Objective reality or how I learned to overcome

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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the very words, Objective reality… would suggests
that there is some point in which we can be
‘‘objective’’…but let us take a look at this…

let us say, I see a tree… can we be objective about
this? I don’t see how… everything I know about a tree,
has been taught to me… through education, I have learned
about tree’s… but the thing about education, it isn’t objective…
by its very nature, education is biased… and bias, by its
very nature is partial, slanted, dogmatic…
How so Kropotkin? The very nature of education is
biased because of how its presented… we see tree’s
through our own biases, which were taught to us…
For example, a tree, an example taught by a biologist,
would look very different than a tree taught by a
very religious person… a religious person would teach
a tree comes from god and it a sign of god’s greatness…
in other words, the ideology a person has, impacts how
people see tree’s… or broader still, the ideology
one has, impacts how we see the world…
this is a biased impact on how we see the world…
and we all see tree’s differently because we were
taught by people with different ideologies… where some
focused on certain aspects of the tree… for example,
a businessman, might see the tree in terms of they can
profit off the tree… how much money can they get for that
tree or its wood… an environmentalist would see the tree in
a different light, for its very presence comes from the beauty
of nature… and a religious person would see that tree as
evidence of god… given that people, all people were taught
by people with different agendas and biases, at no point can
we reach an ‘‘objective’’ viewpoint of trees…
for because of our own, by education, biases,
each of us see’s trees differently… to be ‘‘objective’’
one would have to see that tree without any bias or
prejudice… but that is impossible… the very way
we are taught about trees is biased… education itself
is biased… I use education in the broadest term possible…
we begin our education at the day of birth…
long before we go to school, we are educated by people
with biases and prejudices… and we learn about the world
through the biases and prejudices of others… if my parents
are religious, then I learn about trees through the lens of
the religious, and if my parents are not religious, then
I learn about trees through non-religious biases…
a tree is to be climbed on, to be used for fire,
to build houses… we see wood in many different
forms within our biases…and if everyone has been
taught with different biases, then how can we achieve
a ‘‘objective’’ viewpoint?

We see the world through a vast number of taught biases and
prejudices… if you are taught about something by a number of
people, how do we get to an ‘‘objective’’ viewpoint, if
every one of those people teach through their biases?
and one might say, I am not biased or prejudiced,
I see the world ‘‘objectively’’… the question becomes
who exactly are you lying to? the other person or
yourself? We cannot do anything else but see the world
through our biases and prejudices… conservatives see
the world vastly different than liberals because of the
initial biases of both… for example, conservatives begin
with their bias that all people, themselves excepted of course,
are bad or out to do bad/evil things… thus, the conservative
need to build prisons before schools… whereas liberals see
people as inherently good, or they need education to find
the path to being good…this very inherent bias about
people, dictates how one feels about people right from the
start… we see people through our taught biases…
and there cannot be any sort of ‘‘objective’’ collective,
universal, objective view of people… we see a person,
and we see that person through our biases, our
prejudices… we cannot see another person any
other way than through our biases, our prejudices…
there is no objective, universal way to see people…
because of the time and place I was raised, my biases
and prejudices are different than one born in another time
or place… because of my biases, I see things differently
than you do… to this day, I am still uncomfortable seeing
gays kiss… I was probably in my 20’s before I saw any
gays kissing… and that is, one of my educated biases,
having grown up in the Mid-west… I didn’t see any
out gays… and yet, I fully support gays in the exact
same way I support men and women… in loving
another, in marriage, in adopting children, gays should
have everything that a heterosexual marriage has…
and that is one conflict I have, between the education
I received, against gays and my current beliefs/biases…
to a large extent, I overcame my education, the biases I
was taught by other biased, prejudice people… and I suspect
that to my dying day, I will cringe whenever I see homosexuals
kiss… but overcoming is the key word here…

I grew up with the bias that ‘‘America is the greatest country on
earth’’… that was a very common bias of my youth… but we
are no longer the ‘‘city on the hill’’ that Raygun spoke about…
but to many people, we are still the moral leaders of the world…
but we lost that title decades ago… I was, as so many people were,
impacted by the events of the last 60 years, from Vietnam to
IQ45’s destruction of America… from Vietnam to Watergate…
many people’s faith in America was shattered by these two
events… It is hard to have faith in America when it no longer
cares about doing the ‘‘moral’’ right thing… from allowing
torture to ‘‘protect’’ Americans, to preempted drone strikes,
killing people… we have lost the high moral ground and yet,
that is my own viewpoint, my own bias… where can we
find an objective viewpoint of morality when everyone has
a vastly different idea of ‘‘what is moral?’’

