no more than a few hesitating steps removed from savagery and were obsessed by slavery, paederasty and supernatural fantasies which are no longer tenable in a modern analytic age.


Across a gulf of more than two thousand years, in one of the world’s most highly industrialised countries, the arch-reifier Plato’s metaphysical mummy, the existentially embalmed abstractive notion of "Forms," was grave-robbed, plagiarised, unbandaged by the Gestaltists and placed in the shop window of scientific ignorance like the preserved corpse of Norman Bates’s beloved mother, who was lovingly embalmed and sewn-up by her son's affectionate filial fingers in Hitchcock’s "Psycho."

Hawking a psychological quackery little better than chiromancy and divination via the observation of the spilled intestines of ritually slaughtered animals of their reificant forebears they named the disinterred cognitive corpse "Gestalt Psychology. Thus is Plato in keeping with his doctrine that the soul is immortal and has been many times regenerated.

Tricked out in a white coat, by the Gestaltists Plato is appointed Keeper of Keys and Grounds at a Heideggerian-style hermenuetical Hogwarts, with responsibility for the objects, processes and behaviour that are closely associated with the perceived states of affairs registered by the brain of the observer and are mistakenly unified, taken to be associated in reality and reified into Potteresque psychological concretions.

Thus then are Plato’s forms modified, elaborated and labelled with the German word Gestalt.  The updated Platonism is linked with the word psychology and launched upon a naive public as Gestalt Psychology, and paraded as a novel feature of a shameful repertoire of nonsensicality calculated to elicit large amounts of money from vain and self-infatuated wealthy naifs, who lie about upon couches in sordid "consulting rooms" swallowing tricyclic antidepressive, lithium, benzodiazepines and biperidon.

How did this all come about? Why do men concretise the non-existent? What is there in common between the reificational activities of ancient Greeks and the hypostatisational behaviour of quacks after a quick buck more than 2000 years later. What is the reason for reification? How does it work? What is it FOR?

Dr. Antonio Rossin provides us with a telling answer

Are the Gestaltists really charletans? Are they just ontologically stupid, or is it a natural outcome of mans interface and reificative formularisation and storage of his social environment and the wider world in which he finds himself as Rossin suggests?

Is such behaviour perhaps "condoned" by Mother Nature and if so why? Dr. Rossin's answer above certainly seems to answer this problem

Gestalt has the meaning a unified or significant whole, the distinctive totality of an integrated mental and social unity, as opposed to merely a sum of various parts. It is a German word for "form,” which was adopted as the focus of psychological study. Although it was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932), who was the actual originator of the term Gestalt as the Gestalt psychologists were to use it, reificative psychology had its roots with Ernst Mach (1838-1916.)

It was Mach who plagiarised and resuscitated the concept of forms directly from Plato for inclusion into his cosmology of geometric quantitieswith his relabelled"space forms" and "time forms." [6] (Maccarone, Fender and Ho, 2005)

Somewhat irrationally he reasoned that just because we have a brain that remembers what we see, such as when we see a square as a square, whether it is large or small, red or blue, in outline or even partly uncompleted, etc., it is to be something which must be instantiationally nominalised as "a space form." Likewise, when we hear a melody in which we recognise the melody even if the keys have been altered in such a way that none of the notes are the same.

Max Wertheimer became interested in the perceptions he experienced on a train. While stopped at the station, he bought a toy stroboscope -- a spinning drum with slots to look through and pictures on the inside, a sort of a primitive movie machine or sophisticated flip book. Based upon his experience whilst looking at the spinning pictures on his toy, he published his seminal 1912 paper: "Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement.” [7] (Wertheimer 1912)

Wertheimer’s observation was that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple day to day sensations. He noted that we perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of individual sensory events. This is what he saw in the toy stroboscope he bought at the Frankfurt train station, and what he saw in his laboratory when he experimented with lights flashing in rapid succession (like the Christmas lights that appear to course around the tree, or the fancy neon signs in Los Vegas that seem to move). The effect is called the phi phenomenon, and it is actually the basic principle of motion pictures!
(See my: Meat Thinks. http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/meatthinks.htm)

Apparently we humans wrongly conclude that not only do the moving pictures spinning through the gate of the movie projector or those revolving around on the inner-surface of his toy drum exist, but the moving images that are perceived by the brains of the observer exist too.

Some (perhaps most) human viewers cannot grasp that it is not the visualised movement of the pictures, photographs or fairy lights that exist, but the brain of the human viewer who interprets such a sequentially rapid replacement of slightly different pictures or lights, which (compared with the film of drum or bulb speed) so slowly that the brain interprets the high-speed replacement as a single moving picture rather than hundreds of rapidly appearing  pop-ups.

