That Thing We Do
From the Latin re, or thing, reification is essentially thingification. Theodor Adorno, among others, asserted that society and consciousness have become almost completely reified. Through this process, human practices and relations come to be seen as external objects. What is living ends up treated as a non-living thing or abstraction, and this turn of events is experienced as natural, normal, unchallenged.
In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss provides an image of this reifying process, in terms of the atrophy of European civilization: “… like some aging animal whose thickening hide has formed an imperishable crust around its body and, by no longer allowing the skin to breathe, is hastening the aging process.”1 The loss of meaning, immediacy, and spiritual vibrancy in Western civilization is a major theme in the works of Max Weber, and also bears on the reification of modern life. That this failing of life and enchantment seems somehow inevitable and unchangeable, largely just taken for granted, is as important as the reified outcome, and is inseparable from it.
How did human activities and connections become separate from their subjects and take on a thing-like “life” of their own? And given the evident waning of belief in society’s institutions and categories, what holds the “things” in thing-ified society together?
Terms like reification and alienation, in a world more and more comprised of the starkest forms of estrangement, are no longer to be found in the literature that supposedly deals with this world. Those who claim to have no ideology are so often the most constrained and defined by the prevailing ideology they cannot see, and it is possible that the highest degree of alienation is reached where it no longer enters consciousness.
Reification became a widely employed term as defined by the marxist Georg Lukacs: namely, a form of alienation issuing from the commodity fetishism of modern market relations. Social conditions and the plight of the individual have become mysterious and impenetrable as a function of what we now commonly refer to as consumerist capitalism. We are crushed and blinded by the reifying force of the stage of capital that began in the 20th century.
I think, however, that it may be useful to re-cast reification so as to establish a much deeper meaning and dynamic. The merely and directly human is in fact being drained away as surely as nature itself has been tamed into an object. In the frozen universe of commodities, the reign of things over life is obvious, and that coldness that Adorno saw as the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity is plumbing new lows.
But if reification is the central mechanism whereby the commodity form permeates the entire culture, it is also much more than that. Kant knew the term, and it was Hegel, soon after, who made major use of it (and objectification, its rough equivalent). He discovered a radical lack of being at the heart of the subject; it is here that we may fruitfully inquire.
The world presents itself to us—and we re-present it. Why the need to do that? Do we know what symbols really symbolize? Is truth that which must be possessed, not re-presented? Signs are basically signals, that is, correlative; but symbols are substitutive.
As Husserl put it, “The symbol exists effectively at the point where it introduced something more than life… “2 Reification may be an unavoidable corollary or by-product of symbolization itself.
At a minimum, there seem to be reified fundamentals in all networks of domination. Calendars and clocks formalize and further reify time, which was likely the first reification of all. The divided social structure is a reified world largely because it is a symbolic structure of roles and images, not persons. Power crystallizes into networks of domination and hierarchy as reification enters the equation very early on. In the current productionist world, extreme division of labor fill- i fills its original meaning. Made increasingly passive and meaningless, ‘; we endlessly reify ourselves. Our mounting impoverishment approaches the condition in which we are mere things.
Reification permeates postmodern culture, in which only appearances change, and appear alive. The dreadfulness of our postmodernity can be seen as a destination of the history of philosophy, and a destination of a good deal more than just philosophy. History qua history begins as loss of integrity, immersion in an external trajectory that tears the self into parts. The denial of human choice and effective agency is as old as division of labor; only its drastic development or fullness is new.
About 250 years ago the German romantic Novalis complained that “the meaning of life has been lost.”3 Widespread questioning of the meaning of life only began at about this time, just as industrialism made its very first inroads.4 From this point on, an erosion of meaning has quickly accelerated, reminding us that the substitutive function of symbolization is also prosthetic. The replacement of the living by the artificial, like technology, involves a thing-ification. Reification is always, at least in part, a techno-imperative.
