How Language is Objective

"I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."
- Burnt Norton

The other day I listened to Radiohead's Kid A, digesting it's meaning.

What's confusing about the album, and a lot of contemporary music, is that it's very hard to delineate meaning. By their own admission, Radiohead cut up lyrics, put them in a hat, and drew them out randomly to what what formed Kid A. In a similar way, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland is a jumpy mess; what had a coherent structure, was thrown into random pieces by Ezra Pound. He told Eliot that it did the poem better. Eliot agreed.

An aim of music and poetry is to convey mood. At their hight, music and poetry needles you with a very sharp point, striking the heart with a very refined, cutting meaning. But just because the meaning is very clear to feeling, it doesn't follow that it's easy to communicate. Observe the volumes written on Eliot's poetry, look at youTube commenters on Yorke's lyrics. People are in awe, they return to a definite mood trying to understand an experience they count as significant.

What is cause for wonder is that language can convey significant meaning that can't easily be analyzable, if at all. But no one who has had this experience can tell you that the poetry means nothing for being hard or impossible to dissect.

Now what's fashionable in American philosophy is seeking knowledge through clear reasoning, where propositions can be lined up like dominos, ready for the mind to follow the chain to a certain and well defined effect. This certainty is taken to be the surest vehicle to arrive at truth. If all men are mortal, and if Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. Not even Socrates could doubt that chain of logic! Right?

But if we were to be given something like Radiohead's lyrics,

"Red wine and sleeping pills 

Help me get back to your arms
Cheap sex and sad films
Help me get back where I belong

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

Stop sending letters
Letters always get burned
It's not like the movies
They fed us on little white lies

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

I will see you in the next life." 

- Motion Picture Soundtrack

Or Eliots,

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air. 

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth. 

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire

 - Little Gidding

Or the Bible's,

"The day you eat of it you will surely die."

we're left knowing what death is and believing not only that we will die, but that we do die, and are already dead(!); whereas, if we know Socrates at all, he doesn't believe that all men die, and will contest premises upon premises till he's blue in the face.
But we're told that the more poetic stuff is not clear; since it hits our subjective self in a way that isn't easily put into propositions, we're left without a very clear way of arbitrating mis-interpretation. We might be lead astray by our private whims into error.
But for anyone who has read a particularly forceful piece of writing, he is sure that the understanding he perceives is correct; though not completely specifiable. Since the meaning he perceived is not completely known to himself, he is also open to other's thoughts to add to his comprehension; however, he knows what is true and false, what goes and what doesn't.
What's going on is that readers are perceiving a meaning. And this meaning is real and objective to anyone who has experienced it.
Now let's look at those who insist on precise argumentation. Their motivation is to find a way of arriving at truth that is completely objective, through a series of formal propositions. It's perfectly clean and incontestable. And surely there are ways of being formal and precise in language that's more organized and easier to follow. However! Nothing will ever convince someone of the truth in language who either does not want to experience it.
So even though language is intensely subjective, it also has objective meaning. And we should be comfortable with any sentence that conveys our point, poetic or prosy. Those who insist on complete objectivity find themselves defining their terms without end (a la Socrates), and falling into complete skepticism (a la Socrates).

Objectivity

Objectivity is often thought of as a virtue in it’s own right. The more objective we can be about a situation the better.

What I want to show is that complete objectivity (in any given situation) is impossible, and that whoever seeks it is corrupt.

Now, what do I mean by the word objectivity? A statement is completely objective if it does not depend on a single frame of reference. In particular, the more independent a fact is on a person’s own point-of-view the more objective it is.

To clarify let me give some examples.

A scientific theory is said to be objective insofar as it can be confirmed by experiment and can be described by mathematics. Experiments show that the result does not depend on a particular observer, and mathematical descriptions tell scientists exactly what a theory predicts.

Whenever we are graded on a test or assessed on our job, we should get an objective report. This report is objective insofar as we have formalized criteria for grading. This way the rightness or wrongness of a test is less dependent on the student’s personal quirks, and it is less dependent of the teacher’s mood.

In both these cases individual frames of reference are removed from the facts so that the facts may be judged apart from our subjective quirks.

And it is clear that this process is a good thing. If we didn’t have any objective standards for talking with other people, we couldn’t talk with other people at all!
We couldn’t even make sense of our own thoughts! (More on this in another video.)

Since this is a good thing, we’re tempted to think that the more of it the better. But this is not the case. If we try to be completely objective about any subject, it turns out we can’t know anything about it at all.

Let’s pretend that we can be completely objective about say some subject. The first question we must ask is where do we begin? And the only answer we can give is, “Where it seems to us it is important to begin.”

But in order to say this, we include our own subjective appraisal of importance. And there is no way out of it. If we want to know something, we have to consider what is important about it, and it’s importance is always something relevant to ourselves, our own subjective selves.

Therefore whoever is seeking complete objectivity is seeking something that is impossible. In fact, following an implication of this argument, this pure objectivity seeker is seeking to remove all value from the world, and this is the definition of nihilism: to say nothing matters. Further, we have also seen that this person who says nothing matters, can never completely objectively begin learning things. So he must even say that true knowledge of the world is impossible. So he is a complete skeptic and nihilist. And insofar as he truly seeks complete objectivity he is utterly corrupt.

A Whim and A Prayer

Jacob wrestled the human form devine

Struggling among the earthen shards in dust

Grasping and gasping, rasping: “it is mine”

Along broken skin

Blood ran sanguine

Descending lower, descending only,

Into a valley of this world,

Falling and brawling, calling: “give it me.”

Grinding to rust

The body to dust

The near forfeiting hand lifted to ether

Plunging down to the ground, the place it found,

Tearing and blaring, swearing: “I better.”

Though sinew collapsed

Jacob surpassed.

Rosy fingers spread over the sky’s vault

Pointing to the end of the night’s trouble.

He, breathing and seething, “I shall exalt, for

Along broken skin

Blood ran sanguine”