Frank Kogan

I found myself in the position of teaching the word "objective" to my summer camp because of the Sotomayor hearings, in which one of the big debates was "Personal Experience" vs. "Being Objective." What was obvious, even to the class, was that our definition of "objective" in this debate -- "judging without personal experience" was obviously false, and we (luckily) were able to speak to a federal judge who emphasized that it's not so much that judging with "personal experience" is good or bad, it's that it's impossible not to. Which doesn't mean that everything is some opposite (impossible) extreme, but that the concept as written doesn't have any use except in a disingenuous way (as in the Republican opposition to Sotomayor) or in a way that doesn't lead anywhere productive.

Interesting, though, that when I taught this word it was during my introduction of "authority" -- who has it and why, how we keep it in check, etc. I personally think "objective" is a perfectly reasonable word to use as a comparative, but not as its own class: one can be more objective than another, but can't be "objective" where another person is "subjective." But when you use phrases like "more objective" people tend to ignore the comparative element and have the same uninteresting debate about vocabulary. (When I first talked about "objective" in earnest, in a film class in college, we were essentially forbidden to use the word "objective" when referring to a perspective of a film; but we didn't have conversations about subjective stuff either, it was just a way for us to focus on particular points of view).