I’m Popeye, the sailor man
I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam
I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam
I’m Popeye the sailor man!
There’s no getting around it. We are who we are, and there is nothing to be done about it. If this sounds tautological, the implications are not necessarily obvious. For the greater part of our history, ideas about knowledge and the conveyance of knowledge tended to tamp down the subjective. Evidence, impartiality, and objectivity were what mattered. What didn’t matter, or matter as much, was what you, as a human being, thought. This may seem counterintuitive, but as Terry Eagleton points out in The Meaning of Life, the meaning a person attached to life—before 1600 or so—consisted by and large “of its function within a greater whole.” Our peculiarities and differences mattered less in defining us than did membership in the general category of human being. In fact, the word individual originally meant “indivisible” or “inseparable from,” and according to Eagleton, “Homer’s Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare’s Hamlet most definitely does not.”
Eagleton’s point, however, has more to do with how people expressed themselves than with the nature of their inner lives. Although I very much doubt that Homer or Seneca ever felt inclined to shout, “Me? Whee!”—as Muhammad Ali did in a 1975 speech he gave at Harvard—it’s equally hard to imagine that Petrarch or Leonardo did not regard himself as someone apart from the run of the mill. Eagleton is well aware that the concept of the individual emerged after the fact, but he also thinks that premodern people were less agitated about the meaning of existence “than, say, Albert Camus or the early T. S. Eliot.”
This bears pondering. If men and women did not see themselves as distinct from the polis or community, how to explain Dante’s narrator, who found himself alone in a dark wood around 1300 and whose presence, as Erich Auerbach wrote, first embodied the idea that “individual destiny is not meaningless, but is necessarily tragic and significant”? Tragedy doesn’t describe Benvenuto Cellini’s splashy 1566 Autobiography, but no one can accuse its author of self-effacement. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the author of the Book of Job, written around the fifth century BCE, did not regard himself as a man different from his fellow men even if they shared a similar fate: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” In effect, subjectivity has been around since men and women decided that there were other men and women, but that doesn’t mean it counted for much, philosophically speaking.
Epistemology 101 students may recall the term “subjective idealism,” the idea that knowledge is restricted to one’s own perceptions—a counter to Platonic idealism, which holds that ideas (truth) exist independently of their apprehension. For Plato, sense-experience was but a shadow of reality, a condition that Bishop Berkeley, two millennia later, refined by showing that sight and touch affected our perception of the world, causing everyone to apprehend objects differently, thereby proving in Berkeley’s estimation that no such thing as objective reality existed—except in the mind of the Creator.
Unwilling to leave certainty in His/Her hands, Kant labored mightily to demonstrate that “while all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” We ourselves possess the a priori faculties that literally shape the visible world, which is another way of saying that subjectivity also informs objectivity. So why should we be afraid of it even if it defies universal truth? It didn’t frighten William James, who in The Sentiment of Rationality (1879–80) averred,
‘Subjective’ be it called! and ‘disturbing’ to those whom it foils! … Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. … It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination.
Independently of James, the German thinker Wilhelm Wundt, possibly the first person to identify himself as a psychologist, proposed that psychology examine human experience “in its immediately subjective reality.” And it was Nietzsche, some years later, who touted the mind’s involuntary and subjective relation to the world, a viewpoint that became known as “perspectivism.” “Everything is subjective,” he wrote in The Will to Power, but “subject” is “something added and invented and projected behind what there is. Even this is invention, hypothesis.” Nietzsche, who didn’t shy away from noting the shortcomings of other philosophers, thought they failed by neglecting their own perspectives, which led him to surmise that “every great philosophy” ends up being the “confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.”
The obvious problem here is that of dueling perspectives: Can some be “more” objective than others? To which one can only reply that perspectivism does not impute the same value to all perspectives; it simply maintains that no one person has access to a view of the world that is somehow distinct from an already existing perspective. Ideally, such an awareness should lead to a greater understanding of other possible (plausible) realities, which, in turn, might clarify our own perceptions.
Perhaps nudged by his fellow countrymen, the German psychoanalyst Alexander Herzberg, in 1926, published Zur Psychologie der Philosophie und der Philosophen, later translated as The Psychology of Philosophers, which stipulated a correlation between the personalities of 30 philosophers and their works. He found that a number of them had lost one or both parents at an early age, never married, often complained of being lonely and unhappy, seemed querulous and quick to take offense, and were socially inept and incompetent with money.
None of this comes as a shock. Indeed, Herzberg’s characterization of philosophers could fit a lot of people for whom The Birth of Tragedy, let alone Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is intellectually out of reach. Herzberg’s book didn’t spark any intellectual fires but, if I may hazard a guess, it wasn’t an isolated event in the threadlike history of subjectivity. By 1929, human emotions and behavior were linked to different types of personalities. If Freud believed that human beings were essentially motivated by sexual and aggressive urges, his colleague Alfred Adler taught that behavior could be traced back to the psychical situation of early childhood. Adler called his approach “individual psychology,” and in The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924), he insisted that every human personality was unique and indivisible.
