SOME REFLECTIONS ON REFLEXIVITY by Jørgen Jørgensen

..." This sentence is false " is not a sentence at all in any logical sense. If the expression mentioned is considered a sentence and the word "false " is considered the logical predicate of this sentence, then the logical subject cannot be the whole expression, but at most either the words " This sentence " or the designation of these words. In the first case the whole expression is meaningless because " false " is not the kind of predicate which can be meaningfully ascribed to descriptions as " This sentence " And in the latter case the whole expression is meaningless because the description " This sentence " has no object, there being no sentence to which these words can refer. In neither case can any conclusions be drawn from the expression mentioned, and no paradoxes emerge.
If the whole expression " This sentence is false " is assumed truly to be a sentence affirming its own falseness, then it has no predicate, but the expression as a whole is functioning as the logical subject of a new sentence that must read: " The sentence 'This sentence is false ' is false ". Then the included sentence is true, and the including sentence false. And that is the end of it. No paradox emerges.

The most important generalization that can be made from these considerations is, to my mind, that no sentence can refer to itself, or that no sentences are self-referring. And this can, as far as I can see, be extended to any linguistic expressions whatever, nay, to all so-called reflexive phenomena. My reasons for believing this are as follows:
A phenomenon of whatever kind it may be is not a symbol, i.e. is not functioning as a symbol, unless it is contained in a process of symbolization as a part of this process taking place in an organism. The linguistic sounds or figures are in them- selves or isolated from a process of symbolization not symbols, but solely sensational phenomena produced by symbolizing human beings for whom they may represeint or refer to some- thing differeint from themselves. Outside the symbolizing process they are but remnants of a linguistic process-just as a dead organism is but the remnants of a living organism. The sounds or figures are becoming symbols again, only if they are again used as such by becoming part of a. new symbolizing process. A sentential expression as such, i.e. as an auditive or a visual phenomenon is not by itself referring to anything, but a human being cain use it for referring to something different from the sentential expression. He cannot, however, by means of a sentential expression refer to this very sentential expression- this fact being a consequence of the very nature of symbolization. And in the same way a word can only function as a word, if it is part of a symbolizing process. If a word or a sentential expression is to function as a linguistic expression there must be something different from them to which they may refer via an organism, but they can never refer to themselves-that would be tantamount to their referring to nothing. Therefore, linguistic phenomena are never self-referring or reflexive.
And this applies, I think, to all other phenomena as well. There are no reflexive phenomena at all. This seems to me to be a simple consequence of the. notion of relation. Any relation presupposes at least two terms which may be more or less alike in various respects, but which can never coalesce into a single -term, if the relation shall not disappear. If only a single term is given there cannot be any question of a relation. The sole one 1 could think of is identity which is often considered a relation which an object has to itself. But identity in this sense is in my opinion no relation at all. It is but another name for object-the same object. To be sure, we can speak of two occurrences or two appearances of one and the same object, as well as we can speak of two objects being identical in certain respects, e.g. when they have the sane property or are having the same relation to something. That, however, does not mean that there are two properties or relations that are identical, but solely that the same property belongs to both objects, or that several objects are having the same mutual relation as some other objects have-a property or a relation being something that cannot be localized in space or time. Two different spots of colour may have the same shade of colour, we say. This, however, does not mean that there are two identical shades of colour, but that the same (one and the same) shade of colour is to be found in the two spots of colour. There is no relation of identity between two shades of colour, but the two different spots of colour have a property (viz. the shade of colour) in common. The property is the same-and this is the sense of the phrase "the two spots of colour are identical with respect to colour ". Two different objects may have a property in com- mon; but this fact does not constitute a relation of identity between the objects. As they are two they cannot be identical. Orly the colour is identical in the two objects, i.e. they have the same colour, but there are not two colours with a relation of identity between them.
Further, it may be said that two different names have identical meanings, if they denote the same object. But it has presumably no sense to say, as it is often done, that an object is identical with itself, if " identical " should here mean (indicate) a relation. The expression " every object is identical with itself " can in my opinion solely mean, that no object is different from itself qua object, even if it may have various appearances in different situations. Either an object is the same object at various points of time or space, and if so it cannot have any relation to itself, or the object is not the same at various points of time or space, and if so there are several objects which may stand in various relations to each other, but none of which can have a relation of identity to any of the others.

