Pure objectivity culminates in the mastery of a subject.
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Subjectivity seems arbitrary to objective knowledge; two thousand years ago so did nature.
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Objective knowledge is a product of subjectivity.
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Objectivity is not the opposite of subjectivity, nor is it the ground of subjectivity. Objectivity is a disciplined subset of subjectivity, and that subset is deceptively, shockingly variable.
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If we all agreed on everything, we would have no concept of subjectivity, nor its antithesis, objectivity. The concept of objectivity was born of disagreement.
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We do not pursue mutual understanding when we believe we can evade or overpower the other.
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We’ve spent the last 300 years learning to reach agreement on matters of fact and forgetting how to reach agreement on matters of value.
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We’ve built up a great body of knowledge from the phenomenal ground of earth, but at the height of objective consensus, when it seems our objective knowledge might finally explain us to ourselves, we find we speak different moral languages and cannot understand one another because we do not want to understand one another. The differences are so violent that the methodological substructure of science is swaying and buckling, facts are being shaken loose and crashing back to the earth. The whole edifice of agreement threatens to collapse all the way to the liquid ground.
Maybe the sky would have been a more solid foundation?
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Just because the physical ground is a stable foundation for our physical feet, does it follow that physical reality is also the most stable ground for our knowledge?
We humans are so literal about everything.
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If everyone had refused to hear Galileo out, had not tried to see for themselves what he’d observed and how he interpreted his observations they’d never have seen the truth of his theories.
Galileo was believed, not because of the self-evident truth of his assertions, but because people cooperated with him, tried to see from his perspective and willingly reached synesis with him.
Without agreement on method, agreement on fact would have been impossible.
Why did some agree to participate in his method, where others did not?
Why do some people agree to participate in certain religious lines of thought or practice to see what kind of truth they offer, where others do not?
Why do some people prefer dialogue, where others prefer debate?
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It seems that what we see as valuable and relevant has a lot to do with what we choose to do. And what we do has a lot to do with what we learn to regard as true. And what we regard as true can change what we see as valuable and relevant, and subsequently what we choose to do…
Why -> How -> What -> Why…
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Objective knowledge is unjust to subjects.
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“Love as artifice. — Whoever wants really to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, or a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to avert his eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that he finds inimical, objectionable, or false. So, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start, and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new thing, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Once we have got that far, reason then sets its limits; that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, was just a device to entice the soul of a matter out into the open.” – Nietzsche
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Subjectivity nests inside objectivity as poorly as a garden nests inside a piece of fruit.
It is easier to think objectively, but who said truth is convenient?