Lukács calls this development "reification".
On the one hand, Scholem seems to prefer symbol over myth when discussing Kabbala, suggesting that Kabbala's reification of the biblical narrative does not yield a mythic drama, including a cadre of mythic figures, but rather a series of symbolic clusters or hypostatic forms that are identified through the prism of the personalities in the Hebrew Bible.
To get from the experience to the representative theory requires two steps: a reification of the experience into an idea or image and the epistemic claim that my knowing that I had cornflakes for breakfast is mediated by my knowledge of that idea or image.
He lamented: "Even in physics this is not sufficiently appreciated, as is shown, for example, by the reification of energy.
E. P. Thompson offers an analysis of the concept of "class consciousness" that forces historians to avoid the error of reification when considering such social constructs as consciousness or political movements (1966).
The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács in the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s.
As first generation Critical Theorists saw it in the 1940s, this process of reification occurs at two different levels.
This allows for modification of the nominal predicate before reification, in phrases such as fluffy snow or excessive politeness.
Tsongkhapa dispenses with this notion of a substrate consciousness and sees it as simply another reification, another conceptually constructed essence that masquerades as the primary reality of the self.
Psychologically, śūnyatā refers also to the releasement from all attachment to beings, from all reification and willful appropriation of them.
The primacy of the social totality not only affects the Marxist method, but also the conception of practice and the underlying social ontology: by insisting on a foundational role of practice in the social totality, Lukács makes political action rather than labor into the foundation for overcoming reification (Feenberg 1998).