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SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION: THREE BASIC CONCEPTIONS by Wesley C. Salmon

Two causal mechanisms seem to me to be fundamental. First, there are spatiotemporally continuous causal processes that transmit causal influence from one part of spacetime to another. Causal processes must be distinguished from pseudo-processes. Pseudo-processes exhibit considerable regularity, thus closely resembling causal processes. However, pseudo-processes do not possess the ability to transmit causal influence. Causal processes are distinguished from pseudo-processes by the fact that causal processes can transmit marks, while pseudo- processes cannot.
The second causal mechanism is the causal interaction. When two or more causal processes intersect in spacetime, they may or may not produce lasting modifications in one another. If they do, the intersection constitutes a causal interaction. Pseudo-processes do not enter into causal interations. Pseudo-processes are produced by causal processes, and these causal processes that give rise to pseudo-processes can participate in causal interactions. Thus, a pseudo-process may be momentarily altered by intersection with another process (causal or pseudo), but such modifications do not persist beyond the locus of the intersection.

In many cases, I presume, causal explanations possess both etiological and constitutive aspects. To explain the destruction of hiroshima by a nuclear bomb, we need to explain the nature of a chain reaction (constitutive aspect) and how the bomb was transported by airplane, dropped, and detoneted (etiological aspect).

If indeterminism is true--and I think we must allow for that possibility in our theories of scientific explanation--then circumstances of a type c sometimes yield an outcome e and sometimes one or more other outcomes e' that are incompatible with e. Heterozygous brown-eyed parents sometimes have brown-eyed offspring and sometimes blue-eyed. When the offspring is brown-eyed the explanation is that the parents are both brown-eyed and heterozygous, and three-fourths of all children of such parents are brown-eyed. When the offspring is blue- eyed the explanation is that the parents are brown-eyed and heterozygous, and one-fourth of all children of such parents are blue- eyed. A tritium atom left alone in a box for twenty-four and half years sometimes yields a tritium atom in the box and sometimes a helium-3 atom in the box. When a helium-3 atom 1s found, the explanation is that the tritium atom placed in the box underwent beta-decay and was transmuted to helium-3, and three-fourths of all tritium atoms undergo such decay in that period of time. When a tritium atom is found, the explanation is that the tritium atom placed in the box remained intact, and that happens to one-fourth of such atoms in that period of time.
Strong protest is likely to be raised at this point on the ground that none of the foregoing explanations is acceptable, for we cannot explain why the eye-color is brown rather than blue or blue rather than brown. Nor can we explain why the tritium atom decayed rather than remaining intact or remained intact rather than decaying. The point can be put in terms of van fraassen's contrast class. In the eye-color example, the contrast class contains blue and brown. In the case of the brown-eyed child, 1 should say, we can explain why the topic is true, and we know that the only alternative is false, but we cannot explain why the one rather than the other obtains.
The demand that a satisfactory explanation of any occurrence must contain the "Rather than" component stems most naturally from the modal conception of scientific explanation. According to this conception, an explanation explains by showing that what did happen had to happen, from which it follows that no incompatible alternative could have happened. Such an explanation would explain why the alternative did not happen because under the circumstances it could not have happened. To my mind, this demand for the "Rather than" component stems from the laplacian deterministic context in which the same circumstances always lead to the same outcome. If one holds on to the modal conception, the natural response to indeterminism is to suppose that it makes explanations of certain kinds of occurrences impossible. The laplacian orientation strikes me as scientifically anachronistic.

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SCIENCE AND LINGUISTICS by Benjamin Lee Whorf


The familiar saying that the exception proves the rule contains a good deal of wisdom, though from the standpoint of formal logic it became an absurdity as soon as “prove” no longer meant “put on trial.” The old saw began to be profound psychology from the time it ceased to have standing in logic. What it might well suggest to us today is that, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious. Never having experienced anything in contrast to it, we cannot isolate it and formulate it as a rule until we so enlarge our experience and expand our base of reference that we encounter an interruption of its regularity. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of not missing the water till the well runs dry, or not realizing that we need air till we are choking.
For instance, if a race of people had the physiological defect of being able to see only the color blue, they would hardly be able to formulate the rule that they saw only blue. The term blue would convey no meaning to them, their language would lack color terms, and their words denoting their various sensations of blue would answer to, and translate, our words “light, dark, white, black,” and so on, not our word “blue.” In order to formulate the rule or norm of seeing only blue, they would need exceptional moments in which they saw other colors. The phenomenon of gravitation forms a rule without exceptions; needless to say, the untutored person is utterly unaware of any law of gravitation, for it would never enter his head to conceive of a universe in which bodies behaved otherwise than they do at the earth’s surface. Like the color blue with our hypothetical race, the law of gravitation is a part of the untutored individual’s background, not something he isolates from that background. The law could not be formulated until bodies that always fell were seen in terms of a wider astronomical world in which bodies moved in orbits or went this way and that.

