Objectivity is an abstraction, obviously. We only ever have access to direct, subjective experience. Even the stories (theories, concepts, interpretations) we tell about those experiences are themselves experienced. So don’t you think it’s weird that we favour that to which we never have direct access – namely, objective truth – over that which is – namely, subjective experience?
Descartes was famous for his cogito: I think, therefore I am. He saw that our perceptions often fail us, such as when a stick appears to bend when placed in water. Wishing to find solid epistemological ground, he found that his doubting could not be refuted; therefore it seems safe to believe in the existence of a doubter.
Interestingly, there isn’t a need for the “I” in Descartes thought experiment. If he does not invoke anything beyond that which can be experienced directly, the most solid bare fact is: this is. There’s something rather than nothing. Existence. Moreover, there is something that it’s like to exist. Consciousness. “I” is a concept that is imposed onto this existence-consciousness; it is one of the many things we take to have independent, objective existence that is, in fact, conjured by the mind.
One never comes into contact with bare naked truth. She always comes clothed in the imperfect rags of human perception, at least as far as we know. So why do we believe She can be naked, if we’ve never seen Her so? In other words, what makes us believe in the existence of perceiver-free truths when we’ve only ever and can only ever receive perceiver-meditated “truths”.
Kant argued that human knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world as it appears to us through our senses. However, he believed that the “ground” or source of sensory data was the noumenal world – reality that exists independently of perception. Echoing Plato’s theory of forms, Kant famously argued that we never come into contact with the thing-in-itself.
Well, that’s strange isn’t it? To ground reality in something unknowable? Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to ground our picture of reality on that which we know with certainty, namely, direct experience? In which case, objective truth is a useful abstraction, just like the thing-in-itself, but ultimately fictional.
Perhaps there is no “truth” without perceivers. Perhaps there is no existence without consciousness. If these things are inextricable, perhaps they were never meant to be separated. Now you may say, the universe and truths exist whether or not anyone is conscious of them. Really? Where’s your proof? Anything you say appeals to conscious perception, obviously. So why not ground reality in that? Why take the fiction more seriously than the brute fact?
Passions with Reasons - Musings from heart and mind. 