Few ideas are as deeply entrenched in modern thought as the ideal of objectivity. To be objective is to see things as they really are, free from distortion, bias, or perspective. Perspective, on this view, is a limitation to be overcome.
This post argues the opposite. Perspective is not a defect in our access to a world; it is the condition under which any world can appear at all. The illusion lies not in having perspectives, but in imagining that objectivity consists in escaping them.
Perspective is not bias
Perspective is often treated as a contaminant: something that colours an otherwise neutral view. But a view with no perspective would not be purer — it would be empty. Without a standpoint, there is nothing to discriminate, nothing to count as salient, nothing that could appear as a phenomenon.
A perspective is simply a way of being constrained. It is the particular configuration of distinctions, sensitivities, and exclusions that allows a system to hold anything as real.
To remove perspective would be to remove the world.
Constraint makes objectivity possible
If objectivity is not the absence of perspective, what is it? Relationally understood, objectivity is the stabilisation of constraint across instances. A claim, measurement, or description feels objective when it is reproducible — when different enactments, under the same constraints, converge on the same outcomes.
This convergence is often mistaken for access to a perspective-free reality. But what it actually reflects is the tightness of the constraints involved. The more constrained a system is, the less room there is for divergence.
Objectivity is therefore not transcendence. It is discipline.
Why objectivity feels absolute
Highly constrained systems generate a powerful phenomenology. From within them, the world they enact feels necessary rather than contingent. Alternatives are not merely false; they are unintelligible.
This is why objectivity so easily slips into absolutism. When the constraints that sustain a world are invisible, their products appear self-evident. The world seems to speak for itself.
But no world speaks. Systems do.
Shared worlds and aligned cuts
Different systems can share a world, but only under specific conditions. Their constraints must align sufficiently for phenomena to stabilise across perspectives. This alignment is never total, and it is never guaranteed.
What we often call a shared objective world is better understood as a coordinated field of cuts. Agreement arises not because perspectives vanish, but because they are made compatible.
This also explains why coordination requires work. Objectivity must be maintained through practices, instruments, standards, and norms. It does not come for free.
The error of the view from nowhere
The dream of a view from nowhere promises certainty without commitment. If such a view were possible, disagreements could be settled by appeal to how things really are. But this dream is incoherent. A view from nowhere would have no constraints, and therefore no world.
Invoking such a view does not strengthen claims to objectivity; it weakens them by masking the very constraints that make them intelligible.
What follows
If objectivity is a function of constraint rather than its negation, then disputes cannot be resolved by appeal to a neutral ground. They must instead continue at the level of systems: by examining which constraints are in play, how they are enforced, and what they exclude.
The next instalment broadens the lens further, asking what it means to speak of systems at all, and how different kinds of systems enact different kinds of worlds.
Perspective does not stand between us and reality.
It is how reality, in any sense that matters, comes to be held at all.
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