Natural logic contains two fallacies: First, it does not see that the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness and control of the speaker who is expounding natural logic. Hence, when anyone, as a natural logician, is talking about reason, logic, and the laws of correct thinking, he is apt to be simply marching in step with purely grammatical facts that have somewhat of a background character in his own language or family of languages but are by no means universal in all languages and in no sense a common substratum of reason. Second, natural logic confuses agreement about subject matter, attained through use of language, with knowledge of the linguistic process by which agreement is attained: i.e., with the province of the despised (and to its notion superfluous) grammarian. Two fluent speakers, of English let us say, quickly reach a point of assent about the subject matter of their speech; they agree about what their language refers to. One of them, A, can give directions that will be carried out by the other, B, to A’s complete satisfaction. Because they thus understand each other so perfectly, A and B, as natural logicians, suppose they must of course know how it is all done. They think, e.g., that it is simply a matter of choosing words to express thoughts. If you ask A to explain how he got B’s agreement so readily, he will simply repeat to you, with more or less elaboration or abbreviation, what he said to B. He has no notion of the process involved. The amazingly complex system of linguistic patterns and classifications, which A and B must have in common before they can adjust to each other at all, is all background to A and B.

...Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

Let us consider a few examples. In English we divide most of our words into two classes, which have different grammatical and logical properties. Class 1 we call nouns, e.g., ‘house, man’; class 2, verbs, e.g., ‘hit, run.’ Many words of one class can act secondarily as of the other class, e.g., ‘a hit, a run,’ or ‘to man (the boat),’ but, on the primary level, the division between the classes is absolute. Our language thus gives us a bipolar division of nature. But nature herself is not thus polarized. If it be said that ‘strike, turn, run,’ are verbs because they denote temporary or short-lasting events, i.e., actions, why then is ‘fist’ a noun? It also is a temporary event. Why are ‘lightning, spark, wave, eddy, pulsation, flame, storm, phase, cycle, spasm, noise, emotion’ nouns? They are temporary events. If ‘man’ and ‘house’ are nouns because they are long lasting and stable events, i.e., things, what then are ‘keep, adhere, extend, project, continue, persist, grow, dwell,’  and so on doing among the verbs? If it be objected that ‘possess, adhere’ are verbs because they are stable relationships rather than stable percepts, why then should ‘equilibrium, pressure, current, peace, group, nation, society, tribe, sister,’ or any kinship term be among the nouns? It will be found that an “event” to us means “what our language classes as a verb” or something analogized therefrom. And it will be found that it is not possible to define ‘event, thing, object, relationship,’ and so on, from nature, but that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the grammatical categories of the definer’s language.
In the Hopi language, ‘lightning, wave, flame, meteor, puff of smoke, pulsation’ are verbs — events of necessarily brief duration cannot be anything but verbs. ‘Cloud’ and ‘storm’ are at about the lower limit of duration for nouns. Hopi, you see, actually has a classification of events (or linguistic isolates) by duration type, something strange to our modes of thought. On the other hand, in Nootka, a language of Vancouver Island, all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are no classes 1 and 2; we have, as it were, a monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. ‘A house occurs’ or ‘it houses’ is the way of saying ‘house,’ exactly like ‘a flame occurs’ or ‘it burns.’ These terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for durational and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word for house event make it mean long- lasting house, temporary house, future house, house that used to be, what started out to be a house, and so on.

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TEMPORAL NATURALISM by Lee Smolin

...matter is made out of elementary particles which obey general laws, but that complex systems made out of many atoms can have emergent properties not expressible in or derivable from the properties of elementary particles.

“X may provide a good description of some class of observations of the world, but the world cannot be X exactly because qualia are undeniably part of the world and X are not qualia.”
This is especially the case when X is ”a mathematical object.”


