In Defence of Objectivity

Andrew Collier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134402748
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 2004. This volume addresses the interlocking themes of realism, objectivity, existentialism and (eco-socialist) politics, based on critical realism. However, it moves beyond the purely scientific orientation of earlier contributions to this philosophy, to further develop the themes. The title essay defends objectivity in science, everyday knowledge, and ethics, and examines both subjective idealism and existentialist critiques of objectivity. The other essays examine some of the same themes but from different angles, keeping the politics of the issues at the forefront.

Part I

1	The inorganic body and the ambiguity of freedom*
	The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. (Marx, Early Writings, p. 328)

If we place this notion in the foreground of Marx’s early thought, that thought immediately becomes more fertile and suggestive of important insights than if it is interpreted with ‘humanism’ in the foreground. We can once again learn from it, even if we entirely accept Althusser’s critique of that humanism.

No doubt the ‘inorganic body’ thesis was not in the foreground for Marx himself. It is an aside, and he never works out its implications. But there are a few things to be said about what is implied by Marx, in context, before I go on to draw on other sources to elaborate this notion.

In the first place, it means that we interact causally with the rest of nature, and are dependent for our existence, and for what we are, on that interaction. That we are dependent on nature is obvious enough, but Marx is drawing attention to the special nature of that dependence: on the one hand, that it is not dependence on something external, in that we are constituted as the beings that we are by the way we live out that dependence; and on the other hand, that we ‘live from’ nature actively, and thereby transform it, so that nature (at least on this planet) is always shot through with human history. For instance, the New Forest, in which I walk at every opportunity, and in which I conceived many of the ideas in this paper, is no gift of nature — except in the sense that everything is; it is a monument to the Norman

* ‘The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom’, in Radical Philosophy, no. 57, 1991, pp. 3–9.

tyrants’ lust for blood-sports. Taking these two points together, our transformation of nature is also the transformation of ourselves, and the primary way in which we, as a species, do transform ourselves. (This last clause is another way of formulating the materialist conception of history.)

While this position is as far as could be from any ‘Luddite’ hostility to our cumulative productive powers, it does highlight their peculiarly destructive potential — a potential actualised by capitalism. It does so in three ways:

(1) if the world ‘outside’ us is essential to our being, then the propertylessness of the proletarians is not a deprivation of something ‘external’, leaving them in free possession of their essential being. Our advantage over the animals is transformed into a disadvantage, in that our inorganic body is taken away from us, as Marx comments on the page following the above quote. When he goes on to say that ‘estranged labour’ estranges us from our own body, from nature outside us, from our spiritual essence and from our human essence, he may be read as saying the same thing in four ways, rather than four things.¹

(2) While we must use nature if we are to live, the idea that it is our inorganic body suggests that this is essentially more like the way that we ‘use’ our own bodies-actual,² our own limbs and organs, than it is like any means– end relationship. Treating nature as a means to individual existence is specially mentioned as part of estrangement, in the passage just referred to (Early Writings, p. 329). This distinction between two kinds of use of nature is taken up later in Marx’s manuscripts (Early Writings, pp. 352–53): under communism ‘nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use’ — while ‘the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks a mineralogical sense’.

(3) The manuscript on money (pp. 375–79) can be read as spelling out two ways of living our inorganic bodies. The omnipotence of money in the market economy does not, of course, make us any less dependent on our interaction with nature, but it takes away the personal, situated, integrated manner of exercising our physical, emotional and intellectual powers upon the natural and human world about us, each from their historical and geographical perspective, with its specific links to others and to one’s habitat. Instead, our powers are subsumed under a single, infinitely divisible and amassable power, indifferent to its agent and the content of its exercise: money:

He who can buy courage is brave, even if he is a coward. Money is not exchanged for a particular quality, a particular thing, or for any particular one of the essential powers of man, but for the whole objective world of man and nature.

(ibid., p. 379)

In the next two sections, I shall try to work out a fuller conception of what is involved in thinking of ourselves as bodies-cosmic rather than bodies-actual, drawing on the work of Heidegger and of Spinoza; in the final section, I shall spell out the political implications.

Body as world: the Heideggerian approach

One way of following up the ideas that our material being is more extensive than the space enclosed in our skins is Heidegger’s concept of Being-in-the-world as definitive of human existence, and his analysis of what it means to be in the world. Heidegger makes a sharp break with all accounts which locate our minds inside our bodies; we are our worlds — and whatever it is that gives unity to ourselves (and Heidegger has two alternative accounts of what it is, according to whether we exist authentically or inauthentically), it is not that either body or mind is a substance.

One way in to this idea is by contrasting a metaphor of Heidegger’s with two of Popper’s: Popper refers to bucket-theories of the mind, and searchlight-theories. Heidegger’s metaphor is of a clearing in the forest. Only by virtue of the clearing are the trees visible, yet the clearing is nothing except the trees and the relations between them. We are not in the clearing, we are the clearing. And this indicates that this conception is no longer on the Cartesian ground of a theory of ‘mind’ at all; rather, we have extended the boundaries we assign to our bodily beings; we have exosomatic parts.

Our way of being is ‘Being-in-the-world’, but the ‘in’ does not signify spatial containment; we are our worlds. It is not difficult to find everyday examples to make such an extended definition of our bodies plausible; we habitually regard our clothes, tools we are using, bicycles we are riding etc. as part of us. We feel the road with the wheels of the bike; the motorist refers to ‘my wing’ getting scratched; the victim of a burglary feels violated, even if nothing has been taken and no damage done. Also, distant objects may be existentially closer to us than spatially nearer ones; the scene I look at through the window is more ‘part of me’ than the window; this is a sort of ‘intentional inexistence’,³ i.e. the scene exists in me in that I comport myself towards it; what I am being cannot be understood without reference to the scene, yet it can be fairly well understood without reference to the window, or indeed to my toenails or my appendix.

