Notes On Nietzsche 03: The Objective Man

Chapter 6: We Scholars, Beyond Good and Evil

“However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit—and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsissimosity!—in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification—as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours to "disinterested knowledge".”

In the modern world, one is often not considered an “intellectual” if one does not, from time to time, take care to renounce his subjectivity. A great deal of respect and admiration is accorded to those who are able to view the world in an “objective” fashion, and is able to reduce his individual participation in the experience and representation of the world to a minimum. On the other hand, those who speak with subjectivity and give instinct its due place man’s narrative, are often looked upon with intellectual condescension. Science tells us what is there, not what is important. While there is merit in a scientific outlook, one must understand the limits of objectivity and exercise it with caution rather than worship the objective and scientific viewpoint as a panacea to the tragedy of existence. 

The pessimistic school of thought is most adulating towards this “objective approach”. Time and again, one will come across the occasional nihilist who will tell you how life is meaningless and it does not matter what you do or how you live, because we all die in the end, and our existence is just a blip in the history of mankind. These people are fain to agree with the objective approach, for it gives them the certainty they long for in the uncertainty of the world that stares back at them. It is a reckless and convenient mode of thought, for it allows one to get away with one’s inaction, it rationalizes one’s apathy and indolence and makes it comfortable to live with one’s wretched, inadequate self. 

“The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument, we may say, he is a mirror—he is no "purpose in himself" The objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or "reflecting" implies—he waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and gliding-past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film.”

There is no glory in being a puppet of an ideology. Let us not reduce science to ideological standards by dogmatizing it; let us not reduce science to divine standards by deifying it. Is it not a testimony of man’s appetite for subjectivity, that he exalts science such that he may partake in its glory by being associated with it, by being a man of science? But, his unconscious, the conscious realm of science does not talk back to man when he attempts to converse with it. He remains but a mere instrument that seeks to propagate science, that seeks to view the world with a scientific lens, even the parts of the world that the lens falls short of viewing! 

“Whatever "personality" he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms and events. He calls up the recollection of "himself" with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he readily confounds himself with other persons, he makes mistakes with regard to his own needs, and here only he is unrefined and negligent. Perhaps he is troubled about the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and society—indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his suffering, but in vain! His thoughts already rove away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself.”

How can one solve one’s problems if one isn’t subjective? There is value in personalizing the world before us: we cannot move about in the world if we do not take decisions, if we do not have opinions, if we do not have a hierarchy of values. A common mistake people make is to confuse objectivity with practicality. To be sure, there is a considerable degree of overlap, but just like each toolkit is specialized to repair a different part of the machine, objectivity, or practicality cannot solve all problems. Let us not stubbornly stick to the approaches we have come to be most comfortable with and refuse to acknowledge the existence of problems that our toolkits are not equipped to handle. 

“His mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command; neither does he destroy...Neither is he a model man; he does not go in advance of any one, nor after, either; he places himself generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil.”

A man of measured responses, the objective man stands outside every experience. He wishes to not have opinions on anything of importance, in fact, there is no such thing as “importance” for him, for he does not select or discriminate one thing from another. 

"The objective man is an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination—and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto—for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man.”

He cannot be called strong or original. He does not have substance and must wait for more substantial men to pass by so he can be their mirror to the world. The objective man has no trajectory for growth, for in order to move ahead, one must acknowledge that one would like to be somewhere other than where one is. One needs to dislike what one is, in order to be better. But since he is incapable of liking or disliking, perhaps the accursed objective man is forever doomed to be no more than a mirror of the greatness in the world.