~ 10 The Objective Observer ~
In our age, the folk philosophical tick one is taught – and must grow out of – is believing one can actually be objective as a subject, whether philosophically, scientifically, politically, or otherwise. Our tried-and-true empirical formula of scientific observation tries to make one’s acquiring of objectivity so. Never mind that this entire process and the end result is animated by empiricism, as in a dependence on the subjective sensing and thinking, still not an actual objectivity that is universal and irrefutable outside of human consciousness. Objective truth reached through the empirical sciences remains only an approximation. Kierkegaard explained, mockingly, of the objectivistic attempts of Christendom. “When the matter is treated objectively, the subject cannot impassionedly relate himself to the decision, can least of all be impassionedly, infinitely interested. To be infinitely interested in relation to that which at its maximum always remains only an approximation is a self-contradiction and thus is comical.”[1] This nevertheless extends to the objectivistic pretensions of our modern era – of a subject having no partiality; no passion; no decision.
To be impartial in the contemporary understanding of “objectivity” disciplines the subject to have no ends for themselves to direct the world towards or against. The subject becomes object by having no projects; no interests; no choice. That is, no freedom; no individuality. Compelled to accomplish nothing and have few ideas except that of others, one hardly exists. “To be a human being has been abolished, and every speculative thinker confuses himself with humankind, whereby he becomes something infinitely great and nothing at all” Kierkegaard wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. So it could be with our objectivists attacking the subjectivity of others, as in Shapiro, Hicks, Saad, or else Frank Knight, a US economist of the Chicago School, who declared: “We have no concern with the pains or subjective sacrifices involved in production, since it is not at all in terms of such ‘costs’ that the entrepreneur makes his calculations on the basis of which he decides whether to produce the good or on what scale.”[2] Subjectivity, remember, is the mind so we apparently only favour the subjectivity of the entrepreneur as only “he decides” in our day.
The mind correlates with the world; the mind arrives as ideality alongside reality to posit what exists. Then phenomenology, Husserl noted, “does not remain with vague talk, with obscure universalities”; it “demands exhaustive work” [3]. Then phenomenology might require its own form of ascetic commitment but at least one doesn’t deny their own self, their own life, or their own enjoyment – let alone all those of others as is the case with stoic thrift, household frugality, and neoliberal austerity.
Regarding the spirited and positive form of asceticism that one freely chooses for oneself, Scheler juxtaposed it with Nietzsche’s critiqued form of decadent morality as negative asceticism (commercial usefulness, the disciplining of Ignatius of Loyola’s Jesuits, declining and resentful life, and the subordination of many younger generations and lower ranks of society to this day). Positive asceticism has spirit as its aim; negative asceticism, while proclaiming spirit as its aim, has only the worldly as its aim. Negative ascetic ideals are the material, commercial, and stoical forms of asceticism insisted upon others,
which extend the demand of abstention to the spiritual goods of civilization and their enjoyment, or which want to subject even the “soul” to an arbitrary “discipline” where thoughts, feelings, and sensations are treated as soldiers who can be arrayed at will for certain “purposes.” All these types of asceticism, when found in the Christian sphere, are associations of Christian morality with the ressentiment of dying antiquity, especially of Neo-Platonism and Essenianism, or else (as the “asceticism” inaugurated by Ignatius of Loyola) an entirely modern technique of “submission to authority” that has no specific goal, but merely extends the military idea of “discipline” and “blind obedience” to the ego’s relations with its thoughts, aspirations, and feelings.
– Scheler, Ressentiment, 63.
This summarizes negatively the contemporary Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) explained by Freda McManus towards the end of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A Very Short Introduction, which likens minds and their modes to mere gears of a machine, so other people can be operated in that way as well.
On that note, human nature is shaped by one’s own mind about one’s own self, and decided across a whole lifetime of exerted possibility, not relaxed certainty in nature, necessity, and apatheia. This is also why becoming a Christian, for Kierkegaard, is truer to oneself in relation to God than being presumptive enough, as a chattering middle-class fellow is, that one has already arrived at beingChristian and can proceed to convert others into believers. Kierkegaard regarding the commercial, middle-class, and spiritless Christianity that surrounded him, in his polemic against establishment Christianity, The Moment: “I do not call myself a Christian (keeping the ideal free), but I can make it manifest that the others are that even less”.
So it is with one’s own mind in relation to truth itself, i.e., the facts of oneself, nature, and others. I do not call myself objective, emotionless, and impartial, but I can make it manifest that the others are those even less! The more chattering there is today, the less thinking. The more thinking, the less chatter. What Kierkegaard termed “objective uncertainty”, philosophy of science terms “epistemic humility”, which Hicks, Peterson, Shapiro, Murray, Lukianoff/Haidt, and Saad know nothing about. They only know how to embody the trope of men denigrating and pathologizing women who, according to the judge in Wollstonecraft’s Maria, “plead their feelings”! These men are all capable of “free speech”, certainly, but they’re incapable, or else unwilling, of freedom of thought – of transcendental, new ideas regarding old prejudices.
Simply put, naturalists abstract themselves by the Division of Labour into their own mind, into pure thinking and an eagle’s-eye view of existence, then they reduce others to mere objects by way of their chosen “facts” and “data” at the expense of our own ideas about ourselves. Such abstracted “objectivity” from a self-professed existential psychologist (whether Victor Frankl in his own concentration camp experience[4] or our more contemporary doctors) demonstrates how un-existential he is. He’s, rather, an objective observer like Gilder in his professorial surveying of populations and,
looking again and again at this incessant quantifying is harmful to the observer, who easily loses the chaste purity of the ethical, which in its holiness infinitely scorns all quantifying, which is the lust of the eye of the sensate person and the fig leaf of the sophistical.
– Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Kierkegaard warned of his passionless and objective era as it produced anonymous hand-organs – music-boxes – instead of individuals. Platitudes or “stock phrases” substitute thoughts. The parasitic self-help handbook, for instance, compels one’s mind to be wholly made up by an expert other. Then even lovers learn to “speak anonymously to each other”, wrote Kierkegaard[5]. That is to say, they are lovers objectively.
Becoming an anonymity is to live on another’s ideas and rules instead of creating one’s own, as in today’s yearning for a father figure in a sophist instead of becoming one’s own man. You see, the more the learned doctors talk empirically, chatter instead of think, the more they seem to approach the universal and answers to everything. But then one’s own free spirit does the work (or finds other spirits doing better work), only to find that sophists chatter themselves furthest away from their own sources, nostalgic era, inspired heroes, and truth claims in the manner that half-baked ideas lead to contradictory results. Compared to what was said earlier about the history of rationalizing being dogmatic, so too can one’s own many years of experience, advice-giving, scientific methods, and the empirical sciences altogether be dogmatic when they become naturalistic and devoid of thought, rationality, or ethics. That is, when they become prejudice[6]. And you see actual-historical naturalism heap prejudice upon prejudice on women during the French Revolution in an age of Enlightenment that was supposed to usher in liberty, reason, and equality.
