Nietzsche: “What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good AND evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.”
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The modernist fantasy is this: one day the world will be understood completely, exclusively through empirical observation and mathematical modeling. The project is set, all that is required is persistence and ingenuity. We will experience scientific revolutions (lowercase), but the Scientific Revolution (uppercase) is the last philosophical revolution humanity will ever undergo. Philosophy is spoken. Science has eyes only for the observable.
Modernity wishes the optical to not only dominate, but silence the word, by eliminating the need for it. If you protest this tendency, a modernist will see exactly what you’re doing, and will not listen to you. Only those subject to subjectivity object to objectivity.
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Heraclitus: “Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.”
Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”
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Subjectivity speaks and listens.
Objectivity sees and observes.
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James Spradley observed something interesting. When a researcher surveys research participants, the researcher doesn’t get answers to questions, but observable behaviors — responses to conditions.
Whatever the participant says during the survey is unanalyzable noise in the experiment.
For social science to be scientific, it must silence its subject and make it objective.
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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”