Objectivity, adherence to the external world, is at the base of our daily existence. Every time you trust your senses, care about someone in your life, or drive your car, you’re relying upon objectivity. Yet, there is a lot of doubt and consternation surrounding objectivity, and there are people who attempt to avoid objectivity. Objectivity can be seen as a creator of anxiety or as an unwanted, impinging world.These people are confronted with a world they deny that they cannot leave or turn away from. However, the objective world is ever-present for a person awake, and its influence is found in each of our mental states. There is ultimately no escape from objectivity.
The objective world is our daily engagement. As long as one is conscious, one is engaging in some level of objectivity. People may avoid objectivity, by closing off certain qualities of the external world, and this is common. However, simply observing and using one’s eyes is an engagement in objectivity. As much as a person may dump objectivity, e.g. by doing things hazardous to one’s health, denying a basic fact, or believing pink elephants put one’s shoes on every morning, they ultimately engage in the basic objectivity of sense perception. If a person recognizes another person’s existence, they are recognizing an objective fact (this is why you need objectivity to care about a person in your life, since you must recognize a person’s existence and their qualities in order to care about them). This creates an unavoidability of objectivity. If you’re alive, you’re being objective in some capacity.
Our internal worlds are even not left alone by objectivity. The internal qualities we have only evolved in order to engage with the objective world. Indeed, most, if not all, of our internal existence is made up of our external world, since consciousness is an interaction between ourselves and the external world. Dreams and hallucinations are composed of things we know in the external world, and our internal love is based on external entities. It’s such the case that experiments with extreme sense deprivation, in which subjects were closed off from all sensory information, show a depreciation or non-existence in internal qualities, such as thought and behaviors. Indeed, isolation and sensory deprivation is often used as a punishment in prisons. Our internal worlds are a creation of our interaction with the external world, and, without the external world, our internal worlds go dark and empty.
Objectivity is used at all points in our daily lives. By having or engaging in sense perception, one cannot separate oneself from objectivity. Indeed, it is an essential part of our internal mechanisms, and, even when we’re not directly engaging in objectivity, such as in dreams, we always are marked by its presence.