Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Objectivity is one of several metaphysical assumptions of the hard sciences. Galileo established the position that only those properties accountable to mathematical measurement are (objectively) real. According to Karl Pearson, “The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgements.” Subjective qualities like emotions are misapprehensions to be avoided. Every age has its defining depravity. Today, it is a flatland perspective upon the surface of life that – because it rejects interiority – results in forms of thinking that are detached, impersonal, rigid, and abstract. STEM knowledge that fragments the world, separates humanity from nature, splits spirit from the earth, and isolates body from mind must be viewed with an increasing intensity of suspicion.

While scientific method is a considerable system for observing and documenting details of the outer world, its foundational claims to the objective, rational basis of valid knowledge and the scientific mind divorced from personal feelings results in the ‘splitting’ of wholes into parts, including human selfhood and its relation to the planet. The result is a destabilizing retreat from Being and a crisis of rapport with Otherness. One’s existential duty, as articulated in the arts and humanities, is to engage human and more-than-human others with feeling and embodied relationality – and never as disembodied abstractions. Physicist Arthur Zajonc had it right when he opined, “We now truly stand in need, not as scientists but as a civilization, of the artist’s cognitive capacities.”