Subjectivity

I think subjectivity is largely misunderstood and is slowly becoming a lost art because of it. Objectivity is a more science-y way of thinking, and it’s more conducive to today’s agendas of fairness and equality, so our culture is all about it – just eats it up. Schools and universities push it dogmatically, this superiority of empiricism and passionlessness, especially in STEM subjects but increasingly in the humanities, and then of course, they barrage students with their own subjective truths. The media is the same way, claiming objectivity and then broadcasting their own agendas and biases. Subjectivity is considered less than, an inferior way of thinking. It is a victim of our culture’s current agenda, which is pretty ironic when you think about it. While at the same time, the subjective is secretly embedded in nearly every message we receive throughout the course of a day.

Most people, even dictionaries define subjectivity as sort of tainted by personal agendas or biases or feelings and objectivity as free of personal agendas and biases and feelings. This isn’t necessarily an incorrect definition, but I believe it is incomplete and a bit misleading. Think of subjectivity as the subject of a sentence – the one who does the action or is the observer. The subject is an incredibly important element of any sentence, one could argue the most important element of a sentence, and if you ignore it, then you have a disastrously incomplete understanding of its meaning. The odd but brilliant, German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, even referred to humans as subjects in some of his work to highlight the role of subjective thinking and the moral rights and responsibilities we have as actors and observers in the world. And there are times for objectivity, no doubt. Times when objectivity is absolutely necessary. But I believe that subjectivity is a better default setting…or at the very least equal to objectivity.

Thinking objectively or empirically means that you focus solely on the object, and ignore any and all feelings that you (the subject) have toward it. There are quite a few scholars who would argue that it is impossible not to look at the object through the lens of your own feelings and biases. That idea seems to be one of the core principles of postmodernism. And yet objectivity is still constantly being positioned as the superior way of viewing the world. Kant even believed that it is impossible to actually see the object as it really is. He argued that there is a sort of curtain between us and the physical world, which he called the noumenon, or the thing in itself. This curtain, which he called the phenomenon, is what we perceive when we think we’re perceiving the object. The phenomenon is what the object looks like and sounds like to us when we observe it, but that’s not the thing itself. So there really is no objectivity. Subjectivity is all there is. Meaning is only created in our minds. It’s not about what is. It’s about the way we process our perceptions and emotions. And that’s why some people love the taste of tomatoes and some people hate them. They are not tasting the same thing. They’re not tasting the tomato itself, they’re tasting their own unique construct of a tomato in their own minds.

And there is scientific evidence for this as well. Our brains are miraculous machines. We feel or believe that we see the world sort of like a video camera sees the world, that an image enters our eyes, our brain processes the image, and then we perceive the image in our minds. But this isn't exactly the mechanics of it, at least according to our current understanding of neuroscience. And the video camera analogy does break down when you think about it, because if someone walks with a video camera, the image comes our all shaky, but that doesn't happen in our minds when we walk. That's because the mind is constantly creating a fictionalized image or projection of what it is expecting to see. As the information comes into the brain through the eyes, your mind just uses the new data to correct any errors in the projection. And it's the same with taste. When you taste a tomato, your mind has already constructed an expectation. When the tomato hits your taste buds, your mind adjusts the sensation using the incoming data. But your brain will process data differently than my brain, so even our senses aren't objective. They're subjective. So there really is no way for interact objectively with the world.

Postmodernism seems to come to a similar conclusion in a different way, at least from what I remember of my Lit Theory classes in Grad School. Postmodernists believe that meaning in your mind is constructed socially by the clashing of broadcasted messages and stimuli that are all constantly vying for power in your mind. Your own personal view of the world is constructed over time by the messages and discourses, which power groups in our society broadcast, that have the most power in your own life. So there’s no objective truth about anything, because truth is negotiated in everyone’s mind by the competing discourses that hold influence.

In his autobiography, Chronicles, Bob Dylan talks about his songwriting process. He says that if he is going to write about a chair, he’s not going to write about the chair itself. That would be pointless and boring. He’s going to write about his feelings toward the chair. That’s what is human and interesting. And I think that all good art is about the subjective, not the objective. The beauty of a song is not in the notes that are being played but in the way those notes make the listener feel. So subjectivity is crucial for creating art, but I think you can also extract from that fact the idea that subjectivity is crucial for the effective communication of anything. You know, words are just symbols for things as we perceive them, but when you speak them or write them, they become things in the world, which then have to be interpreted by your audience in the same way everything else in the world is interpreted. To communicate effectively, you have to consider how the words themselves and the things themselves that you are talking about make you feel. And you have to consider how you desire to make your audience feel. Then you choose words and concepts that you believe will make your audience feel that way. Even if you’re simply giving someone directions, you have to put yourself in their shoes. You have to think of your listener as a subject, meaning that you and your listener are like one person. What details should you include to help them navigate from here to there? In order to do that, you have to consider what details you would want to have to help you navigate, so you have to think about yourself as a subject. The objects themselves are less important.

Ok. And then what about God? If you choose to see the world objectively, then you have very little to say about God. For my money, this alone makes objectivity an inferior way of seeing the world. And I believe that the late, great, Danish Theologian and Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard agrees with me. He said that, “subjectivity is truth and truth is subjectivity.” He believed that reason, science, and objectivity can only take you to a certain point and that true joy and passion and meaning lie beyond that point. And so you have to make what he called a Leap of Faith in order to enjoy life to the fullest. One of his arguments about the importance of the subjective reflects Bob Dylan’s idea of the chair. He said, basically, that if you look only at the object then your understanding of the truth of that object is incomplete. You can only know the truth of the object if you also consider how you relate to the object, interact with it, feel toward it. That’s why he said that truth is subjectivity, because truth equals the object itself plus your relationship to the object. No one else’s relationship to that object has any bearing on your truth about it, so truth is subjectivity. Your subjective Truth is what matters!

Another note on subjectivity that I think is interesting. Since my wife and I had a baby 6 months ago, I’ve been reading up on developmental psychology to try and help our son navigate through the gaps and spaces and transitions of childhood. And I don’t remember where I read this, but there is a school of thought within developmental psychology that posits that when you’re born, you believe that you are the whole universe. You and the universe are the same. The ball is the part of you that rolls on the floor. The rattle is the part of you that makes a funny noise. Daddy is the part of you that makes funny faces and changes your diaper. Mommy is the part of you that feeds you and makes you feel loved and so on. One of the first stages of development is differentiation, where you have to determine what in the world is you and what is not you. Sometimes, I’ll notice my son staring at his hands in wonder, and I think maybe he’s differentiating – are these part of me? The hardest thing for you to differentiate from is your mother, and if you struggle with that transition, then it can have lasting consequences on into your adulthood.

Anyway, I bring this up to say that at one point in your life, subjectivity and objectivity were the same. Over time, you’ve been able to differentiate the two. But it’s possible that it is a more accurate view of how reality actually is and that our minds have constructed this differentiation process just to help us navigate through the world. We can’t control a tree or a rock the same way we can control our own fingers, so we have to believe that we are separate from those objects in order to learn how to move through the world. I don’t know. Who knows? But it’s an interesting idea anyway.

There’s real beauty in subjectivity, and there’s power in discovering deeper and deeper parts of yourself. And it's really embedded in everything. We just need to make ourselves aware of it. And I think, you know, that’s where the truth lies -- in the subjective. It’s not out there in the objective world. It’s in the thoughts, processes, emotions, creativity, discipline, etc that we use to make our way through this world, to build our identities, and to discover our place and purpose in all this chaos – to live our best life and be our best selves.