«It’s like two worlds!»: reificated and human realities

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2021-4-582-591

«It’s like two worlds!»: reificated and human realities

Yuri V. Loskutov
Candidate of Philosophy, Docent, 
Associate Professor of the Department of PhilosophyPerm State University,
15, Bukirev st., Perm, 614990, Russia;
e-mail: yuri-loskutov@mail.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4837-5931
ResearcherID: ABB-7195-2021

The article deals with the philosophical problem of reification in the ontological, gnoseological and axiological aspects. The problem of reification was discovered by Patristics, but the theoretical development of this problem was carried out in Marxist philosophy. In the process of historical formation of a human, matter «polarizes», splits into human subject reality and reificated subject reality, which act as objectively existing fictions in relation to each other. Reification of social reality, which excludes a human as a free subject, does not correspond to human essence, and therefore it acts for a human as a non-genuine reality, generating non-genuine values. Reification (together with its «otherness» — fetishism) generates transformed social forms, through which the concept of fact is problematized. This allows us to propose the following hypothesis: if conditional statements describing causal relations in genuinely human reality are designated as factual, then conditional statements describing causal relations in reificated subjectivity must be designated as counterfactual, and conversely. The objective existence of two mutually exclusive subject worlds places science in the situation of choosing between alternative — human or anti-human — models of reality. At the same time, a human appears as a «macrocosm» in the non-reificated human worldview model, and his human reality is constituted in this empirically valid model by a special social substratum that makes all human individuals essentially identical to each other. When describing and explaining social processes, it makes sense to specify which of the two mutually exclusive realities — the reificated or the human one — is being considered in each case.

Keywords: human, matter, value, reification, fetishism, counterfactual statements, social substratum.

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Received: 26.10.2021. Accepted: 22.11.2021

For citation:

Loskutov Yu.V. [«It’s like two worlds!»: reificated and human realities]. Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Filosofia. Psihologia. Sociologia [Perm University Herald. Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology], 2021, issue 4, pp. 582–591 (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2021-4-582-591