One of the most intelligent, well-informed, and perceptive writers of the past century, Umberto Eco, struck a chord with his time when he categorically declared that objectivity was nothing more than a myth. It is well known that toward the end of his life, Eco increasingly devoted himself to the study of lies and, more generally, of falsehood, because, as he said, one can only report on these with any degree of reliability, whereas the truth eludes the observer like a mirage.
How was it possible that a great thinker spoke so many people’s minds and yet, at the same time, became ensnared in his own sophisms?
First, it should be noted that only those who possess some—however vague—notion of what is right and true can speak about what is false. To know what is false, I presuppose the knowledge of what is true. Nevertheless: as a humanities scholar with a background in history, Eco had every reason to doubt the objectivity of these criteria as well. For in the Middle Ages, they were fundamentally different from those of the 21st century. And such differences manifest themselves in space as well as in time. True and false were and are understood differently in India than in China and in Europe. These divergences were before the great Italian’s eyes when he dismissed objectivity as a mere myth.
On the other hand, Eco lived three and a half centuries after Francis Bacon, who was the first to speak systematically of a truth freed from all subjective illusions (idols)—that is, of a truth that is “objective” in today’s parlance, being independent of human will and desires. Humans may unveil the laws of nature, but cannot create them—unlike the laws (commands and prohibitions) that every society creates through its own efforts. Social laws are never objective because they are the result of human will and desire—but the laws of nature stand before us as an unalterable reality. For a natural scientist, the objectivity of the laws of nature is therefore as fundamental as it is obvious, and so is the distinction between true and false. The symbolic language of formulas, with which we describe the processes in nature, is either correct—in which case an engine works, a rocket hits its intended landing site on Mars—or it is incorrect, in which case none of our devices function. Modern industrial society functions solely because the symbolic languages of natural science reliably describe the processes of nature and makes them predictable. It is true for us in precisely this empirical sense. The hope of the Enlightenment rested on this truth, recognizable to everyone, that the natural sciences had created a tool with which humanity could now shape the world according to its own ideas and desires.
Modern industrial society, however, does not consist solely of—largely reliably—functioning machines with which we subjugate the surrounding natural world; it consists above all of us, the people, who are now in turn exposed to the effects of these self-created gadgets. And it is precisely this that gives rise to the dilemma we will discuss here. For the laws of nature exhibit an obvious shortcoming—they confront humanity as facts devoid of meaning. That water freezes at zero degrees and evaporates at one hundred degrees is something we must accept as an objective fact—we cannot ascribe any meaning to it.
The once highly renowned Enlightenment thinker Christian Wolff was rightly mocked by Egon Friedell in his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Cultural History of the Modern Era) for seeing nature as a kind of present for the benefit of humanity. The moon, for example, was supposedly intended to provide a minimum of light for the nighttime wanderer. The sun, so that he might be nice and warm during the day. In this vein, one could add that water probably freezes at zero degrees so that it is suitable for ice skating. By now, we have had to realize that nature does not need humans—in this sense, nature and its objectivity are utterly meaningless to mankind. The French biochemist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod expressed this very clearly a century ago: “Then humanity must finally awaken from its millennial dream and recognize its total abandonment, its radical alienation. It now knows that its place is like that of a gypsy on the edge of the universe, which is deaf to its music and indifferent to its hopes, sufferings, or crimes.”
We cannot ascribe meaning to nature, if only because it existed long before us. In contrast, humanity and its actions are and will always be determined and guided by meaning. We strive for one thing because we consider it good, and reject another because it seems bad to us. Good and evil are the leading forces in human behavior. For us, another human being is not a machine, not an automaton governed by impersonal laws, but will and desire—qualities we do not find in the nature of the things surrounding us—consistently determine his behavior. From this obvious fact, great scholars of the nineteenth century (such as Wilhelm Dilthey) concluded that the sciences of man must follow a path that fundamentally differs from that of the natural sciences. To understand and manipulate nature, we look to the automatism of laws; to understand and guide human beings, we look to meaning, to their choice between good and evil, benefit and harm. A historian understands Caesar’s behavior all the better the richer his own life experience is, for he must put himself in Caesar’s shoes to understand him. But reading any good novel confronts us with the same demand. We must have sufficient life experience of our own to comprehend the characters depicted. We are not faced with an alien and meaningless reality, but rather with a human self that we can understand—in both good and evil—only if we find similar impulses within ourselves.
