Nietzsche on Objectivity
But might there not be an illusion in even the loftiest interpretation of the word objectivity? For in this sense the word implies a state of mind in the historian in which he contemplates an event so purely, with all its motives and all its consequences, that it has no effect on his subjectivity. It connotes that aesthetic phenomenon, that detachment from personal interest by which a painter, in a stormy landscape threatened by lightning and thunder or on an angry sea, perceives his own inner image; it connotes complete immersion in things. But it is superstitious to suppose that the image which things reveal to a man so attuned reproduces their empirical reality. Or are we to suppose that in these moments things actively sketch, paint, or photograph themselves, so to speak, upon a purely passive mind? This would be a mythology, and a bad mythology at that.
~ "History in the Service and Disservice of Life" in Unmodern Observations (Yale: 1990), 115
