Objectivity and the Inhuman

At first glance, the nature of objectivity looks straightforward. Objectivity is the opposite of subjectivity, at least, and taking a subjective view of something means imposing idiosyncratic, personal, or somehow noncognitive elements onto the thing itself. So a subjective representation of a dog, say, would be something like an artistic or otherwise biased statement that expresses how the speaker feels about dogs rather than how dogs really are, regardless of anyone’s attitude towards the animal.

But the philosopher Immanuel Kant showed that this intuitive distinction is incoherent, because even the most so-called unbiased or neutral representation of something requires some cognitive processing which stands apart from the represented thing itself. All we can know or understand is the “phenomenon,” Kant said, the thing as it appears to a creature with our human modes of conceptualization, not the thing as it is independent of any human or nonhuman form of understanding. Indeed, as Kant pointed out, even to speak of the “noumenon,” of how a dog would be even if there were no one else to perceive the dog or to construe the dog’s nature is empty. Perception, understanding, and knowledge all presuppose a mental format brought to the matter by the subject. All cognition, then, has a subjective element. Kant differed from metaphysical idealists such as Berkeley, in denying that knowledge is purely subjective. The nonsubjective part of the world contributes something to the content of our experience. But instead of thinking of objectivity as the absence of subjectivity, Kant argued we should reformulate that distinction as one between the universal and the idiosyncratic. The objective elements of experience are the universal, “transcendental” ones that speak to our human cognitive conditions, those that Kant considered the structures of our mind as far as epistemology is concerned.

Emotions of Objectivity

However, I don’t think this is all there is to objectivity because, contrary to Kant, our conception of the thing in-itself isn’t empty. Where Kant has it right, I think, is in inferring that the more parochial our analysis, the more it speaks only to phenomena, to how things seem subjectively to us. Concepts formulated in natural languages, in particular, are largely metaphorical and anthropocentric. For example, the concept of “objects” itself derives from the Latin word, objectus, which means thrown down towards or thrown down in opposition. Natural things aren’t literally thrown down by any hand, so that initial conception must be analogical or archaic. Presumably, the general idea would be that it’s as if things-as-objects were thrown down before us, because their objective element is that which we have no choice but to address. To have something literally thrown at you is to be forced to deal with it or to have the thing imposed on your perceptual field.

Interestingly, “ob” in “objectus” can mean towards but it can also mean against, as in the Latin root of “oppose.” However, this speaks not to an early cosmicist intuition, but to the role of objectivity in the social practice of disputation. The objective evidence was thrown down not against the initial observer, but an opponent in an argument, so the paradigmatic case of objectivity would be that deployed by the lawyer at trial who dramatically slams the exculpatory piece of evidence on the table before the astonished jury and opposing counsel. Either way, then, objectivity was initially conceived in the West as part of human behaviour, as something done in social interaction, not as whatever speaks more to the nonhuman side of experience, to things as they are independent of how we’re built to think of them.

To return, though, to the criticism of Kant, the point is that if we have in mind anything like that Latin, anthropocentric conception when we claim we’re being objective in thinking of X, we’re likely dealing only with the makings of a phenomenon in Kant’s sense. To get at a more universal, transcultural cognitive element, we’d have to analyze further that practice of throwing down X, to find a more general feature. Notice that such an analysis needn’t be restricted to issues of semantics, categorization, and logic. As phenomenologists have subsequently shown, how things seem to us includes an emotional component which may likewise be idiosyncratic or universal. The real question of objectivity, then, is whether being objective in capturing the noumenon could coherently amount to being indifferent or passive in forming the representation. Kant’s point would be that the notion of any such attempt is incoherent. To form a mental representation is to impose some structure onto the perceived or known thing; otherwise, you’d have just the thing itself, not any cognitive act or representation. Laying aside any such claim to neutrality, though, there’s still the potential for recognizing something’s objective significance with the fitting emotional response. Here we’re talking not about the semantic meaning of arid concepts, but a universal value-laden meaning. 

Thomas Nagel put his finger on these deeper, existential issues of objectivity, in The View from Nowhere. There he points out that objectivity involves abstracting our attention from our personal habits and assumptions, to enter a metalevel of attending to how things are, given that those habits and assumptions are largely insignificant outside our inner, subjective perspective or worldview. Subjectivity is how things seem to us when we’re being ourselves, whereas objectivity requires that we detach from our personality, to take on the wider world’s indifference towards us in our imagining how things would be and would go well enough without us. As Nagel makes clear, this kind of objectivity as the simulation of detachment quickly leads to existential problems of alienation. When we look at the world objectively, by realizing that our personal interests are mostly irrelevant to how other things really are, we discover that we matter mainly to ourselves and to a handful of fellow persons. What follows from that realization isn’t so much a set of esoteric truths about the nature of reality, but an unpleasant sense that we’re castles built on sand. What follows, that is, is the barrage of negative emotional reactions that are central to the philosophies of existentialism, including the reactions of awe, dread, angst, terror, and horror.

