The problematic of the subjective-objective dichotomy in the quest for knowledge in my opinion needs to be wrestled with by every scholar, irrespective of the subject of their research projects. This is an issue I am still struggling with, and below, please find a short-version of the narrative that I am developing in my own search. Therefore, this is not only unfinished work, but also, unpolished and you can detect the rough edges and I am sure can be improved upon greatly. However, I am hoping that this narrative will serve as a background to the development of the debate on the role of the subjective and objective played in the construction of knowledge. Equally, I would like this narrative to be filled out, and corrections be made. It is still very much a cartoon that needs to be worked upon with rigour and thus invites inputs. This narrative has five sections: the first section deals with defining the problematic; the second lays the ground for this debate as explicated by the tussle between rationalism and empiricism. The third section explores the attempted reconciliation in the work of Kant and Hegel rather briefly while the fourth section deals with the reactions to Hegel in Nietzschean perspectivalism and Husserlian Phenomenology. And the final section deals with the present status of the debate which I argue is being lived within the Hermeneutical epoch and here I take the liberty of trying my hand at a bit of philosophizing and I hope you will pardon its simpleness.
1. The problematic of Epistemology
The subjective and objective when spoken of in terms of knowledge lies broadly within the domain of epistemology. Bridging the subjective and the objective has been a perennial philosophical problematic and on a lighter note, I think it will torment us for eternity. Different philosophical traditions have tried to deal with it a multitudinal of ways and one can find traces of this debate not just within the western philosophical tradition but other traditions such as the Indian philosophical traditions. I think there is a core problematic here that defies any easy solution. Put simply, the objective world that the self tries to describe and analyse is inclusive of the inquiring-self. Thus the inquiring-self is firmly located within the material and historical worlds that it tries to make sense of through natural or human sciences. Furthermore this inquiring-self is not a passive and non-active self; rather it is dynamic, active and becoming. Thus any definition of this inquiring-self will have to take into account its changing nature. But then how is it to be done?
2. Rationalism and Empiricism: Descartes and Hume
The modern development of epistemology was a key feature of the Renaissance (1500) with the rediscovery of the historical works of Sextus Empiricus (flourished 3rd century ce). Solving Empiricus’s scepticism became one of the intractable problems of modern European philosophy. Duignan shows clearly, how eventually, two broad approaches developed – ‘one influenced by Aristotle’s emphasis on empirical observation and Sir Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) conception of human knowledge as founded upon the proper application of scientific method; the other by the mathematical metaphysics of Pythagoras and Plato and the spectacular successes of mathematical physics in the 16th and 17th centuries.’ For the empiricists human knowledge is
a posteriori, or derived from experience while for the rationalists, human knowledge is primarily
a priori, or obtainable independently of experience. ‘The task of epistemology, therefore, is to justify knowledge claims either by showing how their elements (e.g., concepts) are connected to something real in the outside world(empiricism) or by showing how knowledge claims are ultimately inferable from a set of basic propositions that are innate or otherwise knowable by the mind alone (rationalism).’ The most important form of rationalism was that of Descartes who claimed that all human knowledge could be founded on
a priori propositions based on the self. He came up with a dualism which separated the self (
cogito) from the body and the world. The doubting and in our case the inquiring self becomes the firm and unchangeable foundation separated from the world around, whose mysteries it is able to unravel through a rational scientific (mathematical) inquiry. The major critique of rationalism came from the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume. Hume argued that since the connection between cause and effect is not possible, all scientific theories are rationally unfounded. This extreme sceptical empiricism of Hume took deep root in the Anglo-Saxon world leading to the dominance of empiricism and pragmatism in England and America respectively.
3. The Reconciliation: Kant and Hegel
However Hume woke Kant in Germany from his slumber. Kant tried to bridge rationalism and empiricism through his theory of transcendental categories. He argued that
a priori knowledge of the empirical world is possible because the structures of the empirical world are part of the structure of the mind itself. However, that the mind can only know what is presented to it in appearance and the thing-in-itself can never be known, only its appearance to the mind. So, in attempting to bridge the subject and the object, the rational and the empirical, Kant ended up creating an unbridgeable gap between the knowing self and the thing-in-itself of a magnitude that had never existed earlier. However, Kant laid the foundations for the German Idealism of the late eighteenth century and particularly to Hegel’s thought in the 1790s which tried to provide an account of reality that appeared to bridge this divide between the objective and the subjective once for all without compromising on the radical freedom of the self (won by Kant) on one hand and the expressive nature of Nature on the other. And Hegel actually believed that he had at last found the answer in his fabulous metaphysical construction of ‘everything’. His Absolute Spirit was not just the eternal Subject, but through its involution had become the objective world. Reality IS the dialectics between the subjective and objective moments of the Absolute Spirit, which the English Philosopher Bradley called the 'the unearthly
ballet of bloodless categories' (a favourite quote of Bernard from whom I heard it for the first time) and thus for Hegel history comes to an end with his work.
