Treating social quality as an entity is an arbitrary hypostasis in idealism and religion

Evidence

Idealism, on the other hand, hypostasises this mysterious something else known as quality, it makes it into an entity of its own, “spirit”, just as religion had done with the idea of divinity. But if the notion of quality is a hypostasis in religious thought and in idealism, that is to say an arbitrary abstraction rather than a process of analytical distinction necessary for explanatory purposes, then the same is true in the case of vulgar materialism, which “divinises” a hypostasis of matter. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1656

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines hypostasis as arbitrary abstraction replacing necessary analytical distinction, a key methodological term.
• XREF: The hypostasis critique previews how later critical theory will name the reification of ‘civilization’ or ‘culture’ in Orientalist writing — a move that matters for critiquing manufactured cultural essences. — connects to: Spurious universal entities are produced by unrepresentative social institutions — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 733