For example, to be objective towards a dog isn’t just to recognize the universal features of doghood, by way of conceptual analysis. Instead, objectivity includes the attempt to feel repulsed by the inhuman element in how something comes to be what it is. So in the case of dogs, the objective recognition would involve an appreciation for the history of how dogs were once wild and entered a symbiotic relation with humans, whereupon we domesticated and bred the animals that we call “dogs.” Objectively, we formed that master-slave relationship for evolutionary reasons. Millennia ago, our ancestors used the dog’s olfactory superiority as an early-warning system, and the wolves used us to feed them. The more pertinent point, though, is that the grounds for that relationship had to do with evolution’s impersonality and indifference. Species evolve with different strengths and weaknesses, because natural selection is unguided and partly accidental. Objectively, then, a more intelligent and ruthless species might come along and enslave us as we’ve “domesticated” numerous animal species. So to ask for an objective mindset towards dogs is to ask for some recognition of the most inhuman conditions of something’s nature, development, or relationships; moreover, we indicate that we’ve grasped those conditions by exhibiting the existential signs, when we suffer from the emotional impact. In short, to be objective is to destroy ourselves, since the impact in question is the negating of our preferred interests and attitudes. If you like dogs, objectivity amounts to a counterweight: the objective/inhuman thing to notice about your love of dogs is that most of the world—perhaps even the dog itself—is indifferent towards that appraisal.

That part of our mindset and worldview that matters only to us and to each other is their most subjective part. If that’s so, however, a critical question arises: How could the upsetting existential reactions be more objective than the mundane ones? Doesn’t the world at large care just as little about our alienation, awe, and horror as it does about our personal tastes, since that world’s inhumanity lies in its equal indifference towards everything? But follow the preceding logic to notice that the forgoing difference between objectivity and subjectivity is informational. Objectivity is a widening of scope which causes the negative existential reaction. That reaction therefore carries the meaning of the world’s inhumanity, whereas our mundane interests testify, rather, to how we’ve developed as individuals. We prove we’re being objective in showing emotionally we recognize that we count for little as subjects and that persons and living things generally are unloved accidents on the whole. That emotional or so-called “noncognitive” proof demonstrates not just that we’ve entered Nagel’s view from nowhere, but that we’ve been infected, as it were, by the world as it really is. Awe, alienation, dread, terror, and horror are signs of the real world’s presence in otherwise largely self-interested or narrow-minded human affairs.

Aesthetics of Objectivity

Notice, further, that that emotional side of objectivity is prominent in religious experiences and in the appreciation of art. The existential reaction to reality, which is our self-directed depersonalization, is aesthetic since what we experience fundamentally is some ugliness, an incongruity, a gross mismatch between what there is and what we’d prefer. We prefer to be ourselves, which is why we’re often quick to forget our moments of objectivity and alienation, to enjoy our life while we can. We’re objective when we depart from ourselves to view the world from an unsettling counterfactual standpoint in our imagination: we entertain the question of how something would have been if we’d never been born or if life generally had never emerged, and we entertain such questions because the world’s indifference forces that inhumanity onto us, assuming we’re interested in learning the objective facts.

So, for example, to recognize the objective facts pertaining to dogs, presented above, entails disgust towards natural selection. I hasten to remind the reader there’s no use protesting that we should rather be grateful to the natural processes that created life on this planet. The upshot of behavioural modernity, beginning some forty thousand years ago, is the collective application of disgust in our endeavour to improve on nature, to artificialize the world by way of realizing how the world should have been. If you’re grateful rather than disgusted towards nature, that is, towards the wilderness, be quick to destroy the computer or pages you’re reading this on, strip and surrender all your worldly possessions, and return to the wild to attempt to survive as a savage. Still here with computer or book in hand? That means you accept the wisdom of promethean (satanic, which is to say antinatural) progress.

In any case, in so far as the disgust on which human “progressive” creativity is premised is an aesthetic reaction, objectivity amounts to treating the world as (bad) art. Part of the badness of this art is precisely its naturalness, its lack of intelligent design or direction, but this would be an ethical rather than an aesthetic assessment. The badness here would lie in nature’s trickery, in its simulation of benevolent creativity which gave rise to the world’s religions and to untold suffering as a result of that illusion. This ethical badness of nature is only metaphorical, of course, since there’s no one responsible for the apparent trickery, and so the ethical condemnation of the world is negated by the aesthetic one. The aesthetic badness, again, consists of the more general disharmony between the facts and how things typically seem. The facts are the more or less inhuman elements of events, whereas the appearances are the often flattering illusions required for “healthy” mental or social functioning. Naïve self-esteem and happiness, for example, are impossible from the objective standpoint, since objectivity accommodates us to the absurdity of our existential situation. The more objective you are, the more alienated you must be from yourself; that is, the more detached the imagined inhuman, psychopathic, or objective version of you must be from the subjective, socially-adjusted version of you.