Let me begin with an assertion we know is true: If we prepare and measure a quantum system we have studied many times in the past, the response will be as if the outcome were randomly chosen from the ensemble of past instances of that preparation and measurement.
Why is this? Usually we think that that is because a timeless law will act in the future as it has in the past.
But this is a wild idea. What kind of thing is a law that lives outside of time but can act in time on every material process? This violates a central tenet of relationalism which is Einstein’s principle of reciprocity, according to which if an entity, A, acts on an entity B to alter it, then B must be able to act back on A. Besides, how does an electron know it is supposed to follow the electron law rather than the quark law? There is a radical metaphysical idea at work, making the crazy seem obvious.
There is a less radical assumption: What was just stated is the only law of nature needed.
If we prepare and measure a quantum system we have studied many times in the past, the response will be as if the outcome were randomly chosen from the ensemble of past instances of that preparation and measurement.
We can cross out a few words and simplify this a bit:
If we prepare and measure a quantum system we have studied many times in the past, the response will be randomly chosen from the ensemble of past instances of that preparation and measurement.
My claim is that this principle may be the only dynamical law of nature.


The block universe cannot represent now because now is an intrinsic property and the block universe can only speak of relational properties. Hence the block universe is an incomplete description of the natural world.
That is, because qualia are undeniably real aspects of the natural world, and because an essential feature of them is their existing only in the present moment, qualia allow the presently present moment to be distinguished intrinsically without regard to relational addressing. Any description of nature that does not allow Now to be intrinsically defined is an incomplete description of nature because it leaves out some undeniable facts about nature. Hence the block universe and timeless naturalism are incomplete, and hence they are wrong.


Panpsychism asserts that some physical events have qualia as intrinsic properties, some of which are neural correlates of human consciousness. But it does not need to assert that all physical events have qualia. Might there be a physical characteristic which distinguishes those physical events that have qualia?
According to the principle of precedence which I discussed above, there are then two kinds of events or states in nature: those for which there is precedence, which hence follow laws, and those without precedence, which evoke genuinely novel events. My speculative proposal the correlate of qualia are those events without precedence.

Panpsychists argue that the elements of the physical world have structural properties and intrinsic and internal properties. By arguing that matter may have internal properties not describable in terms needed to express the laws of physics, panpsychists reserve a place for qualia as intrinsic, non-dynamical properties of matter. I would propose to cut the pie up differently. I would hold that events have relational and intrinsic properties, but relational properties include only causal relations and spacetime intervals which are derivative from them. Under intrinsic properties I would include the dynamical quantities: energy and momenta, together with qualia. I would go further and relate energy and qualia. I would point out that the experienced qualities of qualia correlate with changes of energy. Colours are a measure of energy, as are tones.

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DIALECTIC  OF  THE  CONCRETE  TOTALITY by Karel  Kosik

...From the moment that men became conscious of their time (i.e., they live it, evaluate it, criticize it, and understand it) within the categories of « coal-man's faith » and of « petty bourgeois skepticism », the doctrinaire supposes that a « scientific » analysis of those ideas has been carried out as soon as an economic, social or class equivalent for them has been found. But what is obtained through such a « materialization » is only a double mystification: the overturning of the world of appearance (of fixed ideas) has its roots in overturned materiality (reified). The materialistic theory must undertake the analysis with the following question: why have men become aware of their time precisely in these categories? And, which time presents itself to men through these categories? By posing such a question the materialist prepares the basis from which to proceed to the destruction of pseudo-concreteness, both of ideas and conditions. Only after this can there be a rational explanation of the intimate connection between time and thought.

The real world, hidden and yet at the same time manifesting itself through pseudo-concreteness, is not the world of real in opposition to unreal conditions, or the world of transcendence in opposition to subjective illusions, rather, it is the world of human praxis. It is the comprehension of human-social reality as a unity of production and product, of subject and object, of genesis and structure. Therefore, the real world is not a world of « real » fixed objects which, under their fetishised aspect, lead a transcendental existence understood as a naturalistic variant of platonic ideas. It is, instead, a world in which things, meanings and relationships are considered as products of socialized man. Furthermore, man himself turns out to be the real subject of the social world. The world of reality is not a secularized variation of paradise, of an already realized and a-temporal state. It is a process through which humanity and the individual realize their own truth, and thus bring about the humanization of man. Unlike the world of pseudo-concreteness, the world of reality is the world of the realization of truth, it is the world in which truth is not given or predetermined, it is not already there and copied in an immutable form in human consciousness, rather, it is the world in which reality becomes. It is because of this that human history can be a process and the history of truth. The destruction of pseudo-concreteness means that truth is neither unreachable, nor can it be obtained once and for all. It means that it is made, i.e., it is developed and realized.