I cannot find an objective, universal, eternal viewpoint…
for every single viewpoint has its basis in the biases
of those who taught us our viewpoints…

The bible, the word of god, makes it a point, in
its ten commandments, to say, thou shall not kill…
and yet, god himself, kills millions of people,
one estimate is roughly 2.4 million people are killed by
god… Satan by the way, in the bible, kills 10 people…
Who is more moral in this regard? Who better follows
the 10 commandments rule, thou shall not kill?

This is one example of how we can frame an argument
to back up or support our biases, our viewpoints…
if one can frame an argument like this, it isn’t objective,
nor is it universal or eternal… and we human beings
are always reframing an argument to better fit our own
personal biases, prejudices…

so, when Nietzsche talks about overcoming, what exactly is
he talking about? Overcoming our previously taught biases
and prejudices… overcoming our education…
we are taught by others, within their own biases
and prejudices and they simply teach us their
own biases and prejudices… that is the nature
of education… what is one way to overcome
our education? with facts… for example,
science tells us that the Earth is roughly 93 million
miles from the Sun…that is a fact, which cannot
be biased, or prejudiced… it is by facts that we
can overcome… the bias comes from our
interpretation of those facts…The Earth is in
the goldilocks area of the solar system…
any closer and we don’t survive and any further,
we don’t survive… now religions might say, god
put us into the goldilocks part of space… but that
is, once again, bias and prejudice…our interpretations
of the facts is from our childhood biases and prejudices…
and is not objective nor is it eternal or universal…
the Greeks or Romans had no idea that the Earth
is 93 million miles from the Sun…and even today,
we see people make interpretations of the facts that
are not supported by the facts… people have seen a
small part of a city burned; thus, they assume that the
entire city was burned downed… this is a common bias
of conservatives… they saw pictures of Portland, one
very small section of Portland burn, and by their
biases and prejudices, they assumed the entire city
burned downed… (spoiler alert, it didn’t)
but because of their own biases and prejudices,
they make a wrong assumption… and therein lies
the tale of biases and prejudices… it usually leads
to a wrong interpretation of the facts…
and how do we overcome the bias that comes
from our education?

by the Socratic mottos, one; to know thyself
two: the unexamined life isn’t worth living…

if we examined our own personal biases, taught
to us as children in the form of education…
we can, if we are honest, discover our childhood
biases and prejudices and learn to overcome them…
replace our childhood indoctrinations/biases, with
our own understanding of the world…I was
taught that ‘‘America is the greatest country on Earth’’
but the reality is we are far, far from it… but I could
only come to this realization by overcoming my
own childhood indoctrinations/biases…

so, your viewpoint is controlled by your biases and prejudices,
your childhood indoctrinations…do we live our lives
with our childhood indoctrinations that we no longer hold
to be true, or do we overcome and work out what we
really believe in… what our beliefs really are, not
our childhood biases… this is the true meaning of
overcoming… and the point of our own examination of
our biases and prejudice… not to be objective,
or universal or eternal, but to be true to what we
really hold as our reality… our own viewpoint…

Kropotkin

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It is objectively true that a living tree has roots. Therefore businessman, environmentalist and religious person will all agree. There are several facts about trees that are objective. I don’t think there are schools that teach that trees don’t have roots.

Many things are objectively true.

You have very firm beliefs that you present as objective facts, such as that only democracy really produces art (which I countered with the Renaissance), that Trump is bad, that there is no God…

“so, when Nietzsche talks about overcoming, what exactly is
he talking about? Overcoming our previously taught biases
and prejudices… overcoming our education…”

Rather overcoming weak tendencies, such as through fighting hard battles. Of course he also said man is something to overcome. He certainly didn’t scorn education in general, he was a teacher himself, both at university as philologist and privately as a philosopher.

“I cannot find an objective, universal, eternal viewpoint…”

Because ‘viewpoint’, i.e. perspective, is necessarily subjective. Even though it objectively exists. You have to be responsible for your own judgment.

You look for an unshakable interpretation of the meaning of life. The fact that you are able, as a being, to give meaning, to bestow value, is objective and should be enough. A ground to build on, or plant a tree in.

