Objectivity, in its primal form, is the natural condition of all sentient life on this planet. It is the default epistemic stance of the creature immersed in the immediacy of the world — of the animal reacting to the environment, of the pre-civilizational human responding to stimulus without reflective interference. Early man lived in such a world: unburdened by the labyrinth of introspection, tethered solely to the external. He saw, he heard, he touched — but he did not yet wonder why he saw, or who was seeing. He existed as part of nature, not yet apart from it.
In that early phase, man was purely objective — not by virtue of philosophical discipline, but through the absence of self-awareness. The world appeared as it was; reality, undistorted by symbols, beliefs, or metaphysical longings, was experienced directly, as a brute fact. But somewhere along the evolutionary arc, a rupture occurred: the emergence of myth.
It is not known when or how the first mythological narratives arose — whether from dreams, deliriums, or the collective anxiety of facing the inscrutable. But these stories marked the dawn of man’s symbolic consciousness. They were not idle fables; they were, in essence, the first philosophical frameworks, primitive attempts to structure meaning where none was apparent. These narratives gave rise to cults, and from cults emerged rituals, norms, and hierarchies — the scaffolding of tribal life. What followed was the slow coagulation of human settlements into city-states, bound not only by geography or need, but by shared imaginaries.
Within these nascent societies, the first stirrings of philosophy began. No longer merely reacting to the world, man now turned inward. He began to ask questions — of the gods, of the stars, of himself. The mind became a site of tension: torn between the empirical and the metaphysical, between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Subjectivity had been born.
This birth was not a clean transition but a dialectical process — a conflict between objectivity and subjectivity. Man, once a mere node in nature’s machinery, now stood doubly exiled: from the animal world that had birthed him, and from the divine realm he aspired to comprehend. He could now doubt what his senses told him. He could interrogate truth. He could imagine the unreal, and in doing so, transform it into reality — art, religion, ethics, and science were all children of this newfound interiority.
It is through this internal division — between the outer world of phenomena and the inner world of thought — that the human mind evolved. Over millennia, this tension refined itself into reason, inquiry, and introspection. What began as myth became philosophy; what began as ritual became law; what began as subjective yearning became the architecture of civilization.
Modernity, then, is not the abandonment of objectivity, but its reconciliation with subjectivity. Civilization is the edifice built upon this dynamic tension — the ceaseless oscillation between what we see and what we believe, between the real and the imagined, the known and the unknowable.
Thus, the story of man is the story of an awakening — not from sleep, but into complexity. From the raw immediacy of objective being to the layered, ambivalent consciousness of modern life, we are the inheritors of a paradox: creatures rooted in the real, yet forever haunted by the possible.
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