Technology is “the knack of so arranging the world diat we need not experience it.”5 We are expected to deny what is living and natural within us in order to acquiesce in the domination of non-human nature. Technology has unmistakably become the great vehicle of reification. Not forgetting that it is embedded in and embodies an ever-expanding, global field of capital, reification subordinates us to our own objectified creations. (“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” observed Emerson in the mid-19th century.) Nor is this a recent turn of events; rather, it reflects the master code of culture, ab origino. The separation from nature, and its ensuing pacification and manipulation, make one ask, is the individual vanishing? Has culture itself set this in motion? How has it come to pass that a formulation as reified as “children are our most precious resource” does not seem repugnant to everyone?
We are captives of so much that is not only instrumental, fodder for the functioning of other manipulable things, but also ever more simulated. We are exiles from immediacy, in a fading and flattening landscape where thought struggles to unlearn its alienated conditioning. Merleau-Ponty failed in his quest, but at least aimed at finding a primordial ontology of vision prior to the split between subject and object. It is division of labor and the resulting conceptual forms of thought that go unchallenged, delaying discovery of reification and reified thought.
It is, after all, our whole way of knowing that has been so deformed and diminished, and that must be understood as such. "Intelligence" is now an externality to be measured, equated to proficiency in manipulating symbols. Philosophy has become the highly elaborate rationalization of reifications. And even more generally, being itself is constituted as experience and representation, as subject and object. These outcomes must be criticized as fundamentally as possible.
The active, living element in cognition must be uncovered, beneath the reifications that mask it. Cognition, despite contemporary orthodoxy, is not computation. The philosopher Ryle glimpsed that a form of knowledge that does not rely on symbolic representation might be the basic one.6 Our notions of reality are the products of an artificially constructed symbol system, whose components have hardened into reifications or objectifications over time, as division of labor coalesced into domination of nature and domestication of the individual.
Thought capable of producing culture and civilization is distancing, non-sensuous. It abstracts from the subject and becomes an independent object. It's telling that sensations are much more resistant to reification than are mental images. Platonic discourse is a prime example of thinking that proceeds at the expense of the senses, in its radical split between perceptions and conceptions. Adorno draws attention to the healthier variant by his observation that in Walter Benjamin's writings "thought presses close to the object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself."7 And Le Roy is probably very close to the mark with "we resign ourselves to conception only for want of perception."8 Historically determined in the deepest sense, the reification aspect of thought is a further cognitive "fall from grace."
Husserl and others figured symbolic representation as originally designed to be only a temporary supplement to authentic expression.
Reification enters the picture in a somewhat parallel fashion, as representation passes from the status of a noun used for specific purposes to that of an object. Whether or not these descriptive theses are adequate, it seems at least evident that an ineluctable gap exists between the concept's abstraction and the richness of the web or phenomena. To the point here is Heidegger's conclusion that authentic thinking is "non-conceptual," a kind of "reverential listening."9
Always of the utmost relevance is the violence that a steadily encroaching technological ethos perpetrates against lived experience. Gilbert Germain has understood how the ethos forcefully promotes a "forgetfulness of the linkage between reflective thought and the direct perceptual experience of the world from which it arises and to which it ought to return."10 Engels noted in passing that "human reason has developed in accordance with man's alteration of nature,"11 a mild way of referring to the close connection between objectifying, instrumen-talizing reason and progressive reification.
In any case, the thought of civilization has worked to reduce the abundance that yet manages to surround us. Culture is a screen through which bur perceptions, ideas, and feelings are filtered and domesticated. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, the main thing representational thought represents is its limit.12 Heidegger and Wittgenstein, possibly the most original of 20th century thinkers, ended up disclaiming philosophy along these lines.
The reified life-world progressively removes what questions it. The literature on society raises ever fewer basic questions about society, and the suffering of the individual is now rarely related to even this unquestioned society. Emotional desolation is seen as almost entirely a matter of freely-occurring "natural" brain or chemical abnormalities, having nothing to do with the destructive context the individual is generally left to blindly endure in a drugged condition.