On the basis that mental “illness” is found to be a mere metaphor in psychiatric history, not actual illness, Szasz wrote that
there is, and can be, no such thing as mental illness or psychiatric treatment; the interventions now designated as “psychiatric treatment” must be clearly identified as voluntary or involuntary: voluntary interventions are things a person does for himself in an effort to change, whereas involuntary interventions are things done to him in an effort to change him against his will; and psychiatry is not a medical but a moral and political enterprise.
– The Medicalization Of Everyday Life, 6.
Involuntary can easily be attributed to Anne-Josèphe’s institutionalization, then. It therefore constitutes an invalid use of psychiatric care, but so is attributing “insane” in general to those who aren’t and don’t require insights from psychologists such as Peterson, Saad, Haidt, and Twenge. Szasz further explained that psychology and psychiatry’s history and attempted functions were, not as truly natural or “hard” sciences, but as moralizing sciences towards the mind, which constitutes subjectivity itself, not the brain. The mind and brain still require categorical distinction wherein philosophy’s “hard problem of consciousness”, or else the mind-body problem, factors in.
Questions such as, How does man live? and, How ought man to live? traditionally have been assigned to the domains of ethics, religion, and philosophy. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, psychology and psychiatry were much more closely allied with ethics and philosophy than they are now. For example, much of what was formerly called "moral philosophy" is now called "social psychology" or simply "psychology." For the past century or so, psychologists have considered themselves, and have been accepted by others, as empirical scientists whose methods and theories are ostensibly the same as those of the biologist or physicist. Yet the fact remains that insofar as psychologists address themselves to the questions posed above, their work differs significantly from that of the natural scientist. Psychologists and psychiatrists deal with moral problems which, I believe, they cannot solve by medical methods.
– The Myth Of Mental Illness, 9.
What constitutes “hard science” might be that it is purely descriptive and value-free factuality. Yet neither are true of psychology and psychiatry, since they frequently give prescriptive (positive) and proscriptive (negative) counsel to the patient — a thinking, feeling, choosing human being. A science doesn’t suggest that tectonic plates slide less, nor that planetary bodies should abandon elliptical orbit. Thus, psychology and psychiatry impart moral imperatives to human beings, not only neurological and physiological facts. As such, phenomenological antagonism here extends far beyond CBT, Twenge, Haidt/Lukianoff, Peterson, and Saad. Phenomenology is critical of psychologists and psychiatrists more broadly because neither are practicing a hard science just yet. Instead, both sit squarely in the realm of being physicians of the soul or, more transparently, materializers of the immaterial and the objectifiers of subjectivity. Szasz also wrote, contra psychiatry and psychology, that “so-called mental health problems are not medical but human (that is, moral, social, and political) problems, we cannot solve them by therapeutic means; we must stop continuing and even intensifying our efforts to solve them by such means”[7].
Roudinesco noting the degree to which Esquirol (following Pinel) transformed the study of the human mind into zoographic (animalistic) studies irrespective of the human mind, he abstracted himself as an objective observer: “The asylum as Esquirol conceived of it was meant to resemble a zoological garden, a veritable paradise of fixity, in which species would parade, completely classified and without consciousness.”[8] As a result, Anne-Josèphe’s past and interests were completely ignored. Her liberal radicalism, psychopathologized. Yet half-baked ideas of the psychologizing, credentialed, and “experienced” expert today still lend themselves to folk psychology (as in the doubled-down gaslighting against those who even call out gaslighting), which can lead to thoughtless, tyrannical, even fatal, consequences for family members, a community, and a nation.
Where the mechanization of human life under an observer’s managerial gaze aims to "make machines of men as cannot err" (Josiah Wedgwood[9]), so can psychologizing mental processes lend itself to the mechanization (yet also the abolishment) of the soul, or the mental, in favour of the mere physical. Relevant to Kierkegaard who warned that “Physiology will ultimately expand so much that it will annex ethics”, Husserl explained:
The soul…is the residuum of a previous abstraction of the pure physical body, and according to this abstraction, at least apparently, is a complement of the body. But this abstraction (and we must not overlook this) occurs not in the epochē but in the natural scientist’s or psychologist’s way of looking at things, on the natural ground of the world as pregiven and taken for granted.
– The Crisis of the European Sciences, 79-80.
As such, the psychologizing and natural man will certainly wax rhetorical about his own soul and feelings, but if the same acts occur in the woman, the youth, the radical, the trans individual, and the lower ranks of society, they are denigrated, patronized, and reduced to physicalist explanations. Their own souls are abstracted away, unacknowledged, particularly as feelings, subjectivism, or mental disorder.
So it was with the 20th century that didn’t heed Husserl’s criticism of the natural sciences and psychology. Fuelled by a soul-crushing naturalism, psychological warfare ended up being waged by the west, across the west, against freedom (mind and soul) completely obliviously. On the topic of systems theory among the family therapy camps, the historian Paul Edwards said, as quoted in Weinstein’s The Pathological Family,
This extension of mathematical formalization into the realm of business and social problems brought with it a newfound sense of power, the hope of a technical control of social processes to equal that achieved in mechanical and electronic systems. In the systems discourses of the 1950s and 1960s, the formal techniques and tools of the ‘systems sciences’ went hand in hand with a language and ideology of technical control. (77)
Now the family is subjected to the system while Weinstein noted of the 20th century US more generally: “Critics of therapeutic culture from across the political spectrum derided its minimization of personal responsibility and bemoaned its emphasis on the individual psyche at the expense of social inequalities and the public good” (4). Ironically, such minimization of personal responsibility probably accompanied the observing and experimenting doctor entering into the family home to instruct parents on ideal personality development for their children.
Szasz noted with derision, “Personality theory: familial and social policies disguised as empirical observations and promoted as scientific laws”[10]. Contra Peterson’s insistence not to believe in human perfectibility, his own “personality” development projects today happen to only be human perfectibility dressed in psychology’s garb. Psychology and psychiatry have functional similarities where they operate through the clinic to determine what is “wrong” with people, mentally. This has been historically informed by naturalistic and objectivistic prejudices, as well as contradictions, since our knowledge and observation of anything always harbour our own subjective intending, valuing, and meaning, as Weinstein perceived in the developments of North American family therapy.
Similar to our own moral panic today, Weinstein also wrote of the mid-20th century’s US panic as “the alleged demise of the family in the face of social changes such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, changing demographic patterns of marriage and divorce, and debates about sexual morality and birth control” (25). So it was with family therapy incessantly attacking the mother’s role as “momism” in order to reassert the dominant father’s role (14). They contrived further that African American matriarchal families were “pathological”, judged so “objectively” and “naturalistically”[11]. And yet, in their experimental observations of family behaviour in hospital wards and in homes, family therapists derived their best insights from active communication and interaction with the family, i.e., in Husserl’s intersubjectivity[12]. Also, by being completely absent from the home and then listening to audio or watching film footage, family therapy’s findings were nevertheless re-arranged and viewed empirically/subjectively[13].
