(University of Vienna)
ABSTRACT: My paper is a footnote to Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s influential book Objectivity. Daston and Galison show that our understanding of “objectivity” is a mixed bag of residues of very different epistemic fears and virtues since the 18th century. I want to highlight a dimension of objectivity missing from Daston’s and Galison’s book. I call it the “Geist-conception of objectivity” (GCO). GCO can also best be approached as an attempted solution for period- and place-specific fears directed at the epistemic subject. The place is the German-speaking lands; the period is 1820 to 1980; and the intellectual fears concern: an epistemic subject that high-handedly ignores, or is unable to grasp, its history, traditions, and epistemic communities; an epistemic subject (“historical consciousness”) unable to defend the importance of the Geisteswissenschaften; an epistemic subject incapable of overcoming psychologism, or of grasping invariant, ideal truths; an epistemic subject (“class consciousness”) unable to grasp social-political-economic realities; an epistemic subject naïvely ignoring deep cultural and national differences; or an epistemic subject falling naïvely into cultural relativism. I shall follow the development of GCO from Hegel via Lazarus, Steinthal, Simmel, Dilthey, Freyer and Hartmann to Lukacs, Popper and Bloor.