Detachment, Objectivity, Imagination: A Critique

What is detachment? What is objectivity? Is the empirical study of ‘facts’ enough?

Descartes, Kant, Mill and others all emphasised the rational human who could detach themselves from the world, observing and calculating; absorbing the facts.

This idea of detachment characterises the approach of both the social and the natural sciences.

But what exactly does it mean?

That an observer can put their own feelings, imagination and biases to one side – to detach themselves from their subject matter - and rationally collect the facts.

Much postmodern theory might be summarised as problematising this idea of ‘detachment’.

Rather than being detached and rational Cartesian egos, we are subjectified by, and the product of, innumerable epistemological, economic, or cultural structures, theoretical trends, personal sentiments, unquantifiable feelings, and irrational choices.

What does the imagination bring to the factual? I take a look through the work of Hayden White, Alun Munslow, and Beverly Southgate, before arguing that the romantic historians – Michelet, Thierry, Carlyle - had a much better understanding of the reality of the historian's craft than the scientifically minded did.

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Sources:

Beverley Southgate, History meets Fiction

Hayden White, Metahistory

Alun Munslow, History and Narrative

Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism

Miljana Cunta, “The Romantic Subject as an Absolutely Autonomous Individual”, Acta Neophilologica, 37, 1-2 (2004)

Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science

J. Michelet, History of the French Revolution