It’s awkward, perhaps foolhardy, trying to identify a time when subjectivity became its own justification, but it’s not unreasonable to view the European response to the First World War as a profound distrust of objective truth. Given the war’s brutality, devastation, and obscene loss of life, it’s safe to say that 19th-century ideas of progress and civilization were found wanting. Not only were absolutes in moral judgment discarded, realism itself became suspect. Instead, the disorder of the world summoned the disjointedness and collage effects of Dada and surrealism, as well as the fragmented self of “The Waste Land” and the stream of consciousness of Ulysses. And where objectivity languishes, can subjectivity be far behind?
What was the 1927 Solvay Conference if not a referendum on objective reality? In Brussels, 29 scientists—including Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Marie Curie, and Werner Heisenberg—met to discuss the enormous changes taking place in the minutest realms of particle physics, or quanta. For Bohr and Heisenberg, subatomic entities such as electrons had only probabilities, not actual properties that could be measured. An electron, Bohr argued, can behave either as a wave or a particle depending on the context, and its momentum or position at any one point in time simply cannot be predicted. This dovetailed nicely with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, also formulated in 1927, which maintained that the very act of measuring a subatomic particle alters its position and velocity so that it has no real correlation to nature. Something was in the air that seemed to melt the solidity of facts.
Of course, one could make the case that none of this is particularly relevant to our day to day. Indeed, the world both inside and outside the academy continued to exhibit a laissez-faire approach to subjectivity, which explains why a rather substantial 1980 philosophical treatise passed relatively unnoticed. Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought takes Herzberg up a few notches without—inexplicably—mentioning him. A philosopher himself, Scharfstein wants to get at what makes philosophers tick. Providing functional summaries of their thought, he maintains that such thought cannot be appreciated without considering the emotional state of its author. The “psychologism” that put readers off in 1929 is wholly embraced by Scharfstein, since his entire argument rests on the thesis that philosophical reasoning must derive from some formative emotional crisis.
These moments of revelation, or “conversion-experiences,” as Scharfstein calls them, can come early or late but once experienced set the philosopher on his course. For Spinoza, it was an unidentified event so profound that he felt like “a sick man seized with a deadly disease who sees death before him if he does not find some remedy,” the remedy being “the love towards a thing eternal and infinite.” For Descartes, it was three ambulatory dreams he had one night in November 1619, in which a violent wind twirled him around on one foot, creating an instability that led him to search for “the author of his existence.” For Bertrand Russell, it was coming across his friend Evelyn Whitehead in such intense pain that he was moved to declare that “the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached.” This, in turn, caused him to conclude “that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”
Scharfstein is an evangelist but not an unreasonable one. Although he states that philosophical objectivity “is more apparent than real,” he’s well aware that theory can be construed as objective and responded to objectively. We are not totally guided by our emotions; there are hypotheses to be tested and logical conclusions to be drawn. At the same time, emotions do impinge on how we see the world, thus calling into question the integrity of our concepts. Indeed, once we learn about Kant’s ever-present anxiety, his rigidity, and his pessimism, it’s hard to square his personal life with the lofty self-assurance of his thought.
Perusing Scharfstein’s book 45 years after its publication, we may see it as a precursor of the many recent popular books dealing with philosophers’ worldviews. Although the lives of prominent writers, artists, politicians, athletes, and soldiers have been lavishly pored over, we tended to ignore the interior dramas playing in the heads of systematic thinkers who investigated the big picture. Plato’s idealism, Spinoza’s infinite substance, Descartes’s dualism, Hegel’s phenomenology, Heidegger’s exploration of Non-being, and Sartre’s dive into Being were products of the intellect, of calculated reasoning. Yes, philosophers had definite points of view and even, in some cases, attitude, but concepts were what mattered, not the people who conceived them.
Such oversight, of course, has been corrected, if not overcorrected. Today we know all we want to know about Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism and what a toad Sartre could be. Indeed, many readers probably know more about the lives of philosophers than about their works. Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure, William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels, as well as biography after biography of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein all make it a point to show how large, impersonal ideas were shaped by the formative experiences of childhood and youth.
Yet the more I dip into these books, the more I wonder whether we’re perhaps giving too much weight to the influence of early life experiences. Did Kant’s childhood or adolescence really account for his a priori epistemic philosophy? Must a residue of childhood trauma or persistent feelings of deprivation compel artists and philosophers to process and compensate for what happened to them? I’m in no position to speculate how Pascal, Newton, Keats, Picasso, Stein, Le Corbusier, and Weil came to think as they did, but I believe that linking works of art and philosophy to a psychological wound falls short of providing a complete explanation. Admittedly, no philosophy is born without the mercurial element of the author’s humanity, but let’s not get carried away. A good idea pushed to an extreme loses its virtues. Personal traumas, absent or abusive parents, strange mishaps or accidents, and other people’s terrible behavior may leave emotional scars, but something else is also simmering when artists and philosophers get to work.
