From Messianic Subjectivity to Immaculate Objectivity: An Etymology

If you ask me for my favorite rock band and I’m being subjective, I’d say The Who. If I was being objective, I’d say The Whom.1 Words are porous, but these ripples and tickles in language are what make it humane. In the Western world, humans have for centuries claimed to be objective: the adjectival use of the word is first recorded in English in the year 1490 as relating to an object, and derived from Middle French and post-classical Latin.2 This is a predictable tautology, but it does remind us of our messy world of objects and things that have recently excited philosophers of a speculative-realist/object-oriented-ontological bent, thus allowing them to advocate a plethora of non-anthropocentric perspectives that acknowledge the non-human dimensions of the world and consequently de-centre us from it. (I use the word us deliberately, but that argument is for ‘Another time, another time’.3) So, this early link to objects seems, on the face of it, to be credible enough. But mediaeval objects are not the same as modern objects. Both scholastic philosophy (derived from Aristotelian ratiocination), as well as mediaeval theology, referred to the properties of things objectively – ‘as they are perceived or conceived by the mind’ – in contrast to the properties of things subjectively, being things ‘as they are in themselves’: in other words, inherent. Over the course of the next two centuries these positions reversed as European philosophers identified apperception, or the mind’s