The Pretense of Objectivity
How Scientism has Stripped Away Our Essence of True Being
If I traveled back in time and told the 17-year-old version of myself that I now have a great respect for religion, I think he would laugh in my face. At that age, he was still riding the surge of pride that comes with brandishing the emblem of “scientific thinking being superior to any fairytale crap;” a sentiment that is often pushed by ultra-empiricists. He thought that anyone who genuinely believed in God was delusional since science has obviously proven that as nonsense.
Maybe, somewhere inside him, a seed of curiosity would be planted. The part in him that was tuned to something well beyond whatever science had “proven,” laying dormant out of fear of ridicule, would eventually grow into the experience of self he has now.
Years later, as he found an increasing confidence in this inner world bathed in intuition and archetypal persuasion, he eventually shifted his beliefs. He was no longer able to claim that this second, subjective world was any less real than the supposed objective world “out there.” The further he read into it, the more he discovered that no one has really been able to do that either.
Ok, I’ll stop writing in the third person now.
The experience I had with reconciling my beliefs surrounding these two worlds is one that is rather common to those seeking deeper truths about who they are. Many intelligent people have found the required dogma of religions to be primitive and unintelligent, opting for a purely scientific view of the world. Yet, at the same time, there exists this quiet yearning for something deeper. Something spiritual.
In this article, we will be discussing the nature of these two worlds, and how we can bring about a reconciliation of the two. It will touch on themes relating to consciousness and personal experience, detailing how we can move beyond our narrow ideas of truth, and what this means for our own personal growth.
The Error of the Empiricist
We like to think that science has brought about much certainty in how reality works. There’s a level of comfort in being able to say, “we can stop arguing about existence because it has been proven. The problem is solved.” This is to say that how we feel about reality doesn’t matter, because there exists an opinion that stands outside of all of us. A truly nonpartisan perspective.
This appeal to reason has gained a lot of traction in the many years since it was first practiced. Faith in empiric science has become tremendously easy, as we have seen the many problems of our lives solved with ease. Disease is down, our daily living made more comfortable, food more accessible, etc. All good things.
To the average person, this is surefire proof that empiric science must be the cure-all to solving reality’s mysteries.
And this is indeed the case. The change that modern science has produced is nothing short of a miracle. Our ability to understand on a deep level how the world functions, and our ability to better predict and manipulate it, is enormous. Many lives have been saved by the feats of science.
Yet at the same time, something very dear has been lost.
But before we discuss what has been lost, we must look at the history of empiricism.
The father of modern science is largely credited to Galileo. Galileo was the first person to popularize the use of the scientific method. He made the profound connections that we can understand reality by reducing it to numbers, describing the world around us through mathematical equations.
This profound shift, however, came with a cost. By reducing the world to external numbers, we have to remove our personal experience from the equation. This is the genius of empiricism. It enforces that personal bias does not matter in the scientific paradigm. Opinions only cloud the facts, and should therefore be extracted and removed.
This carries with it the underlying premise that what you feel doesn’t matter.
This is dangerous. While the intention was to remove wanton beliefs, rooted in emotion, from the world as it actually is, this way of thinking carried with it the undertone that how you naturally are doesn’t matter. That you are separate from the world you seek to understand. This is the error of empiricism.
The irony is that the only thing we, as conscious beings, can ever be truly aware of is our own subjective experience. I can only ever be fully aware of the fact that I exist. That I am inside my body, looking out. I see the world around me, and have faith that it will continue to remain as it is, yet I can’t fully be certain that it is truly there.
Galileo understood this. He simply said that we can divide these two worlds, focusing on each separately. As the years went by, this sense of separation slowly vanished as we collectively flattened the inner, subjective world with the hammer of objectivity.
We now live in a world that does not trust, let alone understand the full implication of this second world. This disavowal of the subjective landscape is a large factor in the meaninglessness that many experience in today’s postmodern world. Those identifying with mental illnesses are rising, as more and more feel the weight of apathy and purposelessness.
We’ve reduced our sense of self to being a mere machine, and are now confused as to why we can’t feel alive.
