The Vision Thing

A critique of the notion of perfect objectivity as represented by the 'Universal Language' and other similar notions.

The effect of this vision on the modern mind has for the last fewˋ centuries been progressive and profound. It shows, for instance, in the pervasive attachment of educated opinion in the West to the belief that unless moral principles can be shown to be “objective,” which is to say, somehow or other inherent in a “Nature” untouched by human hands, we have no option but to embrace a noncognitivism according to which morality is a tissue of subjective “feelings” or “commitments,” and as such immune from rational criticism. In another way it shows in the conviction, widespread in literary studies, that there is ultimately no distinction of value to be drawn between great literature and the most trivial piece of kitsch, as literature per se is a fantasy; a further layer of coloured illusion that we interpose between ourselves and the realities of which we would be glumly confined to speaking, did we but speak a language as hostile to fantasy as the Universal Language would be, and as such putative fragments of it as, say, the languages of the physical sciences already are.

(from: Word and World by Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison)