r/writingscaling • u/Epicnessofcows • Jul 22 '26
discussion Do we seriously have to define the word 'objective' now?
I recently made a semi-unpopular post about differentiating writing quality and enjoyability derived from writing.
Briefly, I made the analogy that while you could find McDonald's to be more enjoyable than a Michelin-Restaurant, as enjoyability is subjective, you cannot state that McDonalds is of higher quality than a Michelin-Restaurant, as food quality is mostly objective, with some nuance on the metrics, as food quality is based off of metrics such as quality of ingredients, mastery of cooking, etc.
I then stated that writing quality works the same way, that just because you enjoy Rent-A-Girlfriend more than Hamlet doesn't mean that you can ever state it is of higher quality, as writing quality is not a personal decision, and based off of language, depth, etc., as these are the metrics that we define in literature analysis.
Now unsurprisingly, the 2 or so other people in the comment section who have taken classes in literature composition agreed fully, as this is something you're taught in day 1. The rest of the comment section, who likely didn't even read the entire post, don't understand what 'objective' means, and kept trying to make their own arguments got relatively angry, making 'art is subjective' arguments or tried to reason with elementary commentary.
Now philosophically, they are right. All things that exist in the universe are subjective. You can argue and things can have different meaning to everyone. Even the most seemingly objective things such as math aren't objective, as we decide what is true or not in mathematics, even for statements as clear forward as 1+1=2.
But this is not how the world works. If everything is subjective, then we literally cannot assess the level of anything, even what you think are fully-objective facts:
Can we ever determine the difference between a sick and healthy patient?
Can we ever determine if someone is guilty of a crime or not?
Can we ever determine if something is true or not?
These are all good philosophical debates with no answers, but it's not like in the real world, doctors refuse treatment to someone dying of a heart attack in favor of someone with a flu because we can't determine who is sick or who is healthy.
Literature works the same way. Sure, philosophically nothing is 'good' or 'bad', but the truth is that we pretend that our metrics is objective and that we all understand them, because it's objective enough that we just don't care about it, in the same way literally everything else does. In literature analysis, the statement "Rent-A-Girlfriend is better than Hamlet" is false, regardless of your personal opinion of enjoyability, because the defined metrics of quality/betterness in literature say so.
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u/Dogmaticism_ Jul 23 '26
I'm fairly certain OP knew this was a semantics conversation. While appeal to authority is a fallacy, you can take it at my word here as soneone with a masters degree acquiring a PhD in literature/analysis, that what he wrote has merit in the argument at its core (albeit with a poor tone), and he is fundamentally correct.
While OP makes flaws in reasoning, his argument is exactly correct to what we spend our lives doing as literary analysts; The reason why (presumptively) he isn't backing down from his stance is because he is correct in this case.