On a more abstract level, reification can be neutralized by conflating it with objectification, which is defined in a way that places it beyond questioning. Objectification in this sense is taken to mean an awareness of the existence of subjects and objects, and the fact of the self as both subject and object. Hegel, in this vein, referred to it as the very essence of the subject, without which there can be no development. Adorno saw some reification as a necessary element in the necessary process of human objectification. As he became more pessimistic about the realization of a de-reified society, Adorno used reification and objectification as synonyms,13 completing a demoralized retreat from fully calling either term into question.
I think it may be instructive to accept the two terms as synonymous, not to end up accepting them both but to entertain the notion of exploring basic alienation. All objectification requires an alienation of subject from object, which is fundamental, it would seem, to the goal of reconciling them. How did we get to this horrendous present, definable as a condition in which the reified subject and the reified object mutually entail one another? How is it that, as William Desmond put it, “the intimacy of being is dissolved in the modern antithesis of subject and object?”14
As the world is shaped via objectification, so is the subject: the world as a field of objects open to manipulation. Objectification, as the basis for the domination of nature as external, alien other, presents itself. Clearer still is the use of the term by Marx and Lukacs as the natural means by which humans master the world.
The shift from objects to objectification, from reality to constructions of reality, is also the shift to domination and mystification. Objectification is the take-off point for culture, in that it is makes domestication possible. It reaches its full potential with the onset of division of labor; the exchange principle itself moves on the level of objectification. Similarly, none of the institutions of divided society are powerful or determinative without a reified element.
The philosopher Croce considered it sheer rhetoric to speak of a beautiful river or flower; to him, nature was stupid compared to art. This elevation of the cultural is possible only through objectification. The works of Kafka, on the other hand, portray the outcome of objectifying cultural logic, with their striking illustration of a reified landscape that crushes the subject.
Representation and production are the foundations of reification, which cements and extends their empire. Reification’s ultimately distancing, domesticating orientation decrees the growing separation between reduced, rigidified subjects and an equally objectified field of experience. As the Situationist line goes, today the eye sees only things and their prices. The genesis of this outlook is vastly older than their formulation denotes; the project of de-objectification can draw strength from the human condition that obtained before reification developed. A “future primitive” is called for, where a living involvement with the world, and fluid, intimate participation in nature will replace the thingified reign of symbolic civilization.
The very first symptom of alienated life is the very gradual appearance of time. The first reification and increasingly the quintessential one, time is virtually synonymous with alienation. We are now so pervasively ruled and regulated by this “it” which of course has no concrete existence that thinking of a pre-civilized, timeless epoch is extremely difficult.
Time is the symptom of symptoms to come. The relationship of subject and object must have been radically different before temporal distance advanced into the psyche. It has come to stand over us as an external thing—predecessor to work and the commodity, separate and dominating as described by Marx. This de-presentizing force implies that de-reification would mean a return to the eternal present wherein we lived before we entered the pull of history.
E.M. Cioran asks, “How can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its march into the future, and all the nonsense about evolution and progress? Why go forward, why live in time.”13 Walter Benjamin’s plea for shattering the reified continuity of history was somewhat similarly based on his yearning for a wholeness or unity of experience. At some point, the moment itself matters and does not rely on other moments “in time.”
It was of course the clock that completed the reification, by dissociating time from human events and natural processes. Time by now was fully exterior to life and incarnated in the first fully mechanized device. In the 15th century Giovanni Tortelli wrote that the clock “seems to be alive, since it moves of its own accord.”16 Time had come to measure its contents, no longer contents measuring time. We so often say we “don’t have time,” but it is the basic reification, time, that has us.
Fragmented life cannot become the norm without the primary victory of time. The complexity, particularity, and diversity of all living creatures cannot be lost to the standardizing realm of the quantitative without this key objectification.
The question of the origin of reification is a compelling one that has rarely been pursued deeply enough. A common error has been to confuse intelligence with culture; namely, the absence of culture is seen as equivalent to the absence of intelligence. This confusion is further compounded when reification is seen as inherent to the nature of mental functioning. From Thomas Wynn17 and others we now know that pre-historic humans were our equals in intelligence. If culture is impossible without objectification, it does not follow that either is inevitable, or desirable.
