When perspective became a contaminant
By the time Galilean science consolidates as a self-conscious project, a decisive redefinition has taken place.
Objectivity no longer means careful attention to how phenomena appear under specified conditions. It comes to mean something far stronger — and far stranger:
knowledge that is independent of the observer altogether.
This post examines how that ideal was cultivated, why it proved so powerful, and why it quietly prepared the pathologies that would later surface most sharply in physics.
1. Objectivity as Independence from Perspective
In the Galilean inheritance, objectivity is achieved by subtraction.
To be objective is to remove:
the observer’s position,
the observer’s embodiment,
the observer’s interests,
the observer’s interpretive horizon.
What remains — invariant, repeatable, formally describable — is taken to be what is really there.
This ideal does not deny that observers exist. It simply treats them as irrelevant to ontology.
2. The View from Nowhere
The culmination of this ideal is the familiar aspiration to a “view from nowhere.”
The phrase sounds like epistemic humility. In practice, it functions as an ontological filter.
Only descriptions that survive complete detachment from perspective are admitted into the core of science. Everything else is relegated to:
psychology,
sociology,
phenomenology,
or mere appearance.
The horizon from which knowledge is produced is systematically erased.
3. Explanation as the Removal of Relation
Within this framework, explanation acquires a distinctive meaning.
To explain a phenomenon is:
to reduce it to invariant relations,
to strip away contextual dependence,
to eliminate reference to situated construal.
Relation becomes something to be controlled or eliminated, not something to be theorised.
This is the same inclination already diagnosed:
closure mistaken for completeness.
4. Extraordinary Power in Closed Domains
The success of this approach cannot be overstated.
Where systems can be effectively closed — where boundary conditions can be stabilised and variables isolated — Galilean science achieves astonishing results:
precise prediction,
technological mastery,
cumulative formal knowledge.
Its power reinforces its metaphysics.
What works is taken to reveal how reality is.
5. Structural Blindness
The cost of this success is less visible, but no less real.
By defining objectivity as independence from perspective, science becomes structurally blind to phenomena that are intrinsically relational:
meaning,
normativity,
interpretation,
emergence,
significance.
These are not fringe topics. They are central to how worlds are lived, coordinated, and understood.
Yet they appear, from within the Galilean frame, as subjective add-ons rather than ontological features.
6. Why the Blindness Persists
This blindness is not accidental. It is cultivated.
Any attempt to reintroduce relation is met with suspicion:
it threatens objectivity,
it risks relativism,
it contaminates explanation.
The framework defends itself by treating its own exclusions as virtues.
7. The Bridge to Physics
The consequences of this orientation will later become impossible to ignore.
In physics, the attempt to treat formal description as exhaustive leads to familiar crises:
singularities where models collapse,
infinities that must be managed rather than understood,
interpretive paradoxes around measurement and observation.
These are not signs that reality is irrational.
They are signs that relation has been excluded too successfully.
8. Looking Ahead
Galilean objectivity trains science to forget its own conditions of possibility.
In the next post, we will examine the afterlife of this forgetting: how the exile of relation generates the modern “hard problems” of consciousness, meaning, and value — and why they persist despite ever more sophisticated formalisms.
What was once methodological discipline has become ontological compulsion.
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