The reality of inner life

Objectivity and subjectivity: Often in popular movie moments, popular writing and popular culture there is a suggestion that objectivity is more real than subjectivity.  You know the moments: a strong opinion or strongly held perspective or way of seeing things is discounted by saying that it is all “subjective” or “just your opinion”. And then some small minute subsection of available data is referred to as “objective” and the personal, the subjective is discounted as unreal, of little consequence and certainly not to be relied upon.

You could notice from what I have just written that I have a bias against the reification of objectivity over subjectivity. However this is not really the case. I was trained as a scientist and developed a love and delight in the idea that some things can be replicated, can be tested, can be “verified”, can be thought of as objective, as real, that there is something that endures apart from me. I take great delight in the reliability of the sun rising tomorrow, of light travelling at 186,000 miles per second through a vacuum or 300,000 kilometres per second in this new fangled metric system. At the same time as I trained as scientist I was heavily involved in spiritual matters. From 16 onwards I was regularly meditating, doing yoga and other things designed to bring on enlightenment, bring on unity with the godhead and the ineffable bliss that was meant to ensue. I went so far as to become a member of an ashram for four years which was quite a ride.

This is one reason why I have been considering this area for a number of years. While I would like to imagine having thought about this for so long therefore gives me authority on the subject, actually it doesn’t. I have a rudimentary philosophical appreciation of the area.

Subjective realities? 

But there is one aspect that I do know well. We all have subjective realities, opinions, experiences, ways of seeing the world. This is the stuff of psychodrama after all, where a person’s inner reality is given credence and value and brought forth on a stage, treated as valuable and worthy of consideration. And a person could say that that this subjective reality is not “objective” in that it doesn’t reveal or portray objective reality in that it is not a vase or a car. It is however an objective reality that the person does have a subjective experience. For some reason this subjective reality is seen as ephemeral when it is rather enduring and aspects of it last all our lives.

Your subjectivity is my objectivity

I’ll say it again – a person’s subjective reality is a thing to behold and can be seen by an outsider as an “objective “ thing. If it is not seen as an objective thing then why do other people keep running into it? ☺ Your subjectivity is my objectivity or at least it can be if I take the time.
This denial of another person’s subjective reality is seen everyday in everyday conversation where one person attempts to subjugate another’s ideas and responses with their own. Sometimes called arguing and sometimes just simple old discussions.

Way too much problem solving

In Australia this is often done through the process of “problem solving” where the purpose seems to be to solve the implicit problem of another and hence stop them experiencing whatever is disturbing them. Such as Colleague Number 1 “ I had a really bad sleep last night.” Responded to by Colleague Number 2 with “Have you tried Vervain tea?”. Family member Number 1 “I had a crap day at work today” followed by Family member Number 2 with “Come and have a cup of tea”
Another version of this is the one where hijacking occurs. Friend Number 1 says “I had a really bad sleep last night” and Friend Number 2 responds with “Tell me about it! I didn’t get to sleep before 2am”.

These conversations and underlying implicit yet unstated assumptions are the work of some theorists like Byron Katie and Non Violent Communication/Compassionate Communication and others. The systems being portrayed can be looked at as a denial of the value of another’s subjective experience of reality.

There are numerous ways where we are not required to take objective notice of another’s subjective state. By “not required” I mean our culture does not find it either rude or bad to ignore an individual’s inner subjective workings. Most social conversations don’t require it. Most organisational and work conversations don’t require it. Most spiritual and religious conversations don’t require it. In fact (my fact you will note) it is hardly required anywhere apart from therapists and they get paid to do it and even then if they don’t do it, it will be seen in a therapeutic context as OK.

This is all a discussion leading to the obvious. In psychodrama a person’s subject experience is treated as a real objective truth. Their truth is not, in the first instance, subjected to scrutiny or verification apart from getting it expressed and seen correctly. Psychodrama can be seen as a way to make subjective reality more objective. A person’s inner world is given the status of truth, for a while.

Seriously valuing a person's inner world

This has enormous implications. Amongst these for me are: imagination is valued and encouraged; my world is seen as legitimate; my feelings and thoughts are seen as legitimate; life is more than what I see with my eyes, hear with my ears and feel with my body; a person is a rich seething cauldron of spontaneity and life and lastly, for the moment, a method that can bring the rich inner world of a person to the outside of themselves so it can be seen, tasted, heard, touched and felt is unquestionably of enormous value.

J.L. Moreno (who developed group psychotherapy and psychodrama) in his seminal book Psychodrama, Volume 2 states “We sociometrists have emphasised since our early days that the human being in his total subjectivism has to be made part and parcel of scientific analysis in order to provide the investigator with a complete phenomenological account of what takes place in the human situation. We have demonstrated that if subjectivism is taken seriously, it assumes a “quasi-objectivistic” character which lends the phenomenon to “measurement…..”. …..One is the utterly subjectivistic and existentialist situations of the subject: the other is the objective requirements of the scientific method. The question is how to reconcile the two extreme positions. Sociometry and psychodrama have defined this methodological problem and have tried to solve it. “Existential validation” pays homage to the fact that any experience may be reciprocally satisfactory at the time of the consummation, here and now”

Cheers

For those wanting a decent snappy discussion on the philosophy behind objective and subjective this link is pretty good:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/objectiv.htm#SH2b