Our understanding of nature on the one hand, and our understanding of humanity on the other, thus each follow their own criteria. We use the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, Ohm’s law, or the postulate of the speed of light for our purposes, but we cannot find any comprehensible meaning in them. Conversely, our own behavior and that of others becomes understandable solely through the meaning associated with it. In this respect, it makes sense that the sciences of humanity take a different path than those of nature. It was within this dual understanding of nature and humanity that the nineteenth century produced its greatest achievements. Never before had so many, such insightful, and such empathetic works been written about foreign cultures. Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and many other humanities scholars demonstrate a particular depth of insight with their works, which remain groundbreaking to this day. This also applies to the great works of art, many of which painted an even sharper picture of their era. I am thinking of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann. The humanities and the great artists of the time understood one another; both lived with a reality that consisted in the revelation of human will and desire and thus in the unveiling of meaning. Nevertheless, a clear distinction emerges between them as well. The humanities sought to identify patterns and timeless regularities within the outward chaos of human and social behavior, whereas great writers are interested in the unique character of a personality or an era—the freedom of their self-creation. Because Umberto Eco was far more of an artist than a scholar, he wanted nothing to do with objectivity or law. His rebellion against objectivity was a vote for human freedom.
Although the arts and the humanities pursued different goals, both are based on the premise of human freedom. In contrast, the gap between art and the natural sciences proved insurmountable. While the latter describe a meaningless cosmos, where inexorable laws are expressed in a formal language devoid of any emotionality (that is of desire and will), the former deals with a world in which people orient themselves based on meaning. The contrast between the two worldviews even extends into the social sphere. Scientists and artists live, as it were, on two different planets, as C. P. Snow so masterfully described in his book “The Two Cultures.”
But this dual track proved to be precarious from the start. The humanities—psychology, sociology, political science, literary studies, etc.—faced an obvious objection. The natural sciences enrich human knowledge with truths that claim to be eternal, It is an objective knowledge that applies just as much in China as in Denmark or on Mars. The validity of Ohm’s law and all other laws rests on relationships between specific causes and their effects that can be verified at any time and place. The understanding of human actions, as pursued by the humanities, may, however, be subject to the greatest fluctuations even within a single region of space-time. Trump and his supporters refer to the same reality in terms completely different from those of their opponents. Everyone knows that people socialized in a dictatorship evaluate democratic institutions entirely differently than citizens of a democracy. In other words, the humanities are accused of a lack of objectivity that, in extreme cases, extends to arbitrariness. The hope that the Enlightenment thinkers associated with the natural sciences soon turned into the belief that only the knowledge of objective laws could redeem humanity from its self-inflicted immaturity. This belief was soon to determine the hierarchy among the sciences. The timeless laws of nature, whose existence is independent of human will and desires, take precedence; the transient laws of the humanities bound to a specific time and space must, for that very reason, be content with a subordinate and often derided position. And not only that. While the natural sciences, with their objective methods, are multiplying a thousandfold in all modern states today, the humanities are being pushed to the sidelines everywhere. History classes are disappearing from schools, and funding for the sciences of man is being cut at most universities.
The humanities sought to defend themselves against accusations of a lack of objectivity by increasingly imitating and adopting the methods of the exact sciences. In sociology and psychology, this was mainly achieved through the use of surveys. Judgments about social or psychological phenomena are placed on a more solid foundation when, instead of individual scientists, as many people as possible offer their judgments. When complex mathematical analyses then lend additional credibility to the results obtained, the desired objectivity seems to be much closer. In truth, subjective judgment remains inescapable despite such efforts. The answers that people of our time provide in surveys would have yielded completely different results in the past as well as in other cultures.
The wisdom of Umberto Eco comes into play precisely at this point—as does his blindness to the new scientific reality. In the human world, objectivity is a myth; in the modern interpretation of nature by the natural sciences, however, it is omnipresent—albeit without any meaning discernible to us (apart, of course, from the fact that we alter the material world for our own purposes).