But what I’m suggesting is that that alienation is like the disappointment Dorothy feels when she sees the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Nature seems at first like the product of a divine, wise, and benevolent creator. In reality there’s no such creator, so behind the curtain of nature isn’t even a fellow, troubled mortal, but some inhuman X responsible for turning quantum chaos or plenitude into the natural order. That inhuman cause is colossally creative, so the aesthetic appraisal of nature is hardly absurd, although natural creations obviously differ from human art since only the latter is a work of intelligence. There’s just no reason why beauty and ugliness should be properties only of art in the strict, cultural sense rather than applying to creations in general. And when aesthetic judgment is applied to nature in objectivity, the honest, informed emotional reaction is negative. We judge that nature has betrayed us, as it were, because of the inhumanity of its creations; thus are we obsessed with building a better world, the so-called heavenly kingdom of God on Earth.

Let’s compare the two kinds of aesthetic reactions. According to the dictionary, aesthetics is “the branch of philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments.” When we encounter a painting, for example, we respond aesthetically by paying attention to the work’s intrinsic features that make for its beauty and that inspire us as viewers. The fine arts feature objects or performances that are intended to be appreciated for their aesthetic value. We’re meant to be disinterested towards them, as Kant theorized, to use the objective stance towards them for the purpose of pleasing ourselves in the presence of their beauty. To look at the painting with crass self-interest would involve attending only to how much money the painting is worth and whether you could afford to buy it. Aesthetic self-interest would require attending to the painting’s intrinsic features, to see the artwork for what it really is—not, though, in an attempt to be neutral towards the painting, but to allow the painting to provoke in you some transformative feeling, such as a feeling of the painting’s beauty or an appreciation of how the work’s message challenges certain conventional assumptions.

From the short film "Sundays"

Nature isn’t art in that strict sense, since natural products aren’t intended to illicit any such response. Nevertheless, they do so illicit them, and that’s because we can consider nature with the same disinterest as we can a painting or a song or a novel. There should be little surprise that strict artworks that are intended to please the observer tend to provoke just such a positive reaction, whereas natural products of no intelligent design provoke mixed reactions, at best. Nature’s creations, including entire planets and galaxies are awesome and often beautiful, especially if we confine our attention to their intrinsic properties. As the recent photographs of Jupiter indicate, for example, the colourful swirls on that planet’s surface are beautiful and awe-inspiring. The same can be said if you look closely at virtually any product of nature, from a leaf to a beetle to a sunset. When we detach from our personal preoccupations and perceive things as they are, just in terms of their apparent features, we can readily treat them as if they were artworks in the strict sense, just as even evolutionary biologists can treat organisms as if they were intelligently designed.

The negative aesthetic judgment against nature falls into place, though, as we exit that quasi-aesthetic stance towards nature and return to our full subjective standpoint. Whereas strict artworks such as movies and poems are usually meant to uplift the viewer somehow, even if only to serve as warnings to encourage corrective action, as in the case of dystopian narratives, the beauty of natural creations has the opposite philosophical implications. There’s so much beauty in the universe because the universe is astronomically huge and thus wasn’t meant for us, and because the universe has so much more going on than we can imagine, that life’s emergence must be incidental and thus comically insecure. When we understand that mismatch, we can’t be so easily charmed by nature’s surface beauty. The pleasing appearance of Jupiter is tainted by the disgust provoked by the realization that nature’s beauty is a poison pill: Jupiter’s beauty is the result of the alien (headless) process that created the solar system and that’s wholly indifferent to living things.

Clearly, this disgust towards nature depends on scientific knowledge of the facts, which in turn is based on another kind of objectivity. Scientists, as such, detach from their personal biases by following the rules of the institutions of science, such as by testing their hypotheses and following the evidence where it leads. But in so far as science is entangled with the larger project of instrumentalism, of exploiting knowledge to improve earthly living standards, science depends also on the above values of objectivity, that is, on disgust with nature’s inhumanity. We’re so quick to apply scientific understanding in the forms of technology and commerce, because we want a better world than that which living things generally are given. The more we investigate the natures of matter and of how natural mechanisms and forces work, the deeper our understanding of nature’s impersonality, and thus the more profound our emotional recoil. That recoil spurs the enterprise of our artificialization of nature. To eliminate the source of our horror for nature’s mindlessness, we humanize the wilderness by replacing the natural with the artificial, by injecting intelligently-designed purposes and functions into natural systems. There’s hardly any guarantee that this effort can be sustained on a long-term basis, geologically speaking, since we may succeed only in destroying ourselves as the planet reacts harshly in turn to our defenses. Regardless, this is the heart of objectivity—not just neutrality or indifference, but shock and contempt as we learn about what the world really is and isn’t, as well as a plan to correct systematically for the deficits.