Reification

The word "reification" comes from Latin "res" (thing) and "facere" (to make)—literally "thing-making." What's deliciously ironic is that we use this abstract noun to criticize the process of turning abstractions into things, making reification itself a kind of conceptual ouroboros. The term entered philosophical vocabulary through Marxist theory in the early 20th century, but the act of naming this process potentially reifies it, creating a "thing" out of a pattern of thought.

Hungarian philosopher György Lukács revolutionized the concept in his 1923 work "History and Class Consciousness," extending Marx's commodity fetishism into a comprehensive theory of modern consciousness. He argued that capitalism doesn't just reify goods—it reifies human relations, time, and even our own abilities, transforming them into measurable, tradeable "things." When you see your resume as a product to market or relationships as networks to leverage, you're experiencing exactly what Lukács warned about: the colonization of human experience by thing-logic.

Modern AI and algorithmic systems are reification engines on steroids, crystallizing fluid human behaviors into rigid categories and scores. Your "credit score" reifies your financial trustworthiness into a three-digit number; recommendation algorithms reify your tastes into fixed preference profiles. What's particularly insidious is that these reified versions then shape reality—you become the score, you start consuming content that matches your profile—creating a feedback loop where the map literally reshapes the territory.

When psychiatry names a cluster of behaviors as "depression" or "ADHD," it performs a necessary but dangerous reification: turning patterns into entities. This helps with treatment and reduces stigma, but it also risks making people believe they "have" a discrete thing inside them rather than experiencing a complex interaction of biology, psychology, and circumstance. The philosopher Ian Hacking called this "making up people"—the bizarre phenomenon where creating a category actually brings new kinds of people into being, as individuals reorganize their self-understanding around the newly reified concept.

Few reifications have reshaped society like treating corporations as legal "persons" with rights and agency. This 19th-century legal fiction reified an organizational structure—something that only exists as coordinated human activity—into an independent entity that can sue, own property, and (in the U.S.) exercise free speech. The philosopher John Searle noted this creates "institutional facts": things that only exist because we collectively agree they do, yet have very real power to shape our lives, constrain our choices, and even outlive generations of actual humans.

Recognizing reification is a practical superpower for reclaiming agency in everyday situations. When your boss says "the market demands longer hours," you can ask: who specifically made that decision? When someone claims "science says" to shut down debate, you can inquire: which scientists, using what methods, with what limitations? The antidote to reification isn't rejecting abstractions—we need them—but maintaining what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called awareness of their "misplaced concreteness," remembering that every "thing" was once a choice, a process, a relationship between humans that could have been otherwise.