Objectivity is seeing reality as it is. How do you do that?
OK, I've tried to establish that objectivity is not neutrality. We can't achieve objectivity by hanging upside down and shaking out the presuppositions. We have to pour in the right presuppositions by hearing the word of God and studying the world of God. Thus the right presuppositions about reality bestow a subjectivity that serves as the means to objectivity. Our presuppositions become the mental, emotional, interpretive instrument that focuses and expands our perceptions of reality. Our perceptions and interpretations must be constantly fine tuned and readjusted by encounters with the subject over our whole lives on into our sanctified eternity.
When radical post-moderns deny objective reality they confuse reality with our perceptions of it. Objective reality exists though we don't perceive it clearly, but as Paul says, "through a glass darkly." Kant said there are no "uninterpreted facts." But there are uninterpreted facts or we wouldn't be able to test our interpretations. The fact that we can test our knowledge means that there is a reality to test it against. There is a reality to account for and the better our accounting the closer we come to seeing objective reality.
When it comes to studying history, I've also argued that we have to acknowledge our presuppositions and realize how they affect our interpretation. Then we can set them in reserve while we try to enter the worldview of another. In this way, we strive to put the subject in historical perspective. After we have accurately understood, we have earned the right to critique and appreciate. We evaluate through our subjective worldview through which we hopefully perceive objective reality in an accurate way. We may congratulate ourselves on having achieved this whenever somebody pays us the compliment of having understood their point-of-view.
In sum, we can be objective in the sense seeing reality as it is from God's perspective and being fair to our subject's self-understanding. Right?
In other words, we need to be impartial when fairness is called for, and partial whenever the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are at stake.
3 comments:
I've been considering these sorts of issues a great deal in my Historiography class this semester. It seems that some Christians forget the fact that we have in the Word the ultimate paradigm for examining the world. God's truth is often imitated, but never duplicated, and within that truth lies the key to understanding everything else. Taking hold of that key is what Christian education is all about, eh?
Cheers,
Andrew H. Waller
Amen! What books are you reading for your historiography class? I'm teaching a historiography class at MoBap Univ. right now. We're reading: Novick, That Noble Dream; David Hacket Fischer, Historians' Fallacies; Noll, The Scandal of Evangelicalism; Norman Cantor, How To Study History; and a bunch of articles by Beard, Becker, Latourette, and Noll.
Ah, well, as it so happens, we read a portion of Fischer. We've got a course packet that has a bunch of different articles, some stuff about the philosophy of history, like Thomas Carlyle, for example. We also read some articles of scientific philosophy and made some connections there. As far as the history of history aspect of things, we've been reading Heritage and Challenge, by Conkin and Stromberg. They actually give a pretty even overview of things, including medieval historians, which I appreciated.
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