[MD] The other side of reified

[MarshaV]

dmb,

I asked you the other day to post what you thought was my understanding of 'reification.'   Of course you didn't.  So I'll ask you again,  please explain my understanding of 'reification.''  Explain my understanding in its entirety.  ---  Recently I wrote:  "Reification represents how the common man and many scientists, academics and even philosophers think.  It evolved as tool to facilitate some kind of betterness.  But it is flawed and of course the MoQ and help rectify the flaw."   A flaw is an imperfection, not a major error.  I wrote to you:  For me, reification (Buddhist's expanded version) takes place within or interdependent with the conceptualization process.  ---   You wrote:  "Your incoherent attack on reification is just a foolish."  I asked you to explain this "incoherent attack" but of course you didn't.  Let me again present the Wallace quote that states reification is more than just the "vicious abstractionism" that James presents:  

"Indeed the tendency of the human mind to assume the existence of things that are in fact nonentities is considered to lie at the root of a broad range of unnecessary conflicts and miseries.  The most basic expression of this mental distortion is the reification of oneself as an intrinsically existent personal identity. Having reified oneself, it is inevitable that one reifies others in the same way, and this sets up absolute demarcations between self and other.  One naturally also reifies one's natural environment as intrinsically existent, and therefore as absolutely other. "
       (Wallace, B. Alan, 'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind', 2003, p.142)

I never stated, as Ron suggested, that ""reification IS the basis of all conception."  At least he didn't provide evidence that I made such a strong statement.  Here is another quote from Wallace: "One's inborn sense of a reified self as the observer and the reified sense of the duality between subject and object are still present, even though they may be dormant while in meditation; and when one emerges from this nonconceptual state, the mind may still grasp onto all phenomena, including consciousness itself, as being real, inherently existing entities. "  The word 'inborn' is stronger than than 'tendency.'   

Marsha 



On Jun 2, 2011, at 1:20 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> Marsha said to dmb:
> You obviously have no idea of my understanding of reification.  -  The quotes I present match my view perfectly.  
> 
> 
> Here is the quote that presents Marsha's view "perfectly":
> "One of the chief causes of bondage is, not so much the faculty of conceptualization, but rather the propensity to grasp onto the products of that faculty. The rational nature, like the dispositions Nagarjuna discussed in section seven of the karika, has a value. Concepts are an important and necessary tool to be used in ordering one’s world and acting within it."
> 
> dmb says:
> Your pants must be on fire because Wallace's statement is pretty much the opposite of what you say. To cite a recent example, you said, "I might have defended Bo because of his loyalty to the MD, but that was not the reason I came to believe Bo is correct. I was backed into a corner, he backed me into a corner, and I was struck wordless. I realized that conceptualization reifies. I didn't know the word then, but I clearly understood the process. Only later did I stumble across the word 'reify' and after reading it a number of times I recognized it as the process from which I couldn´t escape..."
> 
> See, Wallace describes the problem as the propensity to grasp the products of conceptualization and NOT the faculty of conceptualization itself. Wallace says concepts are necessary for acting in the world. You say, simply, conceptualization reifies, period. And you say you cannot escape this process. This goes along with your assertion that language is some kind of prison, with the assertion that intellectual patterns are to be killed rather than cured, with the assertion that the intellectual level is forever doomed to conform to SOM. It all adds up to a profoundly anti-intellectual view and it's a gross distortion of what Wallace, James and Pirsig are all saying about this problem. These guys are not philosophical enemies with each other and it makes no sense to pit them against each other. 
> 
> I don't even think you're being honest in the normal sense, let alone intellectually honest. It's just plain foolish to lie about what you did and did not say because your posts are in the archives and anyone can see that you're not telling the truth. Jeez, don't you have any shame? 
> 
> 
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