The apparent impossibility of ever recognizing the meaning of human action—which springs from our will and desires—with indisputable objectivity has in recent time led to a very modern and highly successful branch of science turning away entirely from the ever-subjectively colored sphere of the mind replacing it with its material origin and substrate: the human brain. The result of this bypassing of the inevitably subjective mental intermediary is neurobiology.
This new field of science views the human brain in the same way that the natural sciences view the natural world—namely, as a kind of—extremely complex—machine. It allows for interventions in this machine whose results can be quantified and specified with the same precision as is generally the case in the natural sciences. A tremendous advance in functionality is being achieved; it is to be expected that in the future many mental processes—including, of course, those of healing—will be able to be triggered in any brain in a more or less mechanical manner. The price for the objectivity now gained is, however, quite high: here as well it consists in a radical lack of meaning. The electrical, hormonal, and all other processes in a brain can indeed be described and controlled just as precisely as the processes in a magnetic field, but they possess no discernible meaning for human understanding. To illustrate this with an obvious image. A kiss between two lovers that we see on a computer screen is immediately understandable; the sequence of all those binary symbols consisting of zeros and ones that underlie this image as input signals remains completely incomprehensible. One represents meaning immediately understood; the other is perfect meaninglessness.
For about three hundred years, we have been living in a world that is constantly expanding the realm of meaninglessness and, as it were, pushing meaning to the sidelines, because from the perspective of the objective sciences, it remains tainted with the indelible stain of mere subjectivity. On the one hand, the number of natural scientists is swelling like an avalanche, venturing into the most remote corners of human knowledge. There is practically no object in the material world that research does not make its subject, from the eating habits of cicadas to those of our Stone Age ancestors. On the other hand, most of the results of this rapidly expanding knowledge bear no relation to the will and desires of people living today. The contrast between the infinite growth in intellectual sophistication and depth of our knowledge and the primal need for shared orientation—and thus for meaning—seems to be growing ever wider. The elephantiasis of infinite, meaningless knowledge stands in opposition to the fundamental need for meaning and orientation, which a meaningless science, for all its intellectual brilliance, is unable to satisfy. No wonder that criminals like Stalin, Hitler, and Putin, or demagogues like Donald Trump, repeatedly succeed in filling this void with incredibly primitive messages of meaning.
The dilemma of the sciences has long since escalated into delusion. We fanatically believe in a goal that is, in principle, unattainable.“ “Objectively,” that is, independently of all will and desire, we seek to describe a reality that is itself based on precisely this: will and desire. In doing so, we proceed from the false certainty that freedom will turn out to be mere automatism. Or, to put it more precisely, that we can explain the new with laws—that is, constraints that govern the past.
But the new and inexplicable confronts us not only in human action; it confronts us in evolution itself and thus in the domain of the exact natural sciences, as the biochemist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, whom we have already cited, told us in no uncertain terms.
„According to our current understanding, the notion of /law-governed/ development… must not be /applied to/ evolutionary becoming. Precisely because it is based on the fundamentally unpredictable /e.g., the randomness of mutation/, it is the creator of the absolutely new… Chance alone lies at the root of all innovations, of all creation in the realm of the biosphere. Pure chance… at the root of the magnificent edifice of evolution: This central concept of modern biology is no longer just one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. Today, it is the only valid concept that alone corresponds to the observed and verified facts.“
We call the new in natural evolution chance because no meaning is revealed to us there. The new in the social world, on the other hand, is a product of our desires and will—a product of human freedom. Social reality is a fact only once it belongs to the past, and even then it is necessarily reflected in our consciousness in quite different shades and hues. Depending on what new world we strive for, we condemn or praise the past.
More on this topic in my book recently published by ibidem, »Eine Welt, kein Turmbau zu Babel – eine kritische Philosophie der Geschichte vom Jagen und Sammeln bis zum Wettrennen der Nationen“ (One World, Not a Tower of Babel—A Critical Philosophy of History from Hunting and Gathering to the Race of Nations. Not yet published in English).