The Objective-Subjective Nexus Infects Us

I wrote in a Technician article about Performative truths. A performative truth is when performing an action is what makes the truth of the proposition. So when I say, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that "the couple is man and wife" is false still after I say it.

But when a Priest says, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that the proposition "the couple is man and wife" is true after he said it, and because he said it.

Another example: We give an umpire the authority to say a ball going over is a strike. It's something about his authority that makes it true.

It's a matter of authority, and the authority that we give to people in our society. Philosopher Jamie Whyte has more to say about this, in fact saying that having one's right to her opinion is false and even dangerously wrong. Let's point him out later and maybe retype his argument from the Popular Philosophy Book Crimes Against Logic.

All of this has been said on this blog before. I even said that I got all of this from my philosophy of language class, which wasn't so worthless after all.

My friend Rick says that Performatives existed before the Analytic-Continental divide in philosophy; maybe even Kant did them (we know that we have him and Leibniz to thank for all of this proposition garbage).


My big rant here; my insight is this: Performative truths are a Nexus between objectivity and subjectivity. I was saying this in my article and blog posts before this, but I never really caught it in this way.

I've been posting a lot about Spinoza's Attributes (Thought and Extension) and Feuerbach's divinity of Nature (almost identical to Spinoza, but talking and explicating in his own Feuerbachian way).

This is perhaps where the two planes interact. Spinoza thought that thought is parallel to reality, and that the two were too unalike to interact. Some scholars think of this in terms of listening to music and the production of music. Or, you might consider the stream of consciousness as you are feeling it versus the stream of consciousness, as it exists as a billion's billion chemicals popping and whizzing in your brain, right now. These four things are their pair's two things, and that's what Feuerbach and Spinoza have in mind. FOOTNOTE: George Eliot (Female British Novelist and Philosopher) translated both Spinoza and Feuerbach. Coincidence?


Bring it on home: so the point is this: thought, while seeminlgy subjective (and we can talk about this for a while and try to erase all subjectivity, but until we have the neuroscience to say otherwise will have a difficult time fully unlocking; I personally doubt we will ever eliminate subjectivity (but that is only my belief? (meta-humor people stay with me))) has this foothold in the objective world.

On the other hand; if we reduce all of this business to objectivity, in other words see it in terms of x amounts of chemicals firing in the brain and on and on, everything is completely objective. It works just the same way: objectivity has a foothold in the subjective world.