Family therapists – while venturing out of their Division Of Labour and into the interdisciplinary fields of sociology and anthropology – nevertheless came to the slow realization that sociality existed where mental health was concerned: that between the individual and wider, socio-economic culture, the family stood as a mediator. This societal impetus prompted the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons to write, “It is because the human personality is not ‘born’ but must be ‘made’ through the socialization process that in the first instance families are necessary”[14]. Weinstein explains that, “For Parsons, societal issues were intimately linked to individual personalities through the mechanism or ‘productive functions’ of the family, understood as a social institution whose prime function was to produce healthy personalities” (25). Exactly this sort of mechanistic view would correlate with the modern novelties of viewing the family as potentially disordered, even as “a site of disease”, to be conditioned to orderliness as “personality factories”[15]. Such judgements nevertheless fall under the subjectively and normatively intentional categories of “normal” or else “pathological”, possibly neither the universal nor the objective.
Contra family therapists, Weinstein notes, individualistic or “homeostatic” (60) psychology and psychiatry’s allotted roles became a matter of fixating on psychological explanations in order to obfuscate societal problems and influence. According to Harrington’s Mind Fixers, this happened by way of presumably scientific “mental hygiene” campaigns[16], institutionalization, lobotomization, electroshock therapy, shoddy pharmaceuticals, and psychiatric over-medicalization altogether. While speaking to the American Psychology Association (APA) from its own camp regarding its indolent rulings on homosexuality, Robert Spitzer declared that psychiatry, “once was regarded as in the vanguard of the movement to liberate people from their troubles,” but that it “is now viewed by many, and with some justification, as being an agent of social control”[17]. More than some justification. Where the positive, economic use of lobotomies was concerned, its main advocate Walter Freeman II declared, “Even if a patient is no longer able to paint pictures, write poetry, or compose music, he is, on the other hand, no longer ashamed to fetch and carry, to wait on tables or make beds or empty cans.” That is, they happened to be useful for commercial, mechanical mindlessness.
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is a critical survey of European psychiatry up to the 18th century yet Harrington keeps his book relevant to 20th century developments in North America. Significantly for this play, Foucault noted that, “late in the eighteenth century, Malesherbes would defend confinement as a right of families seeking to escape dishonor” (67). To quote Malesherbes, the French Enlightenment Encyclopédie editor directly, “It seems that the honor of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives” (67). Just as in the asylums of French cities, so too in the disquieted suburbs and cities of North America wherein generations were molded into well-adjusted mediocrities, not individuals. But at least the moral panic of juvenile “delinquency” was addressed with policy, public funding, and careers. Across many eras, where naturalistic, animalistic, and materialistic medicine endeavored to calm the mind, it frequently succeeded in destroying the mind in favour of the expert doctor’s mind, his authority, and a dependent relation, which completely contradicts “personal responsibility” in the patient[18].
There have been too many non-mental attempts to resolve mental matters. That is, the matters of spirit. The German term for the Humanities field or human sciences is Geisteswissenshaften – literally “the sciences of spirit”, and yet the natural sciences, STEM departments, and trade schools aren’t doing much for humanity except persecute the Humanities with so much ascetic, mechanical resentment veiled in comment sections and interviews[19] by their humourism and triumphalism. It could be that, with the reinvigoration of rebellion and justice alongside authentic human dignity and Christian grace, the mechanistic “world of tradesmen and police” (280), as Camus called it, would finally disappear and a harmonious culture and the creative arts could be reborn.
Husserl described phenomenology itself to be the “final form of psychology which uproots the naturalistic sense of modern psychology”[20]. Or else one is psychologized and mechanized by some other subjectivity, an expert, such that one doesn’t even have subjectivity, which is the very wellspring of one’s own meaningfulness. Without meaning, nihilism arises. Then, even Wollstonecraft’s stoic-inspired “rational suicide” becomes an act of protest against what is gendered, political, and ideological that which is allegedly ungendered, unpolitical, and unideological. Refer to Anne-Josèphe’s own Gothic, literary sibling, Maria by Wollstonecraft, because it isn’t unfounded for women to be gaslit and institutionalized on gendered grounds as far back as the 18th century.
On October 10 1793, right at the start of the Reign Of Terror, Robespierre gave a stoical speech: “This government has nothing in common with anarchy or with disorder; on the contrary, its goal requires the destruction of anarchy and disorder in order to realize a dominion of law. It has nothing in common with autocracy, for it is not inspired by personal passions.”[21] One can get a sense here – contrary to the outside narrative of the “blood drinking” extremism of revolutionary government – that the process of the Terror was stoical, dispassionate, lawyerly, and orderly. Robespierre is rather innocuously the stoic-inspired “law and order” politician here but where one’s order can be another’s chaos, as Beauvoir pointed out in Pyrrhus And Cineas. Yet Robespierre must have succumbed to passion when he later put the pistol to his mouth, only to sustain a broken jaw and a slow, agonizing march to the Guillotine. As for the stoics having suicide be a permissible act, Kierkegaard himself noted the irony: “the Stoic takes earthly sufferings, adversities, [and so forth] so lightly that they simply do not exist for him – and then suicide is still recommended as the ultimate avenue of escape”[22]. Contrary to the self-help positivity stoicism cultivates for itself today, Epictetus put the matter of rational suicide plainly: “When someone feels it to be reasonable, he’ll go off and hang himself” and – perhaps just regarding stoicism, “Your poor flesh sometimes undergoes rough treatment, and sometimes gentle. If you don’t find that to be to your profit, the door stands open.” Yet suicide, however stoic and reasonable, can prove to be vainglorious, as enacted by many stoic Girondins and then Montagnards, and could ultimately be a matter of impassioned decision.
Nowadays, we can refer to Kierkegaard’s irony regarding the passionless contemplation of suicide. “Not even a suicide these days does away with himself in desperation but deliberates on this step so long and so sensibly that he is strangled by calculation, making it a moot point whether or not he can really be called a suicide, inasmuch as it was in fact the deliberating that took his life.”[23] Then, what’s worse than passionate decision regarding suicide is the sensible calculation of objectivity, i.e., of soulless disinterest.
