Balancing duality: objectivity vs subjectivity?

Global Insight from Crown Chakra Dynamics in 3D? (Part #10)

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As argued above, the challenge of viable helicopter operation depends on a skillful balance between torque and anti-torque through control of the respective rotors.

This frames a way of exploring various dualities, typically experienced as problematic. That between positive and negative offers one example, especially in the light of the extensive insights of cybernetics with regard to the necessity of positive feedback and negative feedback (also termed balancing feedback) required for the sustainable operation of any system.

Potentially of greater relevance is the duality of objectivity and subjectivity, celebrated in the cultural challenge articulated by C. P. Snow (The Two Cultures, 1959). A commentary on this duality  explored it in dynamic terms, rather than as a matter of static perspective (A Subjective Objection: Objecting to Subjection: interplay of questions enabling transcendence of fundamental dilemmas? 2016; Controversy regarding 'subjectivity' vs. 'objectivity' regarding 'beauty' and 'life', 2010). This included their comprehension from a cybernetic perspective -- Interrelating subject and object in terms of knowledge cybernetics -- and reference to the study by Max Deutscher (Subjecting and Objecting: an essay in objectivity, 1983).

The constraints of the operation of a widely familiar helicopter offer the delightful possibility that:

• with objectivity as the "primary rotor" (as favoured by science), there is a curious requirement for subjectivity as a counter-balancing "tail rotor" (as promoted by the humanities and psychosocial sciences)
• with subjectivity as the "primary rotor" (as favoured by the humanities and psychosocial sciences), there is a curious requirement for objectvity as a counter-balancing "tail rotor" (as promoted by the natural sciences)

A similar argument might be made for the "positive" as the primary rotor, and its needs for corrective "negative" feedback. The visual image of the distance between the vertically-oriented primary rotor and the horizontally-oriented tail rotor (at the end of the helicopter tail boom) is metaphorically suggestive in its own right.

The animation presented above of two coupled tori would however be indicative of a cognitive refinement in which the two "cognitive rotors" were interlocked in a complex manner recalling the designs for rotorcraft in which the counter-acting rotor is not physically distant from the primary rotor but is integrated with it. The humanities and sciences have yet to engender any such integration -- or even to imagine its possibility. Ironically their relationship could be understood as exemplifying a form of "social distancing" to avoid any risk of mutual infection.

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