OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE VIEWS
THE principle of
subjectivism entering into human thought and action, while necessarily it must
make a great difference in the view-point, the motive-power and the character
of our living, does not at first appear to make any difference in its factors.
Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the
collectivity; the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind,
life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony.
But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and
mechanical view of the whole problem. It looks at the world as a thing, an
object, a process, to be studied by an observing reason which places itself
abstractly outside the elements and the sum of what it has to consider and
observes it thus from outside as one would an intricate mechanism. The laws of
this process are considered as so many mechanical rules or settled forces
acting upon the individual or the group which, when they have been observed and
distinguished by the reason, have by one’s will or by some will to be organized
and applied fully much as Science applies the laws it discovers. These laws or
rules have to be imposed on the individual by this own abstract reason and will
isolated as a ruling authority from his other parts or by the reason and will
of other individuals or of the group, and they have to be imposed on the group
itself either by its own collective reason and will embodied in some machinery
of control which the mid considers as something apart from the life of the group
or by the reason and will of some other group external to it or of which it is
in some way a part. So the State is viewed in modern political thought as an
entity in itself, as if it were something apart from the community and
individuals, something which has the right to impose itself on them and control
them in the fulfillment of some idea of right, good or interest which is
inflicted on them by a restraining and fashioning power rather than developed in them and by them as
a thing towards which their self and nature are impelled to grow. Life is to be
managed, harmonised and perfected by an adjustment, a manipulation, a machinery
through which it is passed and by which it is shaped. A law outside
oneself,--outside even when it is discovered or determined by the individual
reason and accepted or enforced by the individual will,-this is the governing
idea of objectivism; a mechanical process of management, ordering, perfection,
this is its conception of practice.
Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view
of a continuing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within
ourselves; life is a se1f-creating process, a growth and development at first
subconscious, then ha1f-conscious and at last more and more fully conscious of
that which we are potentially and hold within ourselves; the principle of its
progress is an increasing self-recognition, se1f-realisation and a resultant
self-shaping. Reason and Will are only effective movements of the self, reason a
process in se1f-recognition, will a force for self-affirmation and se1f-shaping.
Moreover, reason and intellectual will are only a part of the means by which we
recognise and realise ourselves. Subjectivism tends to take a large and complex
view of our nature and being and to reognise many powers of knowledge, many
forces of effectuation. Even, we see it in its first movement away from the
external and objective method discount and belittle the importance of the work
of the reason and assert the supremacy of the life-impulse or the essential
will-to-be in opposition to the claims of the intellect or else affirm some
deeper power of knowledge, called nowadays intuition, which sees things in the
whole, in their truth, in their profundities and harmonies while intellectual
reason breaks up, falsifies, affirms superficial, appearances and harmonises
only mechanical adjustment. But substantially we can see that what is meant by
this 1intuition is the self-consciousness, feeling, perceiving, grasping in its
substance and aspects rather than analysing in its mechanism its own truth and
nature and powers. The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self, to
live in the self, to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self
internally and externally but always from an internal initiation and centre.
1
1 The Human Cycle, "The Objective and
Subjective Views of Life", Chapter II, pp. 67-9.