Sunday, April 08, 2012

Objectivity in Science and Philosophy, not sufficient for a human society

Let me start out by saying that what I mean by Objectivity is quite different than what most people mean. It does not really refer to what they mean when they talk about being Objective. I mean Objectivity in the literal sense of looking at the world as pure object as opposed to taking into account the parts of experience present in the interior experience of subjects, of human beings. While Objective fact, looking at the world through a lens identifying the prime manifestation of the world as being cold and object oriented, has brought us great advances, it has disempowered human society by discounting the commonly held subjective features of life that create the context through which those objective facts obtain true meaning in relation to humanity. Human life has been dichotomized into an Objective realm outside of the individual, thought to be the realm of truth, and a subjective realm within the individual, thought to be the realm of pure arbitrariness, of things purely belonging to individual subject and their particular selves that can't be generalized to other people.

In reality, I feel that the subjective aspects of human experience bleed over into our experience, knowledge of, and interpretation of Objects and of Objective reality, both individually and socially.Science itself may be objective, but the human, anthropological, social experience wherein life is lived simultaneously combines the subjective and objective in both an individual and communal way. By privileging only the objective part of this inter-subjectivity, we disempower and discount the features of social life that come from things like community and association, friendship, that help to constitute the core foundations of our normal lives. The uniting of individuals with each other, who then unite with nature through work for common ends, constitutes the framework in which objective facts will always live.

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