The unifying force which organises my world is my practical concern. ‘My world’ in this sense is unique to me; ‘your world’ is organised around your particular concerns, which may be quite different. Yet ‘my world’ is not composed of appearances, of ‘things for me’. It is the real bicycle, the real road, the real sunlight that go to make up my world — and of course they may go to make up your world too. We need to clarify this point, since Heidegger’s phenomenological heritage places him under suspicion of subjectivism, and at times perhaps the suspicion is well founded. But he certainly thinks that he has shown the error of idealism, in that attempts to prove the existence of the ‘external world’, so far from being necessary and unsuccessful, are unnecessary and foolish, since the ‘external world’ is not external — and not because it is ‘in our minds’, but because we are ‘out there’ in it.

However, granted (as Heidegger grants) that we are always partly in error about the world, do not ‘our worlds’ come apart from ‘the world’ as practically determined appearances of it? May not the way things are organised in my world be unlike the way they are organised in the world?

Here a few remarks are in order about all those existentialist polemics against ‘objectivity’. In the empiricist culture of the Anglophone world, we are accustomed to understand ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ primarily in an epistemic sense. When we hear objectivity decried, we assume that some sort of epistemological subjectivism such as Feyerabend’s is being defended. I think that there is in fact scarcely a trace of such subjectivism in the works of Kierkegaard or Macmurray or Heidegger or Sartre. Rather, ‘subjectivity’ is taken in an ontological sense, as referring to (epistemically quite objective) realities such as emotions, beliefs, encounters, reasonings etc. Thus when R.D. Laing, for instance, under the influence of these thinkers, says ‘objectively there are no intentions’,⁴ he is not saying that intentions are in the mind of the beholder, but that intentions belong to the world of ‘subjectivity’ that a certain kind of beholder — one in the grip of a reductive metaphysics — might miss. At this point it might look as if their anti-objectivism is no more than anti-reductivism. It does include anti-reductivism, but I think it also includes something less acceptable; resistance to a certain kind of knowledge, contrasted with the knowledge inherent in practice, and variously labelled ‘objective’, ‘contemplative’ or ‘intellectual’. I shall not consider here whether there really is some dirty bathwater to be thrown out under these headings, but I do think that the existentialists have thrown out a baby in the process. That baby is counter-phenomenal knowledge. For the capacity of knowledge to contradict appearances is essential if knowledge is to have a liberating function: it is, as Marx and Freud have indicated, precisely because appearances can be false and enslaving that knowledge can be liberating.

Before discussing this matter with reference to Heidegger, it may help to clarify what is at issue if I quote and comment briefly on a passage from Macmurray’s book Interpreting the Universe:

That immediate knowledge of the world which is the effortless result of living in it and working with it and struggling against it has a much higher claim to be taken as the type of human knowledge than anything science either has or can make possible. For the scientist takes this immediate knowledge of the world for granted and bases himself squarely upon it by his continuous appeal to facts. His particular business is simply to interpret it, to express it in such a way that we understand what we already knew in a quite different and immediate fashion.

(pp. 16–17)

The first two sentences, rightly interpreted, may be accepted; but it does not follow that the scientist ‘simply’ interprets pre-scientific knowledge; he or she may produce radically new knowledge, and therewith new practices; and this new knowledge may contradict the ‘immediate’ knowledge which preceded and gave rise to it.

In Heidegger’s account of phenomenology in the introduction to Being and Time he distinguishes ‘phenomenon’ in the sense used in his version of phenomenology — ‘that which shows itself’ — from ‘appearance’ in senses in which there is a contrast with something that does not appear, i.e. firstly, from semblance; secondly from senses this word has in contexts where something that does not appear ‘announces itself’ in something that does (e.g. disease in a symptom); and thirdly from the Kantian sense, in which an appearance is of something that can never appear (the thing-in-itself). Yet ‘phenomenon’ does contrast with something:

‘Behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden. And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is a need for phenomenology. Covered-up-ness is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’.

(p. 60)

Phenomenology then has the task of making things show themselves, which were previously covered up. That looks like counter-phenomenal knowledge — the sort of knowledge that can liberate. Yet Heidegger is reluctant to allow science its appearance/reality distinction. Indeed, he tends to invert the relation between scientific and pre-scientific knowledge, treating scientific results, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that they are the product of a laborious work of uncovering, as merely subjective, and as tending to cover up Being, to which the knowledge implicit in everyday practice gives us genuine access.

Heidegger, in fact, sees his analysis of Being-in-the-world as, despite analysing what is closest to us, running against the difficulty that our world has been pre-interpreted to us in terms of something that is existentially further from us — i.e. the world of mechanically related objects. In the world that is closest to us — the work-world which we inhabit prior to theoretical explanations — the hammer is encountered as that with which we fix the shutter, which in turn is that with which we make a dwelling weatherproof. This world as a whole is composed of the gear that we use, and structured by its reference back to some projected being of ours. Only when the head flies off the hammer are we forced to consider it as an entity with properties other than being hammerable with. So begins objective inquiry. And we habitually misread our lived world as like the objective reality thus discovered. As so often with Heidegger, a good and a bad point are mixed up together here. There really is a Cartesian or empiricist picture of the world as comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Index