Obviousness does not coincide with the perspicuity and clarity of the thing itself; it is rather the lack of clarity of the representation of the thing. What is natural manifests itself as something unnatural. Man must exert some effort and come out of the « natural state » in order to become truly man and know reality as such (man elaborates himself by evolving into man). According to the great thinkers of all times and inclinations -in Plato's myth of the cave, in the baconian image of the idols, in Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger and Marx- knowledge is correctly characterized as the overcoming of naturalness, as the highest activity or effort. The dialectic of the activity and passivity in human knowledge manifests iteself first of all in the fact that man, in order to know things in themselves, must first of all transform them in things for himself. In order to know things as they are independently of himself, he must first submit them to his own praxis. In order to observe how they are when they are not in contact with him, he must first come into contact with them. Knowledge is not contemplation. The contemplation ot the world bases itself upon the results of human praxis. Man knows reality only to the extent that he creates human reality and behaves primarily as a practical being.


As it is well known, Marx distinguished the method of investigation from the method of exposition. Notwithstanding this, the method of investigation is still treated superficially as something known, and the method of exposition is still considered in terms of the form of presentation, i.e., it is not seen that it is through the method of explanation that the phenomenon becomes transparent, rational and comprehensible. The method of investigation involves three steps:
(1) minute appropriation of the subject-matter, full possession of the material, including all the historically available details;
(2) analysis of the single forms of development of the material itself;
(3) investigation of the internal coherence, i.e., determination of the unity of the various forms of development. Without the full possesion of such a method of investigation any dialectic is empty speculation.
What science takes as its point of departure for the exposition is already the result of an investigation and of a critical-scientific appropriation of matter. The beginning of the exposition is already a mediated beginning which embryonically contains the structure of the whole work. Yet, what can, or better, must constitute the beginning of the exposition, i.e., of the scientific development (exagesis) of the problem area, is not yet known at the beginning of the investigation. The beginning of the exposition and the beginning of the investigation are two different things. The beginning of the investigation is casual and arbitrary, while the beginning of the exposition is necessary.

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THE MARXISM OF WILHELM REICH OR THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF SEXUAL REPRESSION by Bertell Ollman

The chief importance of libido theory is that it serves as the central organizing principle in Freud’s treatment of sexual repression and the resulting neuroses. The given is sexual energy that is forever pressing for release. Sometimes the pressure is great, sometimes meager. Relations with parents, siblings, friends, teachers and others provide the objects and opportunities for gratification. They are also the instruments of social repression. Repression takes place in all the ways human beings fashion and enforce the command “don’t.” The immediate effects are a blocked libido and the creation of a repressive force, or conscience, within the individual him or herself. As pressure from the libido builds up, alternative means of gratification make their appearance. Generally these are permitted by the individual and society only insofar as their real sexual character is disguised. When these alternative means of gratification make it difficult for the individual to function effectively or comfortably in the given surroundings, they become symptoms of neurosis.
Freud distinguished between two kinds of neurosis, actual neurosis and psychoneurosis. The former includes anxiety neurosis and neurasthenia, and is attributed to current disturbances in one’s sexual life. These are simply the immediate results of dammed-up sexuality. Psychoneuroses, on the other hand, such as hysteria and compulsion neurosis, have a psychic content, primarily the patient’s fantasies and fears. To be sure, these ideas generally revolve around real or imagined sexual experiences, but their relation to the patient’s present sexuality is unclear. Freud, whose clinical practice was almost entirely restricted to cases of psychoneurosis, suggested that every psychoneurosis has an “actual neurotic core,” but he never made explicit what it is.
Reich does. He claims that the actual neurotic core Freud spoke of is dammed-up sexual energy, and that it provides the motor force in every psychoneurosis. The psychoneurosis retains its psychic content, but these ideas become troublesome only in the presence of sexual blockage or stasis. It follows that the inner conflict loses its strength when the sexual block is eliminated.