As soon as subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is no decision whatever, whether on this issue or any other. All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity. At no point does an observer (and that is what the objective subject is) have an infinite need for a decision, and at no point does he see it. This is the [falsehood] of objectivity and the meaning of mediation as a passing through in the continuous process in which nothing abides and in which nothing is infinitely decided either, because the movement turns back on itself and turns back again, and the movement itself is a chimera, and speculative thought is always wise afterward. Objectively understood, there are more than enough results everywhere, but no decisive result anywhere. This is quite in order, precisely because decision is rooted in subjectivity, essentially in passion, and [maximally] in the infinitely interested, personal passion for one’s eternal happiness.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Stoicism offers up objectivity at a bargain price today, as we’ve seen with phantasia kateleptike, i.e., Hadot’s “objective representations”, or else by the moral abiding of stoic natural law and the world as it merely is. Yet Kierkegaard wasn’t just being facetious as he arrived at his judgement that all sophists in our modern age would be natural scientists. In Socrates’ own time, Hippias was an especially conceited sophist from whom modern Natural Law theory gets its origins[24]. Stoics, subsequently Cicero, a lot of Christianity, the US Founding Fathers, much of liberal Enlightenment, as well as liberal natural law, liberal natural rights, and universal human rights across the world: these could all have their naturalistic origins in sophistry. Rather, rights could be constructed and degraded, could sustain or lose their universal validity, if they’re not willed into the world by decision.
Regarding nature itself, Kierkegaard intended for the mind’s resuscitation. He knew of subjectivity’s own self-deception in obscuring its own looking at nature, its idealizations, projections, and its certainty only of itself, not of nature: “As nature is sophistical—all its greatness and loveliness captivate one, as if they were the explanation, although instead the explanation of this greatness and loveliness is the invisible that cannot be seen, but only believed—so, also, is natural science sophistical”[25]. There’s a degree of one’s own agency and intentions obscured in one’s own looking when looking naturalistically. This is what several authors have also acknowledged in the 2004 essay collection Naturalism in Question, and finally from the more analytical side of philosophy as opposed to this, the continental.
All this is precisely for the same reason that Husserl criticized naturalists. They cancel the human mind and thought itself, consequently actual freedom and creativity – a cancelling that actually can and has been replicated in politics and ideology for many centuries, but not so much from the left side of the political spectrum these days. Each moment Kierkegaard was chirping out his classically liberal and objective age for being spiritless, he was attuning us to modernity’s contradictory and cancelling ways. One sees “ideological narratives”, political correctness, virtue-signalling, moral panic, cancelling, collectivist central planning, conformity, resentment, entitlement, blame, victimhood, and utopianism expressed from all sides of the political spectrum if one’s eyes are open:
Dialectically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but only the positive. How strange! Just as that freedom-loving nation of North Americans has invented the most cruel punishment, silence, so a liberal and open-minded age has invented the most illiberal chicaneries—torchlight processions at night, acclamation three times a day, a triple hip-hip-hurrah for the great ones, and similar lesser chicaneries for humble folk. The principle of sociality is precisely illiberal.
– Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Here Kierkegaard intuited that the US was acting inversely as early as 1846. To make matters worse regarding the inverse intentionality of freedom lovers, today’s objectivists, naturalists, and psychologists writing in defense of an absurd liberal/rightist socio-political order are wholly described by Sartre in 1949 – useful political function, unoriginality, and all. According to Literature And Existentialism, middle-class literature comprised of
psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the élite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed.[26]
Little actual individuality can be gain from that kind of writing. As a corrective to the social order, the middle-class subverted the rulers, then became the rulers, and correspondingly began to disdain the freedoms, the subjectivities, of those they deem below them as they required control.
This also happened in religion. Where Lutheranism and Protestantism was the corrective it was intended to be to Christianity, Kierkegaard concluded in his time that it suffered when it became a norm. “Christ is spirit, his religion that of spirit”, he said. It is also why he expresses the radical idea that “truth is subjectivity” where religious belief is concerned, yet it could also be true of everything such that “objectivity” presupposes our subjective viewing and thinking. Protestantism, on the other hand, had become more worldly, more naturalistic, more materialistic, in its increasingly commercial, spiritless ways, as one witnesses today in the US. So it could be with liberalism as the corrective to conservatism, however. If the concepts of spirit, liberality, or freedom are invoked from the religious right-wing, they don’t understand them. Assuming they have the objective, absolute truth by their God-relation, they don’t even suspect that they themselves are ideological or political.
Objectivity is the most pernicious of stances to take in politics by the liberal, centrist, or else apolitical person. It attempts to mediate and speculate a balance of the radicalism of both political wings when, to its detriment, it’s chock full of indecision. Such was the case with the French Revolution’s moderates, “The Plain” at the National Convention, who were compelled to vote this way, then that, which is veritable anonymity compared to the decisiveness of individuals and groups as diverse as The Society Of Revolutionary Republican Women, the Jacobin Club, The Enragés or “Enraged Ones”, and Napoleon. The Montagnards couldn’t have ushered in the Terror without the moderate majority’s vote.
If subjectivity entails one’s agency — and agency entails the capacity and will for decision, then to be objective entails the lack of agency. Therefore, objectivity lacks decision. Yet Kierkegaard said in the context of the age of revolution that “decision is the little magic word that existence respects”, so we might each be compelled to make a decision in subjectivity, not objectivity, in order to exist.
To be indecisive in deciding – or have an “eye turned in no direction” as Nietzsche said of ascetic priests or objective professors – happens to also be in contradiction: An “objective subject”, as Kierkegaard explained. So it typically is when somebody proclaims to be apolitical or un-ideological while making political or idea-driven arguments. Analogous to objective pretensions, the liberal world order of things contrived the “end of ideology” with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. As phenomenologists, we are nevertheless compelled to study their subjective, ideological, and political interests as they clearly also exist.
[1] Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1,
[2] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 117-8.
[3] Husserl, Ideas I.
[4] Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search For Meaning, 95.
[5] Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review.
[6] Husserl, Ideas I.
[7] The Medicalization Of Everyday Life, 8.
[8] Théroigne de Méricourt, 163.
[9] Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure Of Paine, 68.
[10] Szasz, Thomas, The Second Sin, 107.
[11] The Pathological Family, 102 and 166.
[12] “Chapter Four: Observational Practices and Natural Habitats”, Ibid.
[13] “Chapter Five: Visions Of Family Life”, Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 25
[15] “Personality Factories”, Ibid.
[16] Cohen, Sol. “The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School: The Medicalization of American Education.”
[17] Harrington, Mind Fixers, 132.
[18] Weinstein, The Pathological Family, 4.
[19] Stephen Sackur’s BBC Hardtalk interview with Jordan Peterson.
[20] Husserl, The Crises Of The European Sciences, 70.
[21] Robespierre, Maximilien, “Report On The Principles Of A Revolutionary Government”, Voices Of Revolt: Speeches Of Maximilien Robespierre, 63-4.
[22] As quoted in Rick Anthony Furtak’s “The Stoics: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Apathy”, Kierkegaard and the Greek World. Tome II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, 201.
[23] Two Ages, 68.
[24] Kainz, Howard P., Natural Law: An Introduction and Re-Examination, 2-3. Also, Koterski S.J., Father Joseph, “Lecture 5: Greek Ideas of Nature and Justice”, Natural Law and Human Nature.
[25] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Volume 4: Journals NB-NB5, 69.
[26] Sartre, Jean-Paul, Literature And Existentialism, 116-7.