Two World Dilemma
Rectifying these two worlds has been an issue of philosophy for quite a while. The two main trends of thought on the topic are that of dualism and materialism, both of which I will briefly discuss.
Dualism holds that there are two distinct worlds. There is the objective world of the brain, body, and world it inhabits, as well as the subjective inner experience of consciousness. Even though science does not yet know how consciousness interacts with, or is produced by the brain, there is still nonetheless something separate from the purely biological mechanism.
Materialism, on the other hand, holds that consciousness is simply biological functions. That there is no second world, since it is the same world as the body. Science has not yet shown how consciousness arises from the body and brain. Yet the materialist has faith that, someday, it will be proven, and that all those feelings and values you hold are nothing more than chemicals firing randomly in your brain.
There are other philosophical views, such as panpsychism (something I am personally very excited about and will discuss more later on). But for the sake of my point in this article, these two perspectives matter the most.
The fundamental difference is that one understands the experience of the self as being integral to existence, while the other does not. Dualists give a voice to the purely subjective, relational, aspect of being conscious. They are concerned with the fact that the subjective world operates on different laws than the objective one.
This point is incredibly important. Nowhere in our diagrams of objectivity do we have a place for establishing order on how one experiences. A classic example is asking yourself how you describe the feeling of experiencing the color red (or any color really). We can say, within an empirical model, that the color red is distinguished by a certain frequency of light.
This is objectively true, but says nothing to internal states that are activated when I or you look at the color red. What distinguished your dislike of the color and my liking? If you tell someone who has never seen color before what red looks like, how would you do it? If someone was colorblind their whole life and learned everything there was to learn about color, would that prepare them for experiencing the color red for the first time? Questions like these begin to open the doorway into the subjective realm. They begin to show that objective science isn’t designed to penetrate this world of experience.
And that is exactly the point! Objectivity only works by removing the subjective world. A case often made for materialism is that eventually, science will figure out how consciousness is formed from the material world. That eventually, the magic of experience will be throttled and confined to a mere biological explanation.
However romantic this may sound to the materialist, this is highly unlikely to happen. The paradigm of empirical objectivism isn’t designed to explain the subjective experience of consciousness. Science will never tell you how you have an experience. It only makes sense if we remove the subject.
In other words, if we remove you.
Subjectivity, Objectivity, and the Hungry Ghost
Thankfully, there have been many people throughout history that have had such a profound experience of the depths of the inner world that they have left their lasting remarks on the validity of this realm. This is not only the wisdom of the mystics and mystical thinkers throughout the ages, but also those of the transpersonal and depth psychologists such as Carl Jung.
Jung recognized the inner world as having a distinct life of its own. Though he never established his position on the philosophical nature of consciousness, he respected the subjective world enough to explore it with as much clarity as he could. The entire Jungian paradigm is designed to guide one through the layers of themselves, into questions of how you experience consciousness, and who is experiencing that consciousness. These questions are left out of the purely objective framework that only sees people as machines with haphazard chemicals firing in their brain.
We can see this distinction in Freud, Jung’s prior mentor. Freud declared that all psychological motives stemmed from biological impulses, namely sex. In doing so, he reduced the complexity of personal experience to being a mere machine, following its code blindly as it sought to fulfill its biological destiny.
Jung saw otherwise.
Jung saw the complexity and richness that the conscious experience offered without the need to reduce it to mere biological machinery. Being respectful of science, he still sought to describe the psyche as empirically as possible, drawing relations between inner components and the laws of physics (you can read my article on this here). In doing so, he started to establish a map of the inner world as alive and vibrant as the world around us.
Fundamentally, Jung saw that the person had intrinsic value. That the experience of being a conscious individual mattered tremendously in the grand scheme of things.
Sadly, as our very objective-biased culture continued to move forwards, Jung’s insights were labeled as “too mystical for science,” and any sense of “inner-work,” was left behind to study psychology as purely mechanistic as possible.
Indeed, today’s modern psychology is developed only by reducing people to machines—stripping their humanity to put a label on various behaviors. Complex interactions between people are reduced to purely biological or sociological means. The entire field of psychiatry has produced hundreds of labels that showcase the supposed “pathology” of the psyche.