As suspicious as Adorno was of the idea of origins, he conceded that human conduct originally involved no objectification.18 Husserl was similarly able to refer to the primordial oneness of all consciousness prior to its dissociation.19
Bringing this condition of life into focus has proven elusive at best. LeVi-Strauss began his anthropological work with such a quest in mind: “I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. That of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find was human beings.”20 In other words, he was really still looking for symbolic culture, and seemed ill-equipped to ponder the meaning of its absence. Herbert Marcuse wanted human history to conform to nature as a subject-object harmony, but he knew that “history is the negation of nature.”21 The postmodern outlook positively celebrates the reifying presence of history and culture by denying the possibility that a pre-objectificational state ever existed. Having surrendered to representation—and every other basic given of past, present, and future barrenness—the postmodernists could scarcely be expected to explore the genesis of reification.
If not the original reification, language is the most consequential, as cornerstone of representational culture. Language is the reification of communication, a paradigmatic move that establishes every other mental separation. The philosopher W.V. Quine’s variation on this is that reification arrives with the pronoun.22
“In the beginning was the Word …” the beginning of all this, which is killing us by limiting existence to many things. Corollary of symbolization, reification is a sclerosis that chokes off what is living, open, natural. In place of being stands the symbol. If it is impossible for us to coincide with our being, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, then the symbolic is the measure of that non-coincidence. Reification seals the deal, and language is its universal currency.
An exhausted symbolic mediation with less and less to say prevails in a world where that mediation is now seen as the central, even defining fact of life. In an existence without vibrancy or meaning, nothing is left but language. The relation of language to reality has dominated 20th century philosophy. Wittgenstein, for example, was convinced that the foundation of language and of linguistic meaning is the very basis of philosophy.
This “linguistic turn” appears even more profound if we consider the entire species-sense of language, including its original impact as a radical departure. Language has been fundamental to our obligation to objectify ourselves, in a milieu that is increasingly not our own. Thus it is absurd for Heidegger to say that the truth about language is that it refuses to be objectified. The reificational act of language impoverishes existence by creating a universe of meaning sufficient unto itself. The ultimate “sufficient unto itself” is the concept “God,” and its ultimate description is, revealingly, “I am Who I am”(Exodus 4:14). We have come to regard the separate, self-enclosed nature of objectification as the highest quality, evidently, rather than as the debasement of the “merely” contingent, relational, connected.
It has been recognized for some time that thought is not language-dependent and that language limits the possibilities of thought.23 Gottlob Frege wondered if to think in a non-reified way is possible, how it could be possible to explain how thinking can ever be reified. The answer was not to be found in his chosen field of formal logic.
In fact, language does proceed as a thing external to the subject, and molds our cognitive processes. Classic psychoanalytic theory ignored language, but Melanie Klein discussed symbolization as a precipitant of anxiety. To translate Klein’s insight into cultural terms, anxiety about erosion of a non-objectified life-world provokes language. We experience “the urge to thrust against language,”24 when we feel that we have given up our voices, and are left only with language. The enormity of this loss is suggested in C.S. Peirce’s definition of the self as mainly a consistency of symbolization; “my language,” conversely, “is the sum total of my self,” he concluded.25 Given this kind of reduction, is not difficult to agree with Lacan that induction into the symbolic world generates a persistent yearning that arises from one’s absence from the real world. “The speechform is a mere sorrogate,” wrote Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake.
Language refutes every appeal to immediacy by dishonoring the unique and immobilizing the mobile. Its elements are independent entities from the consciousness that utters them, which in turn weigh down that consciousness. According to Quine, this reification plays a part in creating a “structured system of the world,” by closing up the “loose ends of raw experience.”26 Quine does not recognize the limiting aspects of this project. In his incomplete final work, the phenome-nologist Merleau-Ponty began to explore how language diminishes an original richness, how it actually works against perception.