What you might overcome is the need for universality of values. You could value your valuing for its own sake, find the objective power in that.

1 Like
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valuer=valuer

It’s the golden rule, man.

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Objectivity is a paradox since it denies the personal experience yet is wholly dependant on it.
let’s create an example
When a person want to understand what is objective they chose a topic. ALready we are on shakey ground since the very choice of the subject is, well.. , Subjective.
So our person is interested in finding a way to objectively assess the tartness of lemons,

He asks 100 people and they report stuff like “very tart”, “normal tartness”, Not very, - you get the idea. This is all based on their personal experiences.
SO he makes a machine that isolates the chemical that causes the “tartness” taste in humans.
After test 1000 lemons he declares his Patent Tartness quotient. Lemons henceforth will be nominated from a scale of 100 to zero according to his scale.

So now taking the orignal lemon he declares the lemon to have a tartness of 42.6.
Meaning - nothing.
So why is tarness objectively important?
What happens when lemons arrive that are off the 100 scale.
How do you reconcile the real lived experience of people who think that 42.6 is very tart whilst others think it is too tart.
Is the machine any better than any human, whose local experience of lemons in their own community seems to make more sense to members of his own community.
If those 1000 lemons had been sourced from somewhere else, surely the scale would be different?

These questions should be easy with a single isolatable chemical but absurd when it comes to culturally, historically and socially constructed ideas of a moral nature.
Yet objective morality is a claim often made.
How would you even begin to assess a moral claim on the basis of the object./subject notion?

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@Jakob I hope you stick with this. I feel like we are on a similar topic and it would be exciting if we somehow were able to collaborate on it. You’re completing your project and I’m completing mine and it just feels like they might converge. Not too sure about the potential Hitler astrology connection I’d rather just ditch, but maybe James S Saint was being obnoxious, and maybe you aren’t as attached to astrology as it seems and could transfer your attachment to astronomy? (This is kind of awkward.)

I hope that you can revisit this, because it feels like there’s a piece missing when you ditch practice/praxis.

Click on the hyperlink for a more reader-friendly version.

And again:

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If there is any universal truth (that we can know) regarding a so-called objective meaning to life or existence it would be the fact that meaning-sensitive beings such as ourselves are in possession of the capacity to respond to, accept, choose or reject meanings for ourselves. We can also work on creating or exploring new meanings. Meaning itself is a subtler fabric of living-subjective being, the ‘being of being’ is purely existential which of course also extends into the logical-as-such in terms of pure structure and metaphysical process, etc. But insofar as we are this such and such kind of being that we are, we exist submerged within meanings and within fields of meaning-relations. This ties directly into VO and self-valuing logic because, as far as I am seeing here, meaning flows from valuing. Valuing as such leads to the production of values, and values are active direct relations to valued things/objects/facts/etc. To pieces of existence. We come to draw existence further into ourselves, enriching and expanding-deepening our own subjective experience and the entire body-consciousness that is us. And all of that “subjective stuff” objectively exists and is objectively occurring.

So we can look around at the world, realize we are here because of countless essential and essentializing valuing-processes having occurred in the past and occurring right now within us, as us, by for and of us but also within as by for and of everyone else around us and even everything else around us; and reflect upon the miracle of this, and the joy that we get to experience in being able to both understand this and to choose to accept and engaged with it. “To become more and more that which one truly is”, to plunge the self into itself revealing progressively greater and more comprehensive, accurate, meaningful depths of being within being. To value, to be within meaning as such and to actively build grounds or plant trees here as you put it… sure, there could be other universal “meanings of life” or objective purposes of existence out there, but what are they? I think everything we can figure out or guess at in that space traces directly back into the meaning-responding, meaning-creating and meaning-immersing nature of what it means to be the type of being that we are. What sort of work could be done at this threshold besides that which is always already meaning-oriented and therefore accessible to penetrating phenomenological inquiry and insight on that account? If that does not indicate the pathways upward into the more objective/certain/truthful/real/vitally important then I’m not sure what would. I suppose the cognitive and the emotive need to be properly distinguished just as the known from the unknown or the ‘sane’ from the ‘insane’ methodologies here. Only to properly contextualize all relevant forms of experiencing and not to unnecessarily refute or deny any of reality’s actual contents.

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I would refute/deny any meanings that diverge from valuer=valuer, actually. Otherwise, that was beautiful, Hum. Not that you’re even reading me anymore.

Ironically related: