Please Think Responsibly

You can't have cosmic rights without cosmic responsibilities. 

That's true. What are yours, besides meddling in these posts?

It depends on the situation and on your receptivity.  

Well, right now I'm feeling pretty receptive, since the melon is a little foggy and this is my short morning, so feel free to meddle away.

Speaking of openness and receptivity, this goes to one of our most lofty privileges: for to say that man is capable of objectivity

means that he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven (Schuon).

This is an exceedingly strange situation, for it's one thing to be an object, and another thing to be a subject (like any other animal). But it's another thing entirely for the subject to be capable of detaching itself from itself and considering oneself as an object from outside or above. 

This opens up the question of why leftists lack these gifts of self-awareness, self-possession, and objectivity. 

Yes, and they even tell us so. 

It's a bit early for the insultainment portion of our program, but we all know liberals who claim that "perception is reality," or "all politics is about power," or that there can exist such a thing as "my truth" without denying its very possibility. Each of these distortions or pathologies represents a metacosmic FAIL with respect to thinking responsibly and reaching one's telos.  

I remember discussing this with a tenured relative some two decades ago. He was insisting that objectivity was but a noble lie that was impossible in practice. So I asked him if that was true. I can't recall the name he called me, but he went straight to the ad hominem card.  

Childish?

No.

Vulgar?

Possibly. But everybody says that.

Puerile?

Warmer.

Jejune? 

That's a bingo!

This relative even wrote a book on the subject, and perhaps I should pull it from the shelf and reexamine it. I tried to tackle it once, but it is turgid beyond belief. 

Objectively turgid, or is that just your opinion? 

His bottom line is relatively clear: "I don't think the idea of historical objectivity is true or false, right or wrong: I find it not just essentially contested, but essentially confused. Many philosophical assumptions of the concept seem to me dubious."

To say objective is "to make an empty observation; to say something neither interesting nor useful." My uncle is "unimpressed by arguments of its defenders," but especially those of a particular nephew-in-law which are jejune beyond belief.

Are you going to take that sitting down? 

Yes. I'm a poor enough typist as it is.

Now, as powerful as the following arguments are, I don't expect them to change my uncle's mind. After all, he's been dead for at least a decade. Then again, perhaps now, released from the matrix of tenure, he has an expansive enough vista to appreciate them. 

Hell is a big place.

You said it, I didn't.  

As it so happens, I recently read a book that addresses just this subject in an exceedingly compact and pithy manner. I can't say I recommend it, because about halfway through it starts to get a little too Mohammedan for my taste, but the first chapter is entirely neutral. Objective, as it were.

Much of this has to do with the substance of intelligence, which is to say, what it actually is; and the substance of truth, which turns out to be of the same substance as intelligence.

But you can learn a lot about something by simply observing what people do as opposed to what they say. 

Anyone who has any judgment about anything and communicates it to others has already assumed that what he tells them will mean essentially the same thing to them, and that they will recognize the truth of his opinion, that is, they will have the same judgment.

For example, when Uncle Peter calls me jejune, I don't take him to mean sophisticated, or mature, or useful, rather, the opposite. 

If what one man says has a meaning that is accessible solely to him, and is true solely for him, why then would he even say it to others? 

For example, why write a 600+ page manifesto on the impossibility of objectivity. Isn't that a... what's the word...

Performative contradiction?

Yes. It's positively self-refuting, is it not? Granted, many history books properly belong in the fiction section, but that's because of the existence of nonfiction. Jejune as it might sound,

Unless one accepts that man is fundamentally objective, one quickly finds oneself in refutation of oneself.

One has to start with the self-evidence of objective truth. Any attempt to deny the self-evidence of truth -- or being, or reality, or absoluteness -- will be self defeating.  

Having said that, there are sophisticated and jejune ways of going about something as complex as history, where the objective and subjective are always intertwined. But even the ability to recognize this intertwining is already objective, or rather, something that can only be apprehended from a higher perspective. 

Let's put it this way: to even say history is to have already stepped outside it. The question is not whether transcendence is possible, but how it is possible, i.e., by virtue of what principle?

Or, you could turn it around and say that transcendence is reducible to history. But that would be jejune.