The barriers to orgiastic potency that Reich sees are of three sorts: psychic, physical, and social. Psychically, they lie in the patient’s moralistic beliefs and neurotic fantasies and fears, in which considerable sexual energy is invested. Physically, they exist in the bodily attitudes, in the stiffness and awkwardness assumed in self-repression in order to withstand energy breakthroughs. These psychic and physical restrictions interact, and they were incorporated by Reich into the notion of character structure (of which more later). Socially, the barriers to orgiastic potency are not only the repressive conditions that brought about the original stasis, but also the conditions that make it so difficult to achieve a satisfactory love life in the present. The most important of these are the institutions of monogamous marriage and the double standard applied to premarital intercourse.

Reich’s other main contribution to psychoanalysis, besides the orgasm theory, is his theory of character structure. Reich understands character structure as the internalized pattern of behavior that each person brings to his daily tasks, as organized habit; it “represents the specific way of being of an individual” and is “an expression of his total past.”15 In character structure, the typical reaction has become an automatic one. With this theoretical innovation, the transformation of the whole character replaced symptom relief as the goal of Reich’s therapy.

For Reich, character structure has its origins in the conflicts of the Oedipal period as ways of responding to external pressures and threats. Both its form and strength reflect the kind of repression which the individual was subjected to at this time. The motive for developing such a structure is conscious or unconscious fear of punishment. Consequently, Reich refers to character structure as a “narcissistic protection mechanism” and says it is composed of “attitudes of avoidance.”16 By acting as parents want, or hiding what one does, or steeling oneself for a spanking, or any combination of these, the child transforms his spontaneity into character structure. Similar responses to teachers, priests, and others as the child grows reinforce and sometimes modify the pattern.
While protection against the outside world is the chief objective in the formation of character structure, this is not its main function in the adult individual. One’s intellect and muscular structure as well as various social institutions protect him/her against external dangers. After maturation, it is mainly against internal dangers, against unruly impulses, that character mechanisms guard. In this case, character structure blocks the impulse and redirects its energy, acting both as suppressing agent and controller of the resulting anxiety. The energy that goes into the formation and maintenance of character structure also reduces the degree of repression needed by reducing the force of the drives to be repressed. Again, because of the energy expended in its maintenance, character structure serves as a means of reducing the tension that has built up as a result of its own operation.
Achieving impulse control in this manner has serious side effects on a person’s overall motility and sensibility. According to Reich, it makes “an orderly sexual life and a full sexual experience impossible.”17 The inhibition and fears, the tense and awkward mannerisms, the stiffness and the deadness, all the manifestations of character structure work against the capacity to surrender in the sexual act and, thus, limit the degree of discharge attained in orgasm. Character structure also deadens people sufficiently for them to do the boring, mechanical work that is the lot of most people in capitalist society.18 The same dulling insulates people from outside stimuli, reducing the impact on them of further education and of life itself. Finally, the increased sexual stasis that results from damming up the libido is responsible for reaction formations, such as the development of an ascetic ideology, which in turn increases the stasis.

According to Reich, “every social order creates those character forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling class secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of society. But it is not merely a matter of imposing ideologies, attitudes, and concepts on the members of society. Rather, it is a matter of a deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic structure that corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the population.”22 Reich’s concern here is with the widespread respect for private property and established authority, and with the dullness and irrationality that make it so difficult for people in all classes to recognize and act upon their interests. The problem, as he says in one place, is not why hungry people steal, but why they don’t.23

Reich himself believed that with the notion of character structure he “bridged the gap” between social conditions and ideology in Marx’s system.24 It was now possible to supplement Marx’s explanation of why people are driven to recognize their interests with an explanation of why, even in the most favorable conditions, they generally don’t do so. This paradox is represented in Marx’s writings by the tension between the theory of class consciousness and the theory of alienation. The tension remains unresolved, so that Marx never accounts for the workers’ inability to attain class consciousness by referring to their alienation, nor qualifies their alienation with a reference to their skill in “calculating advantages.”25 Though Reich does not seem to have been very familiar with Marx’s theory of alienation (The German Ideology and 1844 Manuscripts first became available in 1929 and 1932 respectively), his concept of character structure can be viewed as bringing elements of this theory into the discussion of class consciousness.26