In our age, the folk philosophical tick one is taught – and must grow out of – is believing one can actually be objective as a subject, whether philosophically, scientifically, politically, or otherwise. Our tried-and-true empirical formula of scientific observation tries to make one’s acquiring of objectivity so. Never mind that this entire process and the end result is animated by empiricism, as in a dependence on the subjective sensing and thinking, still not an actual objectivity that is universal and irrefutable outside of human consciousness. Objective truth reached through the empirical sciences remains only an approximation. Kierkegaard explained, mockingly, of the objectivistic attempts of Christendom. “When the matter is treated objectively, the subject cannot impassionedly relate himself to the decision, can least of all be impassionedly, infinitely interested. To be infinitely interested in relation to that which at its maximum always remains only an approximation is a self-contradiction and thus is comical.”[1] This nevertheless extends to the objectivistic pretensions of our modern era – of a subject having no partiality; no passion; no decision.
To be impartial in the contemporary understanding of “objectivity” disciplines the subject to have no ends for themselves to direct the world towards or against. The subject becomes object by having no projects; no interests; no choice. That is, no freedom; no individuality. Compelled to accomplish nothing and have few ideas except that of others, one hardly exists. “To be a human being has been abolished, and every speculative thinker confuses himself with humankind, whereby he becomes something infinitely great and nothing at all” Kierkegaard wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. So it could be with our objectivists attacking the subjectivity of others, as in Shapiro, Hicks, Saad, or else Frank Knight, a US economist of the Chicago School, who declared: “We have no concern with the pains or subjective sacrifices involved in production, since it is not at all in terms of such ‘costs’ that the entrepreneur makes his calculations on the basis of which he decides whether to produce the good or on what scale.”[2] Subjectivity, remember, is the mind so we apparently only favour the subjectivity of the entrepreneur as only “he decides” in our day.
The mind correlates with the world; the mind arrives as ideality alongside reality to posit what exists. Then phenomenology, Husserl noted, “does not remain with vague talk, with obscure universalities”; it “demands exhaustive work” [3]. Then phenomenology might require its own form of ascetic commitment but at least one doesn’t deny their own self, their own life, or their own enjoyment – let alone all those of others as is the case with stoic thrift, household frugality, and neoliberal austerity.
Regarding the spirited and positive form of asceticism that one freely chooses for oneself, Scheler juxtaposed it with Nietzsche’s critiqued form of decadent morality as negative asceticism (commercial usefulness, the disciplining of Ignatius of Loyola’s Jesuits, declining and resentful life, and the subordination of many younger generations and lower ranks of society to this day). Positive asceticism has spirit as its aim; negative asceticism, while proclaiming spirit as its aim, has only the worldly as its aim. Negative ascetic ideals are the material, commercial, and stoical forms of asceticism insisted upon others,
which extend the demand of abstention to the spiritual goods of civilization and their enjoyment, or which want to subject even the “soul” to an arbitrary “discipline” where thoughts, feelings, and sensations are treated as soldiers who can be arrayed at will for certain “purposes.” All these types of asceticism, when found in the Christian sphere, are associations of Christian morality with the ressentiment of dying antiquity, especially of Neo-Platonism and Essenianism, or else (as the “asceticism” inaugurated by Ignatius of Loyola) an entirely modern technique of “submission to authority” that has no specific goal, but merely extends the military idea of “discipline” and “blind obedience” to the ego’s relations with its thoughts, aspirations, and feelings.
– Scheler, Ressentiment, 63.
This summarizes negatively the contemporary Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) explained by Freda McManus towards the end of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A Very Short Introduction, which likens minds and their modes to mere gears of a machine, so other people can be operated in that way as well.
On that note, human nature is shaped by one’s own mind about one’s own self, and decided across a whole lifetime of exerted possibility, not relaxed certainty in nature, necessity, and apatheia. This is also why becoming a Christian, for Kierkegaard, is truer to oneself in relation to God than being presumptive enough, as a chattering middle-class fellow is, that one has already arrived at beingChristian and can proceed to convert others into believers. Kierkegaard regarding the commercial, middle-class, and spiritless Christianity that surrounded him, in his polemic against establishment Christianity, The Moment: “I do not call myself a Christian (keeping the ideal free), but I can make it manifest that the others are that even less”.
So it is with one’s own mind in relation to truth itself, i.e., the facts of oneself, nature, and others. I do not call myself objective, emotionless, and impartial, but I can make it manifest that the others are those even less! The more chattering there is today, the less thinking. The more thinking, the less chatter. What Kierkegaard termed “objective uncertainty”, philosophy of science terms “epistemic humility”, which Hicks, Peterson, Shapiro, Murray, Lukianoff/Haidt, and Saad know nothing about. They only know how to embody the trope of men denigrating and pathologizing women who, according to the judge in Wollstonecraft’s Maria, “plead their feelings”! These men are all capable of “free speech”, certainly, but they’re incapable, or else unwilling, of freedom of thought – of transcendental, new ideas regarding old prejudices.
Simply put, naturalists abstract themselves by the Division of Labour into their own mind, into pure thinking and an eagle’s-eye view of existence, then they reduce others to mere objects by way of their chosen “facts” and “data” at the expense of our own ideas about ourselves. Such abstracted “objectivity” from a self-professed existential psychologist (whether Victor Frankl in his own concentration camp experience[4] or our more contemporary doctors) demonstrates how un-existential he is. He’s, rather, an objective observer like Gilder in his professorial surveying of populations and,
looking again and again at this incessant quantifying is harmful to the observer, who easily loses the chaste purity of the ethical, which in its holiness infinitely scorns all quantifying, which is the lust of the eye of the sensate person and the fig leaf of the sophistical.
– Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Kierkegaard warned of his passionless and objective era as it produced anonymous hand-organs – music-boxes – instead of individuals. Platitudes or “stock phrases” substitute thoughts. The parasitic self-help handbook, for instance, compels one’s mind to be wholly made up by an expert other. Then even lovers learn to “speak anonymously to each other”, wrote Kierkegaard[5]. That is to say, they are lovers objectively.
Becoming an anonymity is to live on another’s ideas and rules instead of creating one’s own, as in today’s yearning for a father figure in a sophist instead of becoming one’s own man. You see, the more the learned doctors talk empirically, chatter instead of think, the more they seem to approach the universal and answers to everything. But then one’s own free spirit does the work (or finds other spirits doing better work), only to find that sophists chatter themselves furthest away from their own sources, nostalgic era, inspired heroes, and truth claims in the manner that half-baked ideas lead to contradictory results. Compared to what was said earlier about the history of rationalizing being dogmatic, so too can one’s own many years of experience, advice-giving, scientific methods, and the empirical sciences altogether be dogmatic when they become naturalistic and devoid of thought, rationality, or ethics. That is, when they become prejudice[6]. And you see actual-historical naturalism heap prejudice upon prejudice on women during the French Revolution in an age of Enlightenment that was supposed to usher in liberty, reason, and equality.
