CONCEPT
Reification (Honneth)
Honneth's 2008 revival of Lukács's concept as the forgetfulness of recognition — the habit of treating persons as things, now inverted in the AI moment into the treatment of things as persons.
Reification, as reformulated by Honneth in his 2005 Tanner Lectures and 2008 book Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, names the forgetfulness of recognition — the phenomenon in which subjects treat other subjects as if they were mere objects, losing awareness of the recognition relationship that constitutes the other as a person. Honneth argued that reification is not primarily an epistemic error (false belief that others are things) but a practical deformation: the atrophy of the recognition stance that normally governs our engagement with others. The AI moment opens a parallel problem that the Warsaw research program formulated provocatively: is the deepest problem now that we treat people as things, or that we treat things as people?
In The You On AI Field Guide
Honneth's reformulation departed from Lukács's Marxist account, which located reification in the commodity form's infiltration of consciousness. Where Lukács saw reification as ideology produced by capitalism's structure, Honneth saw it as the loss of a