Quotes about Objectivity

Values by their very nature tend to seed differences and oppositions, i.e. to make it possible for us to detect and appreciate the various perspectives from which issues may be seen; even though we (by a profound self-misconception) may find this psychologically and socially unpleasant, for the sake of value-intelligence we must learn to live and to thrive AMIDST such polemics, "in medias res," in utmost self-uncertainty and insecurity. Values, also by their inherent character and natural function, tend to form hierarchies; and even though our egos and appetites and illusions and delusions may resent being afflicted with judgments of rank and superiority/inferiority, again for the sake of connoisseurial and wisdom-seeking value-intelligence we have to stretch and traumatize our minds aristically to understand the rationality and objectivity of such intrinsic hierarchicalism, valid and authoritative over and beyond all that we may have cultivated as our idiosyncratic and subjectivist preferences (idiotia). Aristeia is naturally ingrained in the very nature of values; values are naturally ingrained in the very character and laws of nature.

Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite.

As Schiller understood in his Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, man is a creature in whom the "accidents" are truly essential; it is essentially wrong to make an abstract and absolute divorce of essence and accidents in the case of human beings. The business of man, as Hegel phrased it, is to live as a "concrete universal," a living concept who is constantly taking up the particles of life into his organismic wholeness, giving an encompassing meaning to the crazed details of our Babel of objectivity. That we participate in the power or action or genius of the infinite is demonstrated by our constant mediation between phenomena and principles, particulars and universal laws, finite and infinite. We transfigure all that is inert and opaque with the radiance of an ever-living sense of essentiality, of a "concentricity" that is and is-not our own selves.

In most mentalities language is just fashionable or banal clothing (rarely finery) that obscures the evidence of natural and human reality; it is a programmatic form of mutual or collective self-deception, a grand conspiracy of untruth or denial.  Language is a mere tool of mere banausic or utilitarian mentalities, for the most part, who are perfectly closed upon themselves.  A fulfilled mind is (as Hegel saw) an infinity-generator, open to its own incalculable richness; and it is so self-possessed that it understands the workings of its own expressive liabilities, and can parry these temptations and set them aside to see things more scrupulously.  What passes for objectivity is for the most part an absurdity, a noxious faith that holds people in the webbing of orthodoxy.  No one escapes his own gravity-traps of subjective self without prodigious philosophical energies.

It's quite easy to imagine one grasps the essential outlines of an issue once one has cleared away all the emotional and moral turbulence that interfere with thinking about it--but in those greenhouse-conditions one is not truly thinking about reality as it actually is. Modern "academic" or "scholarly" philosophy is the victim of the delusionality of "scientism" or "objectivity," of thinking supposing that the controversiality or polemicality of our lives can be effectively purged out of things. We can cosmeticize it, depress its strife and tension with a facade of pseudo-neutralized terms; but even the most meager forms of insight suffice to reveal that this objectivity is mere facade. Modern culture is becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of sophisticated relativism, a mentality that hasn't got a clue what to do about perspectival variations and rationalizations from one mind to another. If there isn't a consensual community about what is right or good, then bourgeois society can only seek forms of mediation or compromise or count the votes of its countless subrational idiots. To wrestle with fundamental norms and principles is not something intellectually respectable among bourgeois minds, any more than it is to make public and direct value-judgments about someone else's thinking. By default we sink into a morass of incommensurable and pathetic views.

Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him

For those familiar with the officially acknowledged applications of Einstein’s theories of Relativity, it should be easy to see how the mere existence of particles that move faster than light and/or communicate telepathically through an aetheric medium begins to unravel an entire paradigm for understanding the physical universe.  On the subject of the “Crumbling of Certainty” in the wake of such logic-challenging discoveries in quantum physics, Charles Eisenstein writes, “The whole idea of certainty of knowledge, built through objective reasoning, is only as sound as the objectivity at its basis. Question that, and we question the soundness of the entire edifice of experimentally-derived knowledge” on which our current sciences, and the worldview connected to them, depend.

So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first
persons -- and a lot of magazine first persons too -- are written in
the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They're the voice of the
Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody
cares about journalists. They're not normal people. So choose a first
person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think
about which one will help you tell the story. You'll see that in very
subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock
interesting things.

The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).