In Praise of Bias: Why the Dream of Objectivity is Killing Knowledge
By Zaky Jaafar (AI-assisted)
Introduction: The Cult of Neutrality
Modern scholarship worships at the altar of objectivity. From the natural sciences to the humanities, the guiding commandment is clear: purge your work of personal bias. The more neutral your language, the more detached your stance, the more “rigorous” your work appears. A scholar is expected to write like a machine: sterile, passionless, above perspective.
This is not only a false ideal; it is a dangerous one. To strip knowledge of bias is to strip it of vitality, rootedness, and transcendence. Humanity does not grow wise through sterilization but through contestation, through the clash of visions, the fire of disagreement. The attempt to erase bias impoverishes knowledge, turning it into a bureaucratic exercise in precision without meaning.
It is time to say it plainly: bias is not the enemy of truth. Bias is the condition of truth.
The Birth of Objectivity: A Historical Misstep
The obsession with objectivity did not fall from the sky. It has a genealogy.
René Descartes, in Discourse on Method (1637), inaugurated the project of radical doubt. He urged scholars to discard inherited opinions and prejudices, retaining only what could be grasped as “clear and distinct ideas.” This methodological purification gave birth to the fantasy of certainty without subjectivity, a clean slate from which science could proceed.
Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum (1620), declared war on the “idols of the mind”—the prejudices and errors that distort human perception. He sought to build knowledge on a purified empiricism, a method cleansed of bias.
Auguste Comte, a century later, codified this impulse into positivism. He declared that science, free from metaphysics and value judgments, was the only legitimate form of knowledge. Even sociology, the study of society itself, was to be conducted with detached neutrality.
Thus, the cult of objectivity was born. What began as a methodological caution hardened into an orthodoxy: personal bias must be eliminated at all costs. By the twentieth century, universities had institutionalized this creed through peer review, citation conventions, and disciplinary policing. The result is a culture where the appearance of neutrality often counts for more than the vitality of thought.
The Poverty of Neutral Knowledge
But neutrality, far from being the guarantor of truth, produces sterility.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1975), dismantled the illusion. He showed that prejudice (Vorurteil) is not necessarily distortion but the very condition of understanding. We always approach the world with pre-judgments shaped by history, language, and culture. To imagine a bias-free knowledge is to imagine a “view from nowhere,” which does not exist.
Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), went further: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” This was not nihilism but honesty. Every act of knowing is perspectival, rooted in a standpoint. To deny bias is not to escape it, but to conceal it.
Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method (1975), exposed the sterility of methodological rigidity. His provocative slogan “anything goes” was not chaos but a recognition that creativity and discovery often require breaking rules, following passions, embracing what looks like bias. Galileo’s defiance of Aristotelian orthodoxy, Darwin’s naturalist leanings, Freud’s obsession with sexuality—all these “biases” were precisely what opened new horizons.
Ian McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary (2009), has shown how our civilization has become trapped in the left hemisphere’s obsession with abstraction, categorization, and detachment—qualities that mirror the cult of neutrality. What is lost is the right hemisphere’s openness to context, metaphor, and transcendence. The erasure of bias is not progress; it is pathology.
Neutral knowledge is precise, but lifeless. It fills libraries with data but leaves us starving for wisdom.
Bias as the Engine of Progress
What, then, is bias? Not petty prejudice, but the unique inflection of human perspective: cultural memory, personal conviction, the archetypal currents of the psyche. Bias is the way transcendence speaks through us.
History shows that progress emerges not when bias is suppressed but when it is declared and contested. Galileo’s “bias” against geocentrism cracked open the cosmos. Darwin’s bias for naturalistic explanation transformed biology. Freud’s bias toward the unconscious reshaped psychology. Anti-colonial thinkers like Syed Hussein Alatas and Rabindranath Tagore, accused of cultural bias, dismantled the myths of empire and articulated alternative visions of humanity.
In each case, the charge of bias was true. And in each case, it was bias that changed the world.
The clash of biases is not chaos. It is a crucible. Just as steel is forged in fire, wisdom is forged in conflict. Bias generates friction, and friction generates heat, and heat generates light. A world without bias would be a world without fire—cold, flat, inert.
The False Promise of Bias-Free Futures
Today, the cult of neutrality has found new expression in algorithms and artificial intelligence. We are told that machines will give us bias-free decisions, data-driven truths. But this is the old Cartesian fantasy reborn in silicon.
Algorithms are built by humans, trained on human data, and soaked in historical prejudice. Yet because they present themselves as neutral, their biases are hidden, unacknowledged, unchallengeable. A biased scholar can be debated. A biased algorithm pretending to be neutral cannot.
The danger of the bias-free ideal is not the absence of bias but the concealment of it. Better an honest bias than a hidden one.
Towards a Culture of Declared Bias
If the dream of objectivity is killing knowledge, what is the alternative? A culture of declared bias.
- Epistemic honesty: Scholars should admit their standpoints instead of pretending neutrality.
- Open contestation: Ideas should be pitted against one another, biases exposed to the fire of critique.
- Embrace of transcendence: Bias should be recognized not merely as error but as the way deeper structures of psyche and culture express themselves.
Humanity advances not through sterilization but through conflict, through the drama of competing visions. The task of scholarship is not to erase bias but to stage its confrontation.
Conclusion: In Praise of Bias
The dream of pure objectivity has failed us. It has given us bureaucratized universities, sterile research, and oceans of data without meaning. It has silenced passion, flattened perspective, and hidden the deeper structures of the human psyche under the mask of neutrality.
It is time to reclaim bias—not as prejudice to be eradicated, but as the very lifeblood of knowledge. To be biased is to be human, to speak from a standpoint, to allow the depths of culture and transcendence to find voice.
Truth emerges not when we erase our differences but when we declare them and let them clash. Progress is born not of neutrality but of bias in combat with bias. To embrace bias is to embrace the fire of knowledge itself.
References (Seminal Works Only)
- Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on Method. Leiden.
- Bacon, F. (1620). Novum Organum. London.
- Comte, A. (1853). The Positive Philosophy. London: Trübner.
- Gadamer, H-G. (1975). Truth and Method. London: Continuum.
- Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil. Leipzig.
- Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method. London: Verso.
- McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Word count: ~1,540
⚡ This version is polemical, manifesto-like, and cites only seminal anchors to give it gravitas without overburdening the text.
Would you like me to also draft a shorter, “viral” version (~800 words) stripped of citations entirely — designed for blogs, op-eds, or social media circulation?
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