4. Reactions to German Idealism: Perspectivalism and Phenomenology
Unfortunately, the world goes on and as history itself has shown us, the quest continues. It is interesting to note how this question continued to dominate the nineteenth century German and French thought which, as I see it, can be said to be in some sense a response to this fundamental contention between subjectivity and objectivity. There was beginning to be developed a strong distaste for the scientific approach which had reduced everything to mechanics and industrialization. Felix Ravaisson and Michel Henri are a couple of examples from the French quarters, and the biggest name on the German front is Nietzsche (we must not overlook Marx) and we cannot of course forget Kierkegaard from the Danish quarters, our father of existentialism. All, in some sense, were critiquing on one hand Hegel’s overarching meta-theory of the universe and equally scientific empiricism. Nietzsche is important in that his perspectivalism which stressed on the subjectivity of the inquiring-self was laying the seeds for postmodern thought. However his perspectivalism destroyed the notion of the self itself and finds its completion in Sartre for whom Being is nothingness and there is no unified concept of the self (this echoes Hume’s view of the Self as a ‘bundle of perceptions’), thus leaving us with dark feelings of existential nihilism. Thus with the advent of the twentieth century, the lines of this debate were redrawn where on one hand there was Descartes’ universal self and on the other hand Nietzsche’s nihilistic self – the former standing for a complete objective view of knowledge and the latter for a radical subjectivity where not even an objective view of subjectivity is permitted leading to the destruction of the self itself. As I see it, the twentieth century can largely be seen as an attempt to rescue humanity from both the tyranny of enlightenment universalism and the despair of postmodern nihilism. We have a new approach in the early decades of the twentieth century in Husserl’s Transcedental Phenomenology. He acknowledges the
Crisis of the scientific tradition, but then comes out with an alternative means to provide a foundation for truth. The radical
epoche of the transcendental inquiring-self was able to provide an objective account of the life-world, or so was the claim. This euphoria did not long last as Husserl’s own student Heidegger debunked his project by grounding the transcendental self firmly in the world in proposing that
Dasein is always being-in-the-world and furthermore that being is necessarily an interpreting-being. Post-Heidegger, the subjective-objective debate by slipping into the philosophy of language has reached a height of philosophical sophistication never seen before.
5. The Hermeneutical Turn
This brings us to the present. In simple terms, the contention is between Scientific method and philosophical quest, both having the same goal of arriving at the truth of being. There are different terms that are used to represent these two sides of the problematic, for example, realism and idealism, empiricism and rationalism, naturalism and non-naturalism, reductionism and non-reductionism. Although, modern philosophy itself has gone the way of scientific method, with Analytical philosophy’s obsession with prepositions and their correspondence to ‘reality’. Many more binaries can be in some sense traced back to this basic contention between subjectivity and objectivity. The way I see it, today there is a growing body of scholarship in the works of Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, MacIntyre who, building on Heidegger, are exploring a hermeneutical position as the middle term between subjectivity and objectivity. This position does not dismiss the objective world including the self as proposed by postmodern constructivism, nor does it claim to have a God's eye-view or a complete objective picture as a rationalist or empirical scientific inquiry would like to claim. It would argue that all knowledge is interpreted-knowledge and while there is no access to objective knowledge, there are sets of rules that govern the different quests of knowledge. The structure that frames a particular inquiry of knowledge in a particular field is restricted by the ‘background’ which has constructed the field in the first place. Therefore there are field parameters that enable us to get objective knowledge of the field. For example, let’s take the games of Football and Basketball. Both contain phenomena that involve human action involving hands and legs. In Football, the ball is moved from point A to point B with the use of legs and if the hand comes into play it’s a foul. While in Basketball it is the reverse, the ball is moved from point A to B with the use of hands and if the leg comes into play it is a foul. This is a very simplistic example, but will serve the point being made. In the Cartesian mould of things there must be one universal set of rules that should govern ‘games’ and these rules are pre-given and universal. They can be found through scientific inquiry and can be expected to be in play wherever games are in play. That would be the only way to play a game. The Nietzschean critique would counter-argue that all rules are man-made and a genealogical trace will show that there are no universal rules, rather these rules have changed over time and they all possess only the status of perspectives. A radical Nietzschean would argue that there are no rules at all, as each person has his own perspective and therefore in this scheme of things, there can be no game in the first place. However, both these interpretations in this very simplistic account are unsatisfactory as we not only find both Football and Basketball played in many parts of the world with great gusto but they have become multi-billion dollar businesses. So what would a hermeneutical reading of the phenomena look like? First, there are no universal rules that govern the movement of hands and legs in ‘games’, because there are different games and each game has a different set of rules. Secondly, just because there are different games with different rules does not lead us to a point of despair where we cannot play any meaningful game. There are objective rules that govern particular games, even though there may be no universal rules for ‘games’ as such. Thirdly, this leads us to make a claim that rules are game-dependent. Put simply, the movement of hands and legs are governed by the rules of the particular game within which the movement occurs. The framework of a particular game gives an objective and in a sense universal set of rules that govern how that game ought to be played at least in a given epoch. They are not primarily subjective to the inquiring-self or the historical context where the game is enacted, unless the game itself has mutated over time, if yes, then the new-construction of the game would become the objective referent. The game dictates how it is to be understood. So we can analogously have conflicting sets of rules (of different games) and yet not give in to contradictions as these rules are constitutive of and constituted by the particular game. In hermeneutical language, both phenomena and the inquiry of the phenomena are situated within particular traditions and in our illustration, the traditions of Football and Basketball. However, with full acceptance that traditions are not passive, rather change, mutate and renew themselves in time. Therefore, there is a need for not just an inquiry into the nature of the phenomena, but also a contemporaneous inquiry into the nature of the inquiring-self and it is in this dialogue between the
inquirer and
inquiree, knowledge is constructed which is both full-blooded and bloodless, ideas meshed within flesh which is the fabric of life.
