Through recent discussions, I’ve found myself wanting to clarify where my own sympathies lie.
I find myself strongly resonating with the view associated with Merleau-Ponty — the idea that we cannot be certain that an objective world exists as a fully completed structure, entirely independent of observation or engagement.
This is not a denial of the world’s existence. Rather, it is a refusal to take for granted the assumption that the world is given to us as a finished object, already complete before any encounter with it.
We are not beings who apprehend the world from a completely detached, external standpoint. We are embodied, acting, perceiving beings who are always already involved with it — through movement, observation, and interaction.
In that sense, objectivity seems less like something guaranteed prior to experience, and more like something that gradually stabilizes through engagement, sharing, and repetition.
This is not the claim that “everything is subjective.” It is simply the sense that we do not need to presuppose a purely observer-independent, unquestionably objective world in order to think meaningfully about reality at all.
Yes. Observation is a natural phenomenon. As such, it is a “property” of the thing being observed, that is to say, observation is self-referential. Therefore even the concept of an objective anything is fundamentally suspect.
There is no evidence to support the existence of “objectivity” - it is a leap of logic, and when I say leap I mean it is a claim that stands apart from evidence and is disconnected from the evidence. It is a presupposition, an axiom arrived at by choice not by reasoning from first principles.
And there is empirical evidence to support that the claim of objectivity is in fact a choice driven by a motivation (as all choices are). If we assume it was a choice, then we would assume there’s a motivation for that choice of creating separation, and we should see that choice being repeated in multiple domains. Lo, where do we find objectivity emerging but in the pre-Socratics of Ancient Greece, the same place we find choice-driven separations in aesthetics (arthroi), metaphysics (waves hand at everything), ethics (virtues), medicine (body as parts instead of body as system), the natural world (biological taxonomies), epistemology, etc.
Objectivity is belief first and then is rationalized post hoc. And we have evidence to support this claim as well. What does psychological research tell us about the behavior of individuals who have post hoc rationalized beliefs when they encounter disagreement? They respond emotionally to protect their psyche. What happened when Europeans - who built their entire civilization integrated with the objectivity of the Ancient Greeks, layer by layer with religion, philosophy, science, politics, and social mores - what happened when they encountered any other civilization that did not center objectivity and instead had more relative, relational, and subjective philosophical approaches to their entire lives? They killed them. They denigrated them. They outlawed their ideas. They ridiculed them and anyone who thought seriously about studying them. They barred people as unfit to practice professions. They suppressed research that was actually sound. In short, they reacted emotionally to protect their individual psyches (and we can go further as say their collective psyche, but some will object to that language).
So, yes. We cannot be certain an objective world exists. It’s not a rejection of the world, but rather a rejection of objectivity. It is those who are emotionally attached to the choice of objectivity via their post hoc rationalization and their deep social insecurity for going against their society’s deeply held beliefs that say “denying objectivity denies the external world”. That’s a non-sequitur. An external world can exist and also not be objective.
I agree with you that objectivity is not something supported by evidence in itself, and that it often functions more like a belief that is later rationalized.
And yet, from there, my thinking has started to move in a slightly different direction.
I’ve come to think that some form of subjectivity is unavoidable — not as an individual or relative perspective, but as a necessary condition for reality to appear as one coherent whole at all.
Even if we reject objectivity as a presupposition, the fact that reality is intelligible as a unified system still seems to require an account.
This line of thought was triggered by encountering a particular paper that attempts to approach these questions not only philosophically, but through scientific experimentation. Since then, my thinking has been moving in this direction.