The bottom line? It is the sequentially replaced pictures and the human viewer that exist – the "movement"  (like all "movement")  is an ontological visual trick that does not exist in itself, but is merely an existential modality of the tricked brain.

Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations. And not only do we have the ability to do so, we have a strong tendency to do so. We even add structure to events which do not have gestalt structural qualities.

It is a pity that Plato’s long suffering defunct puppet Socrates was not aware of this particular transcendentalist reificative hustle, for it would have been an excellent gambit to have used during his interminable and consistently sterile discussions and wearisome dialogues with his mostly monosyllabic interlocutors debating the meaning rather the real-world societal application of his dreary catalogue of abstract nouns. Why is there a compulsion to reify universals into unified wholes? Is it part of the way our brains classify and retrieve information? It would seem so, for reification is an important much studied feature of artificial intelligence and is used  in order to answer the need for data compaction into conveniently identifiable blocks for speedy navigation and the efficient recovery of information.

The obverse aspect of positive reification is sublation or negative reification In sublating one religious, political, scientific of philosophical reification given a more extended or all-encompassing reality. There is a is delimitation of the generalisability of its characteristics which implies a supposedly absolute uniqueness of its positively reified rivals. A person deeply in love claims that no love such as his has existed before in history. One religion or political party or philosophy (compare the adherents of Islam, Nazism or Heideggerian philosophy) claims exclusivity and meritorious uniqueness and thereby rejects the merits of other religious systems and secular belief-value systems.

Such doctrinal fanatics and believers are redolent of the claims of unique merit which is itself absolutised in the pathological megalomanias of the multitudes of mostly harmless Napoleon Bonapartes and the surfeit of Jesuses who haunt the gardens of mental homes.

But the reificatory tendency towards abnormality and subnormality, can also be described in such terms. The failure of reality-contactedness or the ontological inability or reluctance to differentiate between what exists and what does not exist is either brought about genetically, by way of the DNA script, or is the result of early interiorisation via the exposure to parents and peers already afflicted.

Such misfortune then leads to a similar confusion of the subjective and objective as a direct result of the failure of the correcting and refining process to occur. Though for the intelligent educated person the deprivation of reality-contactness is nowhere near as acute as that which can be observed in the behaviour of the mentally challenged, relatively speaking it is just as debilitating in its own way as it is to he insane. Viewed from this perspective, it is ironical that neither the intelligent nor the insane group can ever be aware of their communicative ontological impoverishment with reality – by which is meant the real, actual physical entities of their environment which exist spatially and temporally alongside them in the world in which they exist.

The ontological impoverishment, sublations and negative forms of reification run the same course (though not with the same intesity) for the intelligent as they do for the mentally disabled,  in that they both refuse to acknowledge (or are incapable of appreciating) the realities involved. Some of them go to extraordinary lengths in negating the existent and the demonstrable. They are the negativistic blind-spots of the psychopathologies; often characterized by habitual disbelief in any claims of ultimate knowledge.

Sublation, is a translation of the German word aufheben, and is a key concept of dialectics. Sublation is a characteristic involved in various unilateralisms within traditional philosophy and science. There is the  transcendentalists insistence on an ontological difference or duality, the indeterminist's denial of causality; and the scientist's reification of motion, energy and other useful fictions.

Perhaps the long drawn out denial of global warming by Bush and the American Republican Party, or the denial of AIDS by the recently disgraced President Thabo Mbeki who is said to be responsible  for a failure of leadership over the crisis, which has left more than one in 10 of South Africa's 43 million people HIV-positive will draw further attention to the dangers of negative reification?  We will have to wait and see.


[1] Rossin. Antonio. The Reificative Roots Of The Global Financial Crisis. Nominalist Yahoo List. 20.09.2008.
[2] Ibid
[3] Descartes. René. Discourse on Method. Part IV -i. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
[4] Rossin. Antonio. The Reificative Roots Of The Global Financial Crisis. The Nominalist Yahoo List.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Maccarone, Thomas. J.; Fender, Robert P.; Ho, Luis C. (Eds.) From X-ray Binaries to Quasars: Black Holes on All Mass Scales. 2005. From Astrophysics and Space Science journal, Vol. 300/1-3, 2005.
[7] Wertheimer, Michael. 1999. A Brief History of Psychology. Wadsworth Publishing.
[8] Wertheimer, Max Über Gestalttheorie [an address before the Kant Society, Berlin, '7th December, 1924], Erlangen, 1925. In the translation by Willis D. Ellis published in his "Source Book of Gestalt Psychology," New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1938. http://gestalttheory.net/archive/wert1.html

                                                      To be continued