Objectivity (Buber and Polanyi)

November 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The traditions of objectivity place the material of that objectivity in a shared interpersonal space in front of each and all possible viewers. The (arte)facts of such objectivity are rendered as knowledge objects in this imaginal conceptual space. There is a fact that both you and I can agree upon, and if put in the right light is self-evident to everyone else also, (the Earth is round, parallel lines never meet, all things must pass). The fact is an objective fact and has the same status as any other object.

The question then becomes, what is an appropriate relationship for me to have with that object? What is your relationship? Is yours the same as mine? A number of options are possible; if we are fresh from reading Martin Buber we might have a choice of striking up a relation of I-it, in which we preserve the object’s inanimate sovereignty, but at the cost of rendering ourselves similarly lifeless and regally removed from the situation. Or we might try to establish an I-Thou relationship in which both the object and ourselves are mutually potentiated by contact.

Alternatively, we may have come to the question after reading Polanyi, and recognise in our apprehension of the object a certain direction, a kind of vectorial aspect to our relationship. We may feel that the object over these in shared conceptual space lies at the end of a line of intentionality that begins at the source of our own self. We may sense the ‘from-to’ nature of this intentionality; here I am and there is the object, and what I know of it is the result of the pouring of perception from here to there, an outpouring which oddly leaves my own body in its wake so that I feel myself not located entirely at the source but eccentrically and ecstatically projected forward toward the object. In the from-to relationship this projection is welcomed and a sense of rapport, compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling may be invoked. The from-to light does not simply stop at the surface of the object but penetrates, connects, warms, and co-illuminates. It has a place to go to and it feels like home. Or, to stay with Polanyi, our relationship of projected intention may be less ‘from-to’ and more ‘from-at’, in which the object is given no power to receive our transmissions, and while the gaze may originate here, with the self, there is no end to the journey of our perception. The view into the shared space does not resolve onto an object of (comm)union but is interrupted by an object of the imperial empirical state.

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