Language, as a separate medium, does indeed facilitate a structured system, based on itself, that deals with anarchic “loose ends” of experience. It accomplishes this, basically in the service of division of labor, by avoiding the here and now of experience. “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” an anti-reification statement by Paul Valery,27 suggests how words get in the way of direct apprehension. The Murngin of northern Australia saw name-giving as a kind of death, the loss of an original wholeness.28 A pivotal moment of reification occurred when we succumbed to names and became inscribed in letters. It is perhaps when we most need to express ourselves, fully and completely, that language most clearly reveals its reductive and inarticulate nature.
Language itself corrupts, as Rousseau claimed in his famous dream of a community stripped of it. The path beyond the claims of reification involves breaking representation’s age-old spell.
Another basic avenue of reification is ritual, which originated as a means to instill conceptual and social order. Ritual is an objectified schema of action, involving symbolic behavior that is standardized and repetitive. It is the first fetishizing of culture, and points decisively toward domestication. Concerning the latter, ritual can be seen as the original model of calculability of production. Along these lines, Georges Condominas challenged the distinction that is ordinarily made between ritual and agriculture. His fieldwork in Southeast Asia led him to see ritual as an integral component of the technology of traditional farming.29
Mircea Eliade has described religious rites as real only to the extent that they imitate or symbolically repeat some kind of archetypal event, adding that participation is felt to be genuine only to the extent of this identification; that is, only to the extent that the participant ceases to be himself or herself.30 Thus the repetitive ritual act is very closely related to the depersonalizing, devaluing essence of division of labor, and at the same time approaches a virtual definition of the reifying process itself. To lose oneself in fealty to an earlier, frozen event or moment: to become reified, a thing that owes its supposed authenticity to some prior reification.
Religion, like the rest of culture, springs from the false notion of the necessity for combat against the forces of nature. The powers of nature are reified, along with those of their religious or mythological counterparts. From animism to deism, the divine develops against a natural world depicted as increasingly threatening and chaotic. J.G. Frazier saw religious and magical phenomena as “the conscious conversion of what had hitherto been regarded as living beings into impersonal substances.”31 To deify is to reify, and a November 1997 discovery by archaeologist Juan Vadeum helps us situate the domesticating context of this movement. In Chiapas, Mexico, Vadeum found four Mayan stone carvings that represent original “grandfathers” of wisdom and power.
Significantly, these figures of seminal importance to Mayan religion and cosmology symbolize War, Agriculture, Trade, and Tribute.32 As Feuerbach noted, every important stage in the history of human civilization begins with religion,33 and religion serves civilization both sub-stantively and formally. In its formal aspect, the reifying nature of religion is the most potent contribution of all.
Art is the other early objectification of culture, which is what makes it into a separate activity and gives it reality. Art is also a quasi-utopian promise of happiness, always broken. The betrayal resides largely in the reification. “To be a work of art means to set up a world,” according to Heidegger,34 but this counter-world is powerless against the rest of the objectified world of which it remains a part.
Georg Simmel described the triumph of form over life, the danger posed to individuality by the surrender to form. The dualism of form and content is the blueprint for reification itself, and partakes in the basic divisions of class society.
At base there is an abstract and somewhat narrow similarity to all aesthetic appearance. This is due to a severe restriction of the sensual, enemy number one of reification. And remembering our Freud, it is the curbing of Eros that makes culture possible. Can it be an accident that the three senses that are excluded from art—touch, smell, and taste—are the senses of sensual love?
Max Weber recognized that culture “appears as man’s emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life. For this very reason,” he continued, “culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness.”35 The representation of culture is followed by pleasure in representation that replaces pleasure per se. The will to create culture overlooks the violence in and of culture, a violence that is inescapable given culture’s basis in fragmentation and separation. Every reification forgets this.
For Homer, the idea of barbarism was of a piece with the absence of agriculture. Culture and agriculture have always been linked by their common basis of domestication; to lose the natural within us is to lose nature without. One becomes a thing in order to master things.
Today the culture of global capitalism abandons its claim to be culture, even as the production of culture exceeds the production of goods. Reification, the process of culture, dominates when all awaits naturalization, in a constantly transformed environment that is “natural” in name only. Objects themselves—and even the “social” relationships among them—are seen as real only insofar as they are recognized as existing in mediaspace or cyberspace.
