If you think about it, most of the words we use to talk about subjectivity have the character of being situated in some particular situation. Our personalities are described in terms of dispositions, attitudes, orientations, understandings, perspectives, and points-of-view and stances on various topics (from Greek topos, ‘place’).

Subjectivity has a locative relationship of in, and the word “in” is very frequently used to describe subjective states. We are “in love” or “in a mood” or “in turmoil” or “in a bad place”.

In a subjective relationship, there is no distance between knower and known: the relationship is between whole and an involved part of that whole. The knower participates (takes the relationship of a part within a whole) in what is known. Even the act of knowing falls inside what is to be known. The understander and the understood change one another in the act of understanding, in a feedback loop *.

An objective relationship is fundamentally different. Objectivity is characterized by distance (dis– ‘apart’ + stare ‘stand.’) between knower and known. The knower knows what is known from a distance and is not affected and does not affect what is known.

*

When we think about subjectivity as something that is in our head, and our head as something that is in space that ultimately contains it, we “objectify” subjectivity and deprive subjectivity of what it essentially is. Subjectivity is not shaped like any object, it actually shapes the objects within it and puts them into meaningful relationship. Subjectivity has the shape of the entire world, and it concentrates itself precisely in that part of the world that is relevant and significant to us as we think objectively.

Objectivity and subjectivity are not side-by-side opposites. There is no distance between subjectivity and objectivity. Objectivity stands inside subjectivity, and is a product of subjectivity. But that does not make objectivity “merely subjective”. Much of the apparent irrationality and arbitrariness of subjectivity is a product of its being misframed in objective terms. Logic still holds, because logic is subjectivity itself, following its own laws of thought.

*

Part of the reason we prefer to think objectively is that it is much more natural. It is relatively easy to comprehend an object. We can “wrap our minds around it”.

But subjectivity is a kind of being that not only wraps itself around us, but is in part, actually who we are — perplexes us, fills us with a sort of dread that we find difficult to live with.

Is it any wonder that when we think about the universe, or our own planet, our culture, a marriage, a friendship, a conversation, or even a garden — these things that exceed and envelope but include us — we almost reflexively remove ourselves and view them as something set apart? But in doing this, we expel ourselves from who we really are. We self-alienate in order to feel a godlike comprehensive comprehension of all-that-is.

To “know” subjectivity we need to know a more humble intellectual relationship. We must orient ourselves within it, relate out to it, and give over to its involving superiority over and within us.

*

Interhuman relationships are not essentially objective. Not only is every Other ultimately mysterious to us — our own relationship with the Other reveals things about who we are that would otherwise remain unknown. When we gather in mutual understanding, we participate in a third and greater kind of being present who moves us as the conversation has itself through us, and we are more ourselves than when we were alone.

*

In one sense a seed grows and becomes a tree. In another sense, a bit of garden, a seed, organizes more and more of itself into a tree.

—-

* NOTE on feedback loops: A student of chaos theory may recognize that this implies that a subjective understanding, being nonlinear, is radically unpredictable. The outcome of even the simplest mathematical nonlinear processes, despite proceeding in a perfectly ordered and inevitable way, cannot be predicted. In a nonlinear process the only way to know what will happen is to let it happen.