On the basis that mental “illness” is found to be a mere metaphor in psychiatric history, not actual illness, Szasz wrote that
there is, and can be, no such thing as mental illness or psychiatric treatment; the interventions now designated as “psychiatric treatment” must be clearly identified as voluntary or involuntary: voluntary interventions are things a person does for himself in an effort to change, whereas involuntary interventions are things done to him in an effort to change him against his will; and psychiatry is not a medical but a moral and political enterprise.
– The Medicalization Of Everyday Life, 6.
Involuntary can easily be attributed to Anne-Josèphe’s institutionalization, then. It therefore constitutes an invalid use of psychiatric care, but so is attributing “insane” in general to those who aren’t and don’t require insights from psychologists such as Peterson, Saad, Haidt, and Twenge. Szasz further explained that psychology and psychiatry’s history and attempted functions were, not as truly natural or “hard” sciences, but as moralizing sciences towards the mind, which constitutes subjectivity itself, not the brain. The mind and brain still require categorical distinction wherein philosophy’s “hard problem of consciousness”, or else the mind-body problem, factors in.
Questions such as, How does man live? and, How ought man to live? traditionally have been assigned to the domains of ethics, religion, and philosophy. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, psychology and psychiatry were much more closely allied with ethics and philosophy than they are now. For example, much of what was formerly called "moral philosophy" is now called "social psychology" or simply "psychology." For the past century or so, psychologists have considered themselves, and have been accepted by others, as empirical scientists whose methods and theories are ostensibly the same as those of the biologist or physicist. Yet the fact remains that insofar as psychologists address themselves to the questions posed above, their work differs significantly from that of the natural scientist. Psychologists and psychiatrists deal with moral problems which, I believe, they cannot solve by medical methods.
– The Myth Of Mental Illness, 9.
What constitutes “hard science” might be that it is purely descriptive and value-free factuality. Yet neither are true of psychology and psychiatry, since they frequently give prescriptive (positive) and proscriptive (negative) counsel to the patient — a thinking, feeling, choosing human being. A science doesn’t suggest that tectonic plates slide less, nor that planetary bodies should abandon elliptical orbit. Thus, psychology and psychiatry impart moral imperatives to human beings, not only neurological and physiological facts. As such, phenomenological antagonism here extends far beyond CBT, Twenge, Haidt/Lukianoff, Peterson, and Saad. Phenomenology is critical of psychologists and psychiatrists more broadly because neither are practicing a hard science just yet. Instead, both sit squarely in the realm of being physicians of the soul or, more transparently, materializers of the immaterial and the objectifiers of subjectivity. Szasz also wrote, contra psychiatry and psychology, that “so-called mental health problems are not medical but human (that is, moral, social, and political) problems, we cannot solve them by therapeutic means; we must stop continuing and even intensifying our efforts to solve them by such means”[7].
Roudinesco noting the degree to which Esquirol (following Pinel) transformed the study of the human mind into zoographic (animalistic) studies irrespective of the human mind, he abstracted himself as an objective observer: “The asylum as Esquirol conceived of it was meant to resemble a zoological garden, a veritable paradise of fixity, in which species would parade, completely classified and without consciousness.”[8] As a result, Anne-Josèphe’s past and interests were completely ignored. Her liberal radicalism, psychopathologized. Yet half-baked ideas of the psychologizing, credentialed, and “experienced” expert today still lend themselves to folk psychology (as in the doubled-down gaslighting against those who even call out gaslighting), which can lead to thoughtless, tyrannical, even fatal, consequences for family members, a community, and a nation.
Where the mechanization of human life under an observer’s managerial gaze aims to "make machines of men as cannot err" (Josiah Wedgwood[9]), so can psychologizing mental processes lend itself to the mechanization (yet also the abolishment) of the soul, or the mental, in favour of the mere physical. Relevant to Kierkegaard who warned that “Physiology will ultimately expand so much that it will annex ethics”, Husserl explained:
The soul…is the residuum of a previous abstraction of the pure physical body, and according to this abstraction, at least apparently, is a complement of the body. But this abstraction (and we must not overlook this) occurs not in the epochē but in the natural scientist’s or psychologist’s way of looking at things, on the natural ground of the world as pregiven and taken for granted.
– The Crisis of the European Sciences, 79-80.
As such, the psychologizing and natural man will certainly wax rhetorical about his own soul and feelings, but if the same acts occur in the woman, the youth, the radical, the trans individual, and the lower ranks of society, they are denigrated, patronized, and reduced to physicalist explanations. Their own souls are abstracted away, unacknowledged, particularly as feelings, subjectivism, or mental disorder.
So it was with the 20th century that didn’t heed Husserl’s criticism of the natural sciences and psychology. Fuelled by a soul-crushing naturalism, psychological warfare ended up being waged by the west, across the west, against freedom (mind and soul) completely obliviously. On the topic of systems theory among the family therapy camps, the historian Paul Edwards said, as quoted in Weinstein’s The Pathological Family,
This extension of mathematical formalization into the realm of business and social problems brought with it a newfound sense of power, the hope of a technical control of social processes to equal that achieved in mechanical and electronic systems. In the systems discourses of the 1950s and 1960s, the formal techniques and tools of the ‘systems sciences’ went hand in hand with a language and ideology of technical control. (77)
Now the family is subjected to the system while Weinstein noted of the 20th century US more generally: “Critics of therapeutic culture from across the political spectrum derided its minimization of personal responsibility and bemoaned its emphasis on the individual psyche at the expense of social inequalities and the public good” (4). Ironically, such minimization of personal responsibility probably accompanied the observing and experimenting doctor entering into the family home to instruct parents on ideal personality development for their children.
Szasz noted with derision, “Personality theory: familial and social policies disguised as empirical observations and promoted as scientific laws”[10]. Contra Peterson’s insistence not to believe in human perfectibility, his own “personality” development projects today happen to only be human perfectibility dressed in psychology’s garb. Psychology and psychiatry have functional similarities where they operate through the clinic to determine what is “wrong” with people, mentally. This has been historically informed by naturalistic and objectivistic prejudices, as well as contradictions, since our knowledge and observation of anything always harbour our own subjective intending, valuing, and meaning, as Weinstein perceived in the developments of North American family therapy.
Similar to our own moral panic today, Weinstein also wrote of the mid-20th century’s US panic as “the alleged demise of the family in the face of social changes such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, changing demographic patterns of marriage and divorce, and debates about sexual morality and birth control” (25). So it was with family therapy incessantly attacking the mother’s role as “momism” in order to reassert the dominant father’s role (14). They contrived further that African American matriarchal families were “pathological”, judged so “objectively” and “naturalistically”[11]. And yet, in their experimental observations of family behaviour in hospital wards and in homes, family therapists derived their best insights from active communication and interaction with the family, i.e., in Husserl’s intersubjectivity[12]. Also, by being completely absent from the home and then listening to audio or watching film footage, family therapy’s findings were nevertheless re-arranged and viewed empirically/subjectively[13].
