The Single Observer Standpoint and Its Limits

Abstract

Alongside Plato’s theory of Forms and Aristotle’s writings on mimesis, there is perhaps no more powerful set of views on questions of truth in philosophy than those that revolve around the modern conception of the “single observer standpoint.” In epistemology, this underlies the notion of truth as seen from an objective position; in moral philosophy, it underlies the notion of judgment from an impartial perspective. The stance of the distanced and impartial observer underlies the conviction that the world is as it is, can be known as it is, and can be represented as it is known independent of our conceptual frames, linguistic practices, historical conditions, and conventional agreements. What is also important to notice is how readily the “ideal” and “impartial” standpoints are thought of in relation to the activity of observation. Observation is understood as a form of impartial looking, which is why it has served as such a powerful metaphor for knowledge and judgment. In beginning to speak about conventions and agreements in Chapter 2, we have already begun to explore some views that offer alternatives to such ideas. But before we go further in exploring alternatives, we need to explain how the attempt to find a ground for truth and a similarly universal standpoint for morality came to rely on vision, and specifically how these efforts came to rely on vision as modeled on the sight of the “punctual” individual. Observation is modeled as we have come to imagine human vision is: it involves the “sight” of an individual who regards the world from a punctual standpoint but impersonally. To understand how these metaphors became so powerful, and to understand how the idea of vision in the punctual, individual sense could serve to support so many ideas underlying conceptions of truth and value, we need to invoke a third notion. This is the notion of the subject. Heidegger described subjectivity through its Latin and Greek roots ( subiectum , hypokeimenon ), which point to the idea of an “underlying ground” for everything that is. Beginning with Descartes, subjectivity was not just one world view among others, or a realm of competing world views, and it certainly was not a synonym for relativism. Rather, it became the position from which we set the world before us as if it were a representation to be viewed.