Quotes about Subjectivity

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.

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.

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

The problems of human subjectivity replicate themselves at many different scales, like the overtones and undertones in a stringed instrument striking ghost-intervals up and down into infinity.  This is not Hegel's ingenuity, it is his responsiveness to the organic structure in us that echoes itself throughout the whole architecture.

Punctuation is a function of subjective interpretation. One man's exclamation mark is another man's ellipsis.

The 'subject' is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.

Truth is verifiable only by identity with it and not by knowing about it.