Family therapists – while venturing out of their Division Of Labour and into the interdisciplinary fields of sociology and anthropology – nevertheless came to the slow realization that sociality existed where mental health was concerned: that between the individual and wider, socio-economic culture, the family stood as a mediator. This societal impetus prompted the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons to write, “It is because the human personality is not ‘born’ but must be ‘made’ through the socialization process that in the first instance families are necessary”[14]. Weinstein explains that, “For Parsons, societal issues were intimately linked to individual personalities through the mechanism or ‘productive functions’ of the family, understood as a social institution whose prime function was to produce healthy personalities” (25). Exactly this sort of mechanistic view would correlate with the modern novelties of viewing the family as potentially disordered, even as “a site of disease”, to be conditioned to orderliness as “personality factories”[15]. Such judgements nevertheless fall under the subjectively and normatively intentional categories of “normal” or else “pathological”, possibly neither the universal nor the objective.
Contra family therapists, Weinstein notes, individualistic or “homeostatic” (60) psychology and psychiatry’s allotted roles became a matter of fixating on psychological explanations in order to obfuscate societal problems and influence. According to Harrington’s Mind Fixers, this happened by way of presumably scientific “mental hygiene” campaigns[16], institutionalization, lobotomization, electroshock therapy, shoddy pharmaceuticals, and psychiatric over-medicalization altogether. While speaking to the American Psychology Association (APA) from its own camp regarding its indolent rulings on homosexuality, Robert Spitzer declared that psychiatry, “once was regarded as in the vanguard of the movement to liberate people from their troubles,” but that it “is now viewed by many, and with some justification, as being an agent of social control”[17]. More than some justification. Where the positive, economic use of lobotomies was concerned, its main advocate Walter Freeman II declared, “Even if a patient is no longer able to paint pictures, write poetry, or compose music, he is, on the other hand, no longer ashamed to fetch and carry, to wait on tables or make beds or empty cans.” That is, they happened to be useful for commercial, mechanical mindlessness.
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is a critical survey of European psychiatry up to the 18th century yet Harrington keeps his book relevant to 20th century developments in North America. Significantly for this play, Foucault noted that, “late in the eighteenth century, Malesherbes would defend confinement as a right of families seeking to escape dishonor” (67). To quote Malesherbes, the French Enlightenment Encyclopédie editor directly, “It seems that the honor of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives” (67). Just as in the asylums of French cities, so too in the disquieted suburbs and cities of North America wherein generations were molded into well-adjusted mediocrities, not individuals. But at least the moral panic of juvenile “delinquency” was addressed with policy, public funding, and careers. Across many eras, where naturalistic, animalistic, and materialistic medicine endeavored to calm the mind, it frequently succeeded in destroying the mind in favour of the expert doctor’s mind, his authority, and a dependent relation, which completely contradicts “personal responsibility” in the patient[18].
There have been too many non-mental attempts to resolve mental matters. That is, the matters of spirit. The German term for the Humanities field or human sciences is Geisteswissenshaften – literally “the sciences of spirit”, and yet the natural sciences, STEM departments, and trade schools aren’t doing much for humanity except persecute the Humanities with so much ascetic, mechanical resentment veiled in comment sections and interviews[19] by their humourism and triumphalism. It could be that, with the reinvigoration of rebellion and justice alongside authentic human dignity and Christian grace, the mechanistic “world of tradesmen and police” (280), as Camus called it, would finally disappear and a harmonious culture and the creative arts could be reborn.
Husserl described phenomenology itself to be the “final form of psychology which uproots the naturalistic sense of modern psychology”[20]. Or else one is psychologized and mechanized by some other subjectivity, an expert, such that one doesn’t even have subjectivity, which is the very wellspring of one’s own meaningfulness. Without meaning, nihilism arises. Then, even Wollstonecraft’s stoic-inspired “rational suicide” becomes an act of protest against what is gendered, political, and ideological that which is allegedly ungendered, unpolitical, and unideological. Refer to Anne-Josèphe’s own Gothic, literary sibling, Maria by Wollstonecraft, because it isn’t unfounded for women to be gaslit and institutionalized on gendered grounds as far back as the 18th century.
On October 10 1793, right at the start of the Reign Of Terror, Robespierre gave a stoical speech: “This government has nothing in common with anarchy or with disorder; on the contrary, its goal requires the destruction of anarchy and disorder in order to realize a dominion of law. It has nothing in common with autocracy, for it is not inspired by personal passions.”[21] One can get a sense here – contrary to the outside narrative of the “blood drinking” extremism of revolutionary government – that the process of the Terror was stoical, dispassionate, lawyerly, and orderly. Robespierre is rather innocuously the stoic-inspired “law and order” politician here but where one’s order can be another’s chaos, as Beauvoir pointed out in Pyrrhus And Cineas. Yet Robespierre must have succumbed to passion when he later put the pistol to his mouth, only to sustain a broken jaw and a slow, agonizing march to the Guillotine. As for the stoics having suicide be a permissible act, Kierkegaard himself noted the irony: “the Stoic takes earthly sufferings, adversities, [and so forth] so lightly that they simply do not exist for him – and then suicide is still recommended as the ultimate avenue of escape”[22]. Contrary to the self-help positivity stoicism cultivates for itself today, Epictetus put the matter of rational suicide plainly: “When someone feels it to be reasonable, he’ll go off and hang himself” and – perhaps just regarding stoicism, “Your poor flesh sometimes undergoes rough treatment, and sometimes gentle. If you don’t find that to be to your profit, the door stands open.” Yet suicide, however stoic and reasonable, can prove to be vainglorious, as enacted by many stoic Girondins and then Montagnards, and could ultimately be a matter of impassioned decision.
Nowadays, we can refer to Kierkegaard’s irony regarding the passionless contemplation of suicide. “Not even a suicide these days does away with himself in desperation but deliberates on this step so long and so sensibly that he is strangled by calculation, making it a moot point whether or not he can really be called a suicide, inasmuch as it was in fact the deliberating that took his life.”[23] Then, what’s worse than passionate decision regarding suicide is the sensible calculation of objectivity, i.e., of soulless disinterest.
