The Objective Fallacy: PART I.

In an age of rampant media consumption on all fronts, the danger of forgetting to distinguish fact from fiction is too real. Yet often those who draw the heaviest and darkest line between the factual and fictional are those most prone to be deluded by their “realistic” worldviews.

 

This especially is true of those who make too stringent a distinction in between “objective” and “subjective” facts and notions. The distinction in between these two dimensions of experience is simply a distinction of dimension, not of substance; saying something is “objective” rather than “subjective” is like saying something is the width but not the height; this mathematically is the truth, and it is crucial to the recreation of a figure, yet one can’t divide a table purely into height and width. Subjective and objective facts are inextricably connected and, at heart, they are one and the same. We only make a point to tell the two apart depending on the context.

 

Much like separating Church and State, the principle for this distinction differs also by perspective. Members of the State believe that separation of this kind exists in order to protect the State, though members of the Church know it exists in order to protect the Church. The schism in between objective and subjective is intended to protect subjective notions from the tyranny of mere objective “facts”, yet tyrants who believe such facts are absolutes pretend that such a schism serves their own dominion, protecting it from the corruption of “opinion”.

 

The logical and introverted ego will subjectify the World primarily and only secondarily impose its own regime of objectivity upon that World. Such individuals are often quick to ridicule the feelers and the sensers and intuitives because those others clearly skew reality in favour of their own subjective inclinations. Yet the strict logician also does this, as his categories are abstractions, and his Kantian duality between the Noumenal and the Phenomenal is arbitrary; Sartre, for example, proved such dualism to be false in 1943, as Jung did in the psychoanalytic realm and Werner Heisenberg did in the realm of physics.

 

Subjectivity pervades and penetrates all pretense to an objectivity. This does not mean that we can’t be objective. It is rather that we cannot help but be objective, yet we choose to act as though this were not so, so as to push one form of arbitrary objectivity upon another. Facts are feelings, and a feeling is a fact. This does not mean that every feeling is appropriate, just as not every point of view is true. Yet stating something for a fact, although this runs the risk of error, also reaffirms the possibility for breakthrough and success. To feel is thus to posit; if I feel correctly, then my feeling has revealed the way things are in fact.

 

One group which has renounced this unity between the feeler and the facts have been the clinical psychologists. Ignoring all the strides that had been made by Jung and Rogers, modern therapists secure their station in the jaded, nihilistic world by reinforcing that same nihilism. Even though the work of Kant is dated in the study of epistemology, he is alive and well in mental hospitals, which should not be surprising, as that is where Kant belongs.

 

It may be so that many of the patients who’ve been locked away in these Draconian asylums are intelligent enough to understand that Kant was wrong and that their feelings are as valid as a scientific thesis in revealing the bare flesh of Being. Yet these intellectual dissenters are most often patients, citizens of secondary class, and their assertions of the underlying fallacies in Kant’s epistemology have been reduced to mere neurotic symptoms in the studies of the ruling doctors. If I would accuse the therapist of placing too much faith in Kant, the therapist might say I’m speaking nonsense, as it’s likely she’s not heard of Kant since high school, maybe never, and it never has occurred to her that someone from the eighteenth century could influence her worldview and her “independent” choices in a therapeutic setting (even though, of course, the notion that this is impossible is in itself a serious delusion).

 

Therapists require the distinction in between the Noumenal and the Phenomenal if they’re to do their jobs. Just as a law enforcement officer must meet a traffic quota, so the therapists must meet a quota, though the former actually has a valid reason, while the latter lacks one. Traffic officers must meet their quotas for the simple fact that traffic accidents take many lives; when those arrested on such violations mock the cops by pointing out the quota, it is at their own expense, as this just illustrates the rampant problem which the violator has created by electing reckless driving.

 

Yet the therapist does not hold such a crucial station. “The statistics” may insist that “mental illness has been on the rise”, etc. Yet diagnosing mental illness is not an objective statement such as saying that a vehicle has crossed the legal limit on the motorway. The cause for mental illness is objective, while the symptoms are subjective. We can only think that someone is a madman, but we cannot know it. We can only know the reason for his madness: failing stocks, unhappy marriages, a civil war, a cancer diagnosis, loss, etc. The patient very well may be a scientific genius whose stress arises from the implications of a nuclear war. The therapist cannot engage with such a genius about that possibility, assuming that a passing grade in physics is not crucial to receive a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. The therapist can only “treat the patient” by removing how the patient feels about the prospect from the facts. The truth is that it’s not a complex or neurosis that has plagued this scientist, but facts. By segregating feeling from those facts, the therapist can diagnose the feelings, meet her quota, and then lecture on how war is a projection.

 

**[({R.G.)}]**