A domesticating reification renders everything, including us, its objects. And these objects possess less and less originality or aura, as discussed by commentators from Baudelaire and Morris to Benjamin and Baudrillard. “Now from America empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life,” wrote Rilke.36 Meanwhile the whole natural world has become a mere object.
Postmodern practice severs things from their history and context, as in the device of inserting “quotations” or arbitrarily juxtaposed elements from other periods into music, painting, novels. This gives the objects a rootless autonomy of sorts, while subjects have little or none.
We seem to be objects destroyed by objectification, our grounding and authenticity leached away. We are like the schizophrenic who actively experiences himself as a thing.
There is a coldness, even a deadness, that is becoming impossible to deny. A palpable sense of “something missing” inheres in the unmistakable impoverishment of a world objectifying itself. Our only hope may-lie precisely in the fact that the madness of the whole is so apparent.
It is still maintained that reification is an ontological necessity in a complex world, which is exactly the point. The de-reifying act must be the return to simple, non-divided life. The life congealed and concealed in petrified thingness cannot reawaken without a vast undoing of this ever-more standardized, massified lost world.
Until fairly recently—until civilization—nature was a subject, not an object. In hunter-gatherer societies no strict division or hierarchy existed between the human and the non-human. The participatory nature of vanished connectedness has to be restored, that condition in which meaning was lived, not objectified into a grid of symbolic culture. The very positive picture we now have of pre-history establishes a perspective of anticipatory remembrance: there is the horizon of subject-object reconciliation.
This prior participation with nature is the reverse of the domination and distancing at the heart of reification. It reminds us that all desire is a desire for relationship, at its best reciprocal and animate. To enable this nearness or presence is a gigantic practical project, that will make an end to these dark days.
1998
Footnotes
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1972), p. 382.
2. Edmund Husserl, Le Discours et le Symbole (Paris, 1962), p. 66.
3. Novalis, Schriften, vol. II (Stuttgart, 1965-1977), p. 594.
4. Iddo Landau, “Why Has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?” Philosophy Today, Summer 1967.
5. Quote attributed to the playwright Max Frisch. Source unknown.
6. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of ‘Mind (London, 1949)
7. Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, 1981), p. 240.
8. Eduoard Le Roy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson (New York, 1913), p. 156.
9. Martin Heidegger, “What is Thinking?” in Basic Writings (New York, 1969)
10. Gilbert B. Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment (Albany, 1992), p. 126.
11. Friedrich Engels, Dialectic of Nature (Moscow, 1934), p. 231.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, 1993), p. 2.
13. Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, 1983) p. 262, for example.
14. William Desmond, Perplexity and Ultimacy (Albany, 1995), p. 64.
15. E.M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (Chicago, 1990), p. 126.
16. Giovanni Tortelli, De Orthographia, 1471.
17. Thomas Wynn, The Evolution of Spatial Competence (Urbana, 1989).
18. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 118, 184.
19. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, 1970)
20. Levi-Strauss, op.cit., p. 358.
21. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), p. 236.
22. W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge, 1995), p. 27.
23. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia, 1990)
24. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review74(l965),p. 12.
25. C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1931-1958), vol. 5, pp. 28, 29.
26. Quine, op.cit., p. 29.
27. Quotation is title of Robert Irwin’s autobiographical work (Berkeley, 1982).
28. Bradd B. Shore, Culture in Mind (New York, 1996), p. 222.
29. Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest (New York, 1977).
30. Mircea Eliade, quoted in False Consciousness, by Joseph Gabel (Oxford, 1975), p. 39.
31. J.G. Frazier, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York, 1932-36), XLIX, p. 74.
32. Mark Stevenson, “Mayan Stones Discovery May Confirm Ancient Text” (Associated Press, November 17, 1997).
33. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York, 1967), p. 209.
34. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings (New York, 1969), p. 170.
35. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” in Essays on Sociology, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. (New York, 1958), pp. 356-357.
36. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters ofRilke, vol. 2 (New York, 1969), p. 374.
