Neutrality & objectivity

A typology of epistemology leads to discernment between different approaches to knowledge, whatever the field: scientific, political, social, aesthetic, technical and so on. The nineteenth century, with its primacy of single causes external to the facts, produced one of the most persistent and widespread versions, defining an ideal epistemological form. The positivism of Auguste Comte held that the only valid knowledge was scientific knowledge, to be obtained empirically, with a rigid separation between subject and object. Its language was to be mathematical and logical, on the model of the exact sciences, devoted to the description of facts and to an absolute abstention from moral judgement. Max Weber refused this conception for the social sciences, arguing that human action requires an understanding of meaning, and showed that pure objectivity is impossible, beginning with the choice of the object of study and the cutting-out of the data.

The point is not to discuss any of these positions in depth, only to indicate that they represent two historical tendencies which have confronted one another for centuries under different guises. An earlier example is the divergence between Pascal and Descartes in their approach to the sciences; earlier still, the opposition between empiricism and rationalism played out by Aristotle and Plato, supposedly "resolved" by Kant. Kant relies on the great scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton, which overthrew the Aristotelian physics that had dominated for nearly two thousand years, joining empiricism and rationalism along the opposition of subject and object and creating categories of reason that supposedly cleanse the subject of the deviations of subjectivity. It is the diversity of these tendencies that makes it possible to draw forms that alternate and confront one another in history, and so to arrive at a typology of different epistemes. What they all have in common is the pursuit of objectivity, differing over which elements may or may not take part in it, which model is best suited, which language is to be used.

We know the choice made by Comte's positivism, which leads to a demand for the neutrality of the observer, modelled on the natural sciences as the gold standard of objective knowledge. From all this arises a confusion between neutrality and objectivity, to the point that the distinction between the two words is lost. Well before discussing particular models and their presuppositions (is it possible — or even reasonable — to apply the model of the exact sciences to the human sciences, or is Max Weber right?), it is necessary to distinguish between neutrality and objectivity.

This confusion precedes any choice of epistemological model, and for that reason no model undoes it alone. It derives from a very ancient split, the one that separates subject and object. Once the subject is placed outside the object, to be objective comes to mean to be absent, and objectivity and neutrality become the same thing: the distinction between them is foreclosed before it can even be thought. The models that refuse this split — Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, each in his own register — do not give up objectivity; they give up neutrality, which without the split has nothing to rest on. For Benjamin, the past allows itself to be read only by one who is implicated in it, in a moment of danger. The essay The grammar of the whirlpool shows what the three have in common.

It is not difficult. The wisdom of Solomon is the surest path. The Book of Kings tells the story of two women quarrelling over a child. Both had given birth to a baby, and the baby of one of them had died. Each claims that the living child is hers. Solomon places himself outside any judgement of value: it is impossible to know who is right, who is lying, who is telling the truth. Cut the child in two. Nothing could be more impartial: the judge shows himself neutral, the sentence takes no side, it distributes the values — truth and falsehood — equally, half to each litigant. One of the women accepts the sentence; the other cries out: let the other woman have the baby, but do not cut it in two. The second sentence is the final one: that is the mother.

It does not matter here whether the biological mother was in fact the one who preferred to lose the child rather than destroy it, or simply the one who, objectively, offered the better conditions for being a mother. This is the enormous distance between neutrality and objectivity. Taking the child as an allegory of justice, what the wisdom of the King expresses is that there is true justice only when the truth enters the judgement whole: a judgement, to be just, needs the truth entire, the living truth. The truth cannot be divided into pieces, with each side receiving its share, like a dead thing.

That is why this site makes no claim to neutrality of any kind. It seeks to gather the facts, the empirical data, without retiring either reason or values, without any pretension to an angelic perspective, in pursuit of a more objective drawing of what the Origin of the Brazilian Republic was.