As soon as subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is no decision whatever, whether on this issue or any other. All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity. At no point does an observer (and that is what the objective subject is) have an infinite need for a decision, and at no point does he see it. This is the [falsehood] of objectivity and the meaning of mediation as a passing through in the continuous process in which nothing abides and in which nothing is infinitely decided either, because the movement turns back on itself and turns back again, and the movement itself is a chimera, and speculative thought is always wise afterward. Objectively understood, there are more than enough results everywhere, but no decisive result anywhere. This is quite in order, precisely because decision is rooted in subjectivity, essentially in passion, and [maximally] in the infinitely interested, personal passion for one’s eternal happiness.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Stoicism offers up objectivity at a bargain price today, as we’ve seen with phantasia kateleptike, i.e., Hadot’s “objective representations”, or else by the moral abiding of stoic natural law and the world as it merely is. Yet Kierkegaard wasn’t just being facetious as he arrived at his judgement that all sophists in our modern age would be natural scientists. In Socrates’ own time, Hippias was an especially conceited sophist from whom modern Natural Law theory gets its origins[24]. Stoics, subsequently Cicero, a lot of Christianity, the US Founding Fathers, much of liberal Enlightenment, as well as liberal natural law, liberal natural rights, and universal human rights across the world: these could all have their naturalistic origins in sophistry. Rather, rights could be constructed and degraded, could sustain or lose their universal validity, if they’re not willed into the world by decision.
Regarding nature itself, Kierkegaard intended for the mind’s resuscitation. He knew of subjectivity’s own self-deception in obscuring its own looking at nature, its idealizations, projections, and its certainty only of itself, not of nature: “As nature is sophistical—all its greatness and loveliness captivate one, as if they were the explanation, although instead the explanation of this greatness and loveliness is the invisible that cannot be seen, but only believed—so, also, is natural science sophistical”[25]. There’s a degree of one’s own agency and intentions obscured in one’s own looking when looking naturalistically. This is what several authors have also acknowledged in the 2004 essay collection Naturalism in Question, and finally from the more analytical side of philosophy as opposed to this, the continental.
All this is precisely for the same reason that Husserl criticized naturalists. They cancel the human mind and thought itself, consequently actual freedom and creativity – a cancelling that actually can and has been replicated in politics and ideology for many centuries, but not so much from the left side of the political spectrum these days. Each moment Kierkegaard was chirping out his classically liberal and objective age for being spiritless, he was attuning us to modernity’s contradictory and cancelling ways. One sees “ideological narratives”, political correctness, virtue-signalling, moral panic, cancelling, collectivist central planning, conformity, resentment, entitlement, blame, victimhood, and utopianism expressed from all sides of the political spectrum if one’s eyes are open:
Dialectically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but only the positive. How strange! Just as that freedom-loving nation of North Americans has invented the most cruel punishment, silence, so a liberal and open-minded age has invented the most illiberal chicaneries—torchlight processions at night, acclamation three times a day, a triple hip-hip-hurrah for the great ones, and similar lesser chicaneries for humble folk. The principle of sociality is precisely illiberal.
– Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Here Kierkegaard intuited that the US was acting inversely as early as 1846. To make matters worse regarding the inverse intentionality of freedom lovers, today’s objectivists, naturalists, and psychologists writing in defense of an absurd liberal/rightist socio-political order are wholly described by Sartre in 1949 – useful political function, unoriginality, and all. According to Literature And Existentialism, middle-class literature comprised of
psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the élite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed.[26]
Little actual individuality can be gain from that kind of writing. As a corrective to the social order, the middle-class subverted the rulers, then became the rulers, and correspondingly began to disdain the freedoms, the subjectivities, of those they deem below them as they required control.
This also happened in religion. Where Lutheranism and Protestantism was the corrective it was intended to be to Christianity, Kierkegaard concluded in his time that it suffered when it became a norm. “Christ is spirit, his religion that of spirit”, he said. It is also why he expresses the radical idea that “truth is subjectivity” where religious belief is concerned, yet it could also be true of everything such that “objectivity” presupposes our subjective viewing and thinking. Protestantism, on the other hand, had become more worldly, more naturalistic, more materialistic, in its increasingly commercial, spiritless ways, as one witnesses today in the US. So it could be with liberalism as the corrective to conservatism, however. If the concepts of spirit, liberality, or freedom are invoked from the religious right-wing, they don’t understand them. Assuming they have the objective, absolute truth by their God-relation, they don’t even suspect that they themselves are ideological or political.
Objectivity is the most pernicious of stances to take in politics by the liberal, centrist, or else apolitical person. It attempts to mediate and speculate a balance of the radicalism of both political wings when, to its detriment, it’s chock full of indecision. Such was the case with the French Revolution’s moderates, “The Plain” at the National Convention, who were compelled to vote this way, then that, which is veritable anonymity compared to the decisiveness of individuals and groups as diverse as The Society Of Revolutionary Republican Women, the Jacobin Club, The Enragés or “Enraged Ones”, and Napoleon. The Montagnards couldn’t have ushered in the Terror without the moderate majority’s vote.
If subjectivity entails one’s agency — and agency entails the capacity and will for decision, then to be objective entails the lack of agency. Therefore, objectivity lacks decision. Yet Kierkegaard said in the context of the age of revolution that “decision is the little magic word that existence respects”, so we might each be compelled to make a decision in subjectivity, not objectivity, in order to exist.
To be indecisive in deciding – or have an “eye turned in no direction” as Nietzsche said of ascetic priests or objective professors – happens to also be in contradiction: An “objective subject”, as Kierkegaard explained. So it typically is when somebody proclaims to be apolitical or un-ideological while making political or idea-driven arguments. Analogous to objective pretensions, the liberal world order of things contrived the “end of ideology” with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. As phenomenologists, we are nevertheless compelled to study their subjective, ideological, and political interests as they clearly also exist.
[1] Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1,
[2] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 117-8.
[3] Husserl, Ideas I.
[4] Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search For Meaning, 95.
[5] Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review.
[6] Husserl, Ideas I.
[7] The Medicalization Of Everyday Life, 8.
[8] Théroigne de Méricourt, 163.
[9] Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure Of Paine, 68.
[10] Szasz, Thomas, The Second Sin, 107.
[11] The Pathological Family, 102 and 166.
[12] “Chapter Four: Observational Practices and Natural Habitats”, Ibid.
[13] “Chapter Five: Visions Of Family Life”, Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 25
[15] “Personality Factories”, Ibid.
[16] Cohen, Sol. “The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School: The Medicalization of American Education.”
[17] Harrington, Mind Fixers, 132.
[18] Weinstein, The Pathological Family, 4.
[19] Stephen Sackur’s BBC Hardtalk interview with Jordan Peterson.
[20] Husserl, The Crises Of The European Sciences, 70.
[21] Robespierre, Maximilien, “Report On The Principles Of A Revolutionary Government”, Voices Of Revolt: Speeches Of Maximilien Robespierre, 63-4.
[22] As quoted in Rick Anthony Furtak’s “The Stoics: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Apathy”, Kierkegaard and the Greek World. Tome II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, 201.
[23] Two Ages, 68.
[24] Kainz, Howard P., Natural Law: An Introduction and Re-Examination, 2-3. Also, Koterski S.J., Father Joseph, “Lecture 5: Greek Ideas of Nature and Justice”, Natural Law and Human Nature.
[25] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Volume 4: Journals NB-NB5, 69.
[26] Sartre, Jean-Paul, Literature And Existentialism, 116-7.