Many different categorizations have been established that “prove” you—yes you—are not functioning correctly. That your apathy and depression are purely symptoms of chemicals misfiring in the brain, that your inability to concentrate is equally about misfiring chemicals, that experiencing the entire range of human emotional states is to be capped off at some point, and venturing too far beyond the boundaries of “normal,” is requirement for medication.
We then see many people cling to labels of pathology, leaning into them, scapegoating them, allowing their destructive, unconscious behavior to dictate their life in the name of powers beyond their control. Any semblance of finding inner meaning, of these issues stemming from a complex tapestry of personal narrative and impersonal archetypal persuasion is completely ignored. The message pushed by this supposedly “enlightened” objective perspective is that you are fundamentally broken. You are at the mercy of a brain that doesn’t work.
What this has done is left in its wake a sea of people desperate for deeper understanding, but so completely ignorant as to what that entails. Cast adrift from the beacon of deeper meaning to be found within, we project our need for self-understanding onto false idols—celebrities, politicians, Artificial Intelligence, purely objective paradigms of truth—only to find that they do not take away the deep yearning for wholeness.
This pining for deeper fulfillment is also misplaced into addictions. Our culture has completely normalized addiction, in the forms of substances (from alcohol, to vaping, to weed), work, adult videos, and the incessant need to be online and “connected” to others at all times. So deep is our wounding of meaning that many must constantly numb themselves to avoid this pain.
This has created a society of hungry ghosts. The hungry ghost, also known as the Preta, is a creature of Buddhist and Hindu myth that is doomed to be eternally hungry, yet can never find satisfaction in what it consumes. This is the culture we live in. Ignorant of the wealth of purpose and being that the inner world has to offer, many turn to the superficial material world to satisfy this deep hunger.
The issue is that the material world will never satisfy the internal craving for meaning. Just as objective scientism can never truly explain the subjective experience, the inability for the world around us to give us a true sense of self is a mere reflection of this fundamental truth. In order to save our integrity as individuals, we must recognize and respect the inner world of subjective experience.
It is in this recognition that we will be able to transcend the dual experience of objective and subjective, entering a new paradigm for understanding reality.
Intrinsic Nature
Before we can discuss this transcended mode of understanding, let us briefly discuss a key element—the idea of intrinsic nature.
One of the largest errors in thinking that the objective worldview can deliver us with a truly unified theory of everything is misunderstanding what exactly objective science has shown us.
It is a common belief that the scientific methods have produced data on what reality intrinsically is. We now know that what we see out there isn’t exactly what it appears to be. The world is made up of atoms and even smaller particles. Nothing is ever created or destroyed, simply rearranged. Space and time are woven together into a single fabric that houses everything there could possibly be.
These complex descriptions appear as if they tell us what reality is. Rather, they only detail the relationships between different aspects of reality. Understanding that your desk is made up of atoms only implies that the desk is a product of the relationship of those atoms. And when we look into what an atom is, we are left only with the answer that it is a product of the relationship of electrons, neutrons, and protons. No matter how deep we go, the empiric paradigm never explicitly tells us what reality is fundamentally made of. It only offers us answers on how to predict how different parts of reality will operate given a certain set of circumstances.
This understanding is rather shocking. When it comes down to it, there is a hole at the center of science. Our supposed ideas of having solved reality with the power of the intellect are merely a facade.
This is where the idea of panpsychism comes into play. While it is difficult to deny the subjective inner world as having validity, to think that there is some separate realm that we are plugged into that has no real remnants in the objective world is equally difficult to assume. Instead, panpsychism posits that the fundamental element of reality that permeates the objective world and orchestrates an interconnected experience between all things—is consciousness.
This idea can be difficult for people to grasp, and for the sake of this article, it’s not entirely necessary. My point in bringing this up is to showcase how this type of thinking bridges the two worlds in an integrated, harmonious way.
