Objectivity
YOU'VE HEARD the old joke--the world has two kinds of people: those who divide things into two groups, and those who don't. Well, that's how this starts.
The world has two kinds of things: those that exist because we think them or talk of them, and those that would exist anyway. Rocks and trees would still be if we ignored them, or even if all humans died (solipsists may please now exit quietly). We call such things objective, that is, being like an object. But marriage, greed, comfort, debt and credit, mortgages, political disputes, social castes, national boundaries, and philosophical distinctions such as this one--all these exist only because conscious observers have developed the word or concept, and talk about them in various ways. They are subjective.
One truly interesting question of philosophy is whether these two groups are completely distinct, with a sharp line between, or if they blend into each other. In the philosophy biz, that's to ask if it is a dichotomy or a continuum. I used to think of it as a dichotomy. Now I regard it as more of a continuum. For example, one may well argue that "five" (the abstract quantity, fiveness) exists apart from us--even if humans had never evolved, you could still have five rocks in a field--and perhaps this extends to fractions and even irrational numbers; but when you start to talk about negative numbers, complex numbers, hypercomplex numbers, infinitesimals, transfinites, matrices, vectors, multi-variable functions, tensors, fields, Galois groups, and the Mandelbrot set the compulsion to regard these as purely mental constructs is overwhelming. ("God made the integers" said old Leopold Kronecker, "all else is the work of man.") Yet study math and you'll find that the stretch between such highly abstract things and the simple notion of five is quite continuous. You don't get from one to the other in a big jump. You get there in gradations, by nudges, by shades-each step building inexorably on the previous. (And at least one good mathematician, Roger Penrose, does believe that the Mandelbrot set exists "all on its own")
A clever person could easily argue that debt and credit are also objective. Certainly an atom can become ionized, lose an electron, and thereby accrue an electrochemical debt; and certainly this can have serious physical consequences, which would exist even if humans had never evolved. This brings us to the threshold of another philosophical dispute, nominalism vs. realism; but for now, I don't want to go there.
So for sake of argument, it's a continuum, not a dichotomy. And the degree of objectivity we assign to something much depends on how we think of it. (Somebody call the solipsists back into the room.)
People have spilled much ink over how much objectivity we "should" assign to this concept or that. Where do we put God, for example--on the near end of the objectivity spectrum, along with rocks and trees, or further along, next to Nature, or the far end, with Mother Goose? And what about values such as beautiful, ugly, tasty, contemptible? To Platonists, Objectivists such as Ayn Rand, and some Christian thinkers like C.S. Lewis, these are objective qualifications, while most philosophers would insist they are only in our minds. Outside of us, in the world of whiling atoms and twinkling stars, the universe just doesn't care about such things.
Closely tied in to this is the question of moral objectivity. Are good vs. evil or right vs. wrong objective distinctions, or more subjective? I happen to believe they are objective, or at least they have a certain objective footing, regardless of what we think. And yet I also believe values are subjective. How do I manage that? By recognizing moral principles not as simple values, but meta-values--statements about values, and about relationships between them. For example: If you wish to live in a social context with other autonomous individuals, do thus-and-so, else your presence in that social context is likely to be cut short. That's not to say moral precepts don't often include conventions that are partly subjective--matters of fashion and culture, like dress codes or the rule about driving on the left side in England; but at their core is bedrock that stands on its own--abstract rules emerging from the interaction of individuals, much as Bernoulli's laws emerge from the interaction of molecules in a fluid or a gas--and are therefore quite as objective.
And so we can have objective statements about subjective things; the statement "John is angry" can be objectively true, though anger itself is subjective. (Have a headache yet? If not, you're a trooper.)
Another fascinating tie-in is the question of whether primary sensations, such as warmth or redness, are objective or subjective. If an object looks red, is it red in and of itself, or do our eyes or mind just see it that way? I am inclined to slide warmth or redness down toward the subjective end of the scale, simply because things change color in different kinds of light, some folks are colorblind, and different people can feel chilly or too warm in the same room (if you're married, you know just what I mean). But if, for example, you define redness as the tendency to absorb or reflect certain specific electromagnetic spectra, then yes, it is objective, or more so. Believe it or not, this was a highly vociferous debate in circles of philosophy just recently. (Now you know why philosophers are wet blankets at parties.)
What is objective? Abstruse conditions like rest mass, structure, moment of spin, chemical composition, electrical charge, position relative to other objects--aspects fairly difficult to determine. And at the cutting edge of science, where quantum physics starts to grade into metaphysics, you will even find scientists who argue that conditions such as time and position (locality) are also illusions, that is, subjective masks for deeper, more objective attributes it might take years of study to understand.
Face it: in our daily lives, we float in a sea of subjectivity. We must dive deep, deep below the surface to find the objective heart of things. And equipped with reasonable scuba gear, we may even get to see some of it bubble back up.
-Kenneth E. Nahigian has been a freethinker, humanist, and Bright for about thirty of his fifty-five years. He lives and works in Sacramento as a software developer and also serves as treasurer for Atheists and Other Freethinkers, the local AAI affiliate. Beyond that, he is part of a philosophical think-tank consisting of himself, four cats, and some shrubbery.
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