I mean the Imagination. What Herzberg and Scharfstein ignore is the creative process that summons experience but doesn’t necessarily spring from experience. For this impressionable reader, Kant’s Categories, his Transcendental Aesthetic, his Manifold of Apperception seemed to be imaginative devices that allowed for the validity of knowledge. Is it really a stretch to think that Descartes’s Meditations or Hegel’s Phenomenology or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness owes less to the imagination than does J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or T. H. White’s The Once and Future King? The imagination is not something you want to define, but without it, as Guy Davenport hinted, there’s little difference “between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse.”
What does all this have to do with the prevalence of the “disturbing” subjective factor? William James, of course, didn’t find subjectivity disturbing at all, but one has to wonder what he would make of it today. No doubt he would approve of its place in the academy, where it remains central to the study of the mind, identity, the self, critical thinking, consciousness, and the like, but would he endorse its elevated status in the culture at large? Despite my feeling that there is less of an equation between the personal and the philosophical as some contemporary writers would have us believe, I think it silly not to recognize the fact that emotions color our reasoning. Such emotions by definition reside with (in) the subjective, which is all well and good, but what happens when the subjective takes precedence, when it begins to subjugate our belief in the objective nature of things?
Subjectivity today seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Cruising social media or switching between Fox News and MS NOW only illustrates what one commentator, Renée DiResta, has aptly termed “bespoke realities”—diverse viewpoints continually being reaffirmed by algorithms and scripts that recognize our preferences and feed us what we want to see and hear. Most people, I suspect, believe their own take on reality matters more and, of course, is more true than other realities “out there.” And this conviction, which automatically disavows the validity of other perspectives, also absolves us of not actively searching for an alternative reality. We can handle the truth all right; we just can’t handle someone else’s.
Indeed, we now suffer from what Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich at the RAND Corporation refer to as “truth decay,” which is distinguished by, among other related trends, “the erosion of trust and confidence in key institutions that previously served as sources of factual information … [and the] blurred … line between opinion and fact.” An assessment that seems borne out when the secretary of Health and Human Services informs us that vaccines are dangerous, or when government officials assert that videos of a murder in Minneapolis by federal agents depict an act of self-defense, or when a presidency of dunces issues executive orders that seek to rewrite—that is to say, modulate and soften—the nation’s history in its treatment of Native Americans, Black Americans, women, and immigrants.
There are no facts here; only lies, elisions, and propaganda. My apologies to A. E. Housman, but I don’t believe that the “faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” Who doesn’t think their bespoke reality isn’t better or more viable than the next person’s? Unfortunately, placing such faith in one’s own opinion is often accompanied by a devaluation of contrary opinions. This is, of course, a natural human impulse, but in the present day, it seems almost de rigueur. How, for example, does one navigate safely between the ideological bellicosity of academic critics who rail against America and the anxious, perhaps justifiable warnings of patriotic ideologues? Neither side is completely wrong nor completely right, and both should be measured by their own narrowness.
I am no Absolutist, but I am concerned. If subjectivity has finally gained a foothold in the academy and enlarged our appreciation of the human element in abstract ideas, it has also created a relativistic freefall: too much unreliable information, too many opinions heard from, no one opinion nearer the truth than another. Am I wrong—or did “facts” once have real substance? “Now, what I want is, Facts,” the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind raps out in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. … In this life, we want nothing but Facts, Sir; nothing but Facts!” To be sure, hoaxes, rumors, and barefaced lies were rampant in every century, but generally speaking, the findings or conclusions of scholars and scientists existed independently of those who formulated them and those who interpreted them. Experts might have gotten things wrong, but that didn’t open the door to crackpot theories or convince people that education was useless. One really has to wonder whether those who get their information from the web are capable of distinguishing between scholarship and nonsense.
Perhaps the only way out of this mess is to wait for things to settle down. A time will come when influential folk in both the academy and the media will urge another generation to find the right balance between self-expression and the self-restraint necessary to sustain a community. Freedom of expression is no small gift, but the refusal to acknowledge the existence of truth is too large a price to pay. As Orwell knew only too well, a democracy may lose control of the truth, but tyranny will always pervert it. Subjectivity may be the rule today, but it should not rule us. It may dominate the foreground of debate and be deployed to justify every point of view, but it does not follow that truth is no longer possible. Truth may be harder than ever to ascertain or convince people of, but in one form or another it is “out there.”
Admittedly, the world is a product of subjectivity in the sense that we necessarily interpret it in light of what we already know about it, which is partly what Nietzsche meant by perspectivism. It is also what Kant was getting at in his own complicated transcendental philosophy. For Kant, whose hypochondria was regulated by his fixation on order, the phenomenal world was a construct of the subjective, issuing from a priori categories that put into concrete form whatever information we received from the world. We may know only the appearance of things, but—here’s the trick—we cannot know them in any other way. Hence, we can posit and take for granted accurate representations of reality. This, in a nutshell, accounts for the problematic nature of Kant’s first Critique, which was published in 1781. Three years later, he wrote—and we’ll never know exactly why—that “from such crooked timber as mankind nothing entirely straight can be made.” A rather grim thought, in whose defense one could argue that someone conceived it in the hope that one day he might be proven wrong.