A Union of Opposites—Nondual Synthesis
While it may seem that I am anti-empiricism in this article, I am actually very much a fan of the scientific process. The wealth of knowledge and understanding that have come from these disciplines is tremendously exciting. I deeply value what the scientific method, as well as objective modes of thought, has done for humanity.
Reinstating the subjective as a valued avenue of truth does not mean we do away with objectivism. Not in the slightest. Subjective truth that is not checked by the objective runs the risk of becoming driven by whim and personal bias.
This is, after all, the product of the religion dominated era that came before the age of reason. The church, or any subjective-oriented institution, had established values that were pushed as dogmatic truth. The only issue was that they were not balanced in genuine truth, but in the truth of a select few individuals.
Born from this subjective arrogance was the need to view the world entirely objectively. While this had good intentions, it has now devolved into labeling the world as cold and mechanistic, completely removing the personal experience and the wealth it brings.
The way forward may seem like tipping the scale back towards the subjective, but this endless back and forth would only result in more of the same push-pull. To make the most of both avenues of truth, we must find a creative synthesis of the two.
In this model, we can recognize both the separatist, objective method of discerning truth and the personal, interconnected experience as well.
What this transcended level looks like goes well beyond the duality of the subjective and objective. It reinvigorates knowing and understanding by placing the experiencer back in the larger picture. No longer is there a world “out there” and a world “in here,” but rather that to understand the world out there is to understand the world within.
The knower and the known truly cannot be separated.
This level of understanding instills not only a deeper appreciation for the natural world, but allows us to see the vitality evident in the creation around us. By understanding the world not only as a thing, but as a relational being, our sense of self is expanded along with our mental conceptions.
At this level, we are no longer interested in establishing who is “correct,” because we realize that truth is an ever evolving concept. To know something is to be in a relationship with it. We can only truly study and understand the world around us when we have fully understood the world within. And as many know, this process unfolds into eternity.
This is why I am particularly excited about panpsychism. When we transcend our own dual nature, taking our intellectual capacity towards concepts of genuine wholeness and interconnectedness, we can begin to sense that we are woven from the same fabric as literally everything else.
This type of understanding is known as Gnosis. The authority that comes with reconciling the polar opposites of reality into one cohesive world view.
From here we can, for example, study astronomy, history, mythology, and psychology, and understand how these weave together to form the truths evident in astrology. The truths that, at their core, only bring out unconscious elements for you to integrate. Learning about the world objectively informs the world of selfhood and vice versa. Nothing is ridiculed as being less than, only as holding degrees of “half-truths.”
This is the wisdom of a synthesized process of truth-seeking. The recognition that no one avenue of truth will ever deliver the answer to life’s questions with absolute decree. All perspectives deliver half-truths, pieces of the puzzle, and that it is through the process of learning and understanding that we unveil genuine truth. It is by undergoing the experience of learning about the world and yourself simultaneously that we find the synthesis of higher truths.
Carl Jung also wrote about this concept of reconciling opposites. To him, the individuation process—the process of discovering your true self— was the act of holding the tension between two paradoxical truths, allowing yourself to feel the conflict they create. Exposed, held distended like Christ on the cross, our perception is gradually elevated, allowing us to see the middle path forward with increasing clarity.
Conclusion
I truly believe we are at a breaking point. We cannot continue to go down this lifeless, mechanized path any longer. The casualties, both within the individual and on the entire planet are growing as we reduce and render the interpretation of the world into a shallow reflection of what it really is.
Vitality, both within people and on the planet's surface, is dissipating. Collective recognition of the validity of the subjective world, as well as the transcendence into an integral worldview are becoming a dire necessity.
As with any period where there has been an increase in collective consciousness, the time right before this shift occurs always feels like the end of the world. The era we are living in is no exception. It really feels like the end of everything as we know it.
And in a way, it is. But thankfully, energy is never destroyed. Every death gives rise to a new birth, and while it feels like civilization is slipping down the drain, we have the immense power to make the birth that follows one that is truly meaningful.
Every single individual that raises their personal level of consciousness affects the collective. We are all tangled together into one massive tapestry of awareness. Any small change the individual makes reverberates throughout this web of being.
And no matter what, things usually end up being ok in the end.
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