poetic objectivity

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Poetic objectivity is Weber’s proposed partial grasp of living concern through embodied participation, expression and relation, as presented in RB2. It accompanies third-person description while remaining answerable to the being investigated. The proposal distinguishes this disciplined access from projecting one’s feelings, abandoning scientific rigor or assuming that participatory understanding gives transparent knowledge of another organism’s experience.

Explanation

The defining passage pairs poetic objectivity with empirical subjectivity, assigning the former an epistemic role and the latter a claim about concern. Poetic does not simply mean decorative language or private aesthetic preference. The term records an attributed proposal for attending to living reality rather than a new instrument that directly measures subjective feeling.

Stengers reformulates the demand as an arrangement in which the phenomenon can affect the question and defeat an imposed description. Inquiry must expose interventions, scales and definitions of relevance to correction. This keeps participation disciplined instead of treating closeness to a subject as immunity from error or evidence against every laboratory method.

AB anchors objectivity in the practical power of reality to make consensus fail. RB3 similarly makes cross-domain comparison risk refusal. These comparisons support a rigorous participatory interpretation without claiming poetic expression alone proves a biological hypothesis or that observers can recover another being’s full inwardness from its visible behavior.

Scope and attribution

Keep Weber’s term and Stengers’s corrective formulation distinguishable.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Partial embodied access must preserve the living phenomenon’s capacity to correct inquiry.

Occurrence locators: 175, 176.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Weber’s poetic objectivity is distinguished from Stengers’s more general resistance criterion used as explanatory background.