Hypostatization

“ - Well, how do they start a war?

- Well, one country offends another.

- How could one country offend another? You mean, there’s a mountain over in germany gets mad at a field over in France?

— All Quiet On The Western Front[1]

“ Language often obscures truth. More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue. When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country—when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis”—we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors. How different it would be if we had no such word as “France”, and had to say instead—thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory! Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.” This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the “few”? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey?

Empire-building is done not by “nations” but by men. The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majo- rities pay the expenses and fight the wars necessitated by imperialist expansion.

— Parker Thomas Moon, Imperialism and World Politics (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1926), p. 58.

“ Reification fallacy - ( See Hypostatization.) (Also concretism.) Treating abstractions as actual existing entities or regarding them as causally efficacious and ontologically prior and superior to their referents. Similar to hypostatization, except the kinds of abstractions involved are usually philosophical or ideological, such as “universals,”15 “existence,” “good,” and “justice.” TOP Example: “Good and evil are the two forces ruling the universe.” But, good and evil are qualities, not forces.

Hypostatization fallacy - ( See Reification.) Attributing actual existence or qualities of actual existents to something that is only a name, a relationship, or abstraction; or attributing qualities of one kind of existents to a different kind of existents, (e.g. personification). (Also described as attributing concreteness to the abstract.) TOP The hypostatization fallacy is very subtle and easily misunderstood. The description of hypostatization applies to rhetorical devices, as well, such as metaphor and personification, which are not fallacies at all, but important and useful tools of language in literature and poetry. The distinction between treating abstractions as material existents rhetorically or using them in arguments that result in false conclusions, is often difficult to detect, or even to describe, especially when the fallacious use is intentional. Hypostatization (together with the closely related fallacy of reification) may be the most common of all fallacies. Whole systems of philosophy, politics, religion, science, and social theories are built on or supported by this fallacy.11

Examples:

“Nature’s purposes are always pure, therefore we should always accede to her.” Nature has no purposes.

“The only just laws are those that relieve a society’s suffering.” Laws do not “relieve” anything, and “societies,” do not suffer.

“Industry is a danger to both nature and society.” Here are three hypostatized abstractions, industry, nature, and society. Industry is not a “thing” that does anything, and neither nature or society are things to which anything is done. Some industries might do something that is harmful to some natural things or some persons in some society, but treating any of these as entities, even collective entities, is fallacious.

“What are personal considerations in the face of the needs of society, the fate of the nation, the preservation of culture?” Since, society has no needs, nations do not have fates, and there is no such thing as culture to preserve, personal considerations are all that are left.

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country.” -(John F. Kennedy) Obviously rhetorical, and therefore, all the more subtle. Behind the rhetoric is the insidious concept that citizens exist for the sake of a country (state or government), the opposite of the intention of the American Constitutional, that government exists for the sake of the citizens.

The pathetic fallacy is a subset of this fallacy.

Pathetic fallacy - Incorrectly projecting or attributing human emotions, feelings, intentions, thoughts, traits to events or objects or phenomena which do not have such qualities. (Also called personification or anthropomorphism, it as wonderfully useful rhetorical device in literature; it is a disaster in logic.) TOP See Hypostatization fallacy of which this fallacy is a subset, for examples.

— Hypostatization fallacy

“ The worst enemy of clear thinking is the propensity to hypostatize, i.e., to ascribe substance or real existence to mental constructs or concepts.

In the sciences of human action the most conspicuous instance of this fallacy is the way in which the term society is employed by various schools of pseudo science. There is no harm in employing the term to signify the cooperation of individuals united in endeavors to attain definite ends. It is a definite aspect of various individuals’ actions that constitutes what is called society or the “great society.” But society itself is neither a substance, nor a power, nor an acting being. Only individuals act. Some of the individuals’ actions are directed by the intention to cooperate with others. Cooperation of individuals brings about a state of affairs which the concept of society describes. Society does not exist apart from the thoughts and actions of people. It does not have “interests” and does not aim at anything. The same is valid for all other collectives.

Hypostatization is not merely an epistemological fallacy and not only misleads the search for knowledge. In the so-called social sciences it more often than not serves definite political aspirations in claiming for the collective as such a higher dignity than for the individual or even ascribing real existence only to the collective and denying the existence of the individual, calling it a mere abstraction.

The collectivists themselves disagree with one another in the appreciation of the various collectivistic constructs. They claim a higher reality and moral dignity for one collective than for others or, in a more radical way, even deny both real existence and dignity to the collectivistic constructs of other people. Thus, nationalists consider the “nation” as the only true collective, to which alone all individuals they consider as conationals owe allegiance, and stigmatize all other collectives—e.g., the religious communities—as of minor rank. However, epistemology does not have to deal with the political controversies implied.

In denying perseity, i.e., independent existence of their own, to the collectives, one does not in the least deny the reality of the effects brought about by the cooperation of individuals. One merely establishes the fact that the collectives come into being by the thoughts and actions of individuals and that they disappear when the individuals adopt a different way of thinking and acting. The thoughts and actions of a definite individual are instrumental in the emergence not only of one, but of various collectives. Thus, e.g., the same individual’s various attitudes may serve to constitute the collectives nation, religious community, political party, and so on. On the other hand, a man may, without discontinuing entirely his belonging to a definite collective, occasionally or even regularly in some of his actions proceed in a way that is incompatible with the preservation of his membership. Thus, e.g., it happened in the recent history of various nations that practicing Catholics cast their votes in favor of candidates who openly avowed their hostility to the political aspirations of the Church and spurned its dogmas as fables. In dealing with collectives, the historian must pay attention to the degree to which the various ideas of cooperation determine the thinking and the actions of their members. Thus, in dealing with the history of the Italian Risorgimento, he has to investigate to what extent and in what manner the idea of an Italian national state and to what extent and in what manner the idea of a secular papal state influenced the attitudes of the various individuals and groups whose conduct is the subject of his studies.

The political and ideological conditions of the Germany of his day induced Marx to employ, in the announcement of his program of nationalization of the means of production, the term “society” instead of the term “state” (Staat), which is the German equivalent of the English term “nation.” The socialist propaganda endowed the term “society” and the adjective “social” with an aura of sanctity that is manifested by the quasi-religious esteem that what is called “social work,” i.e., the management of the distribution of alms and similar activities, enjoys.

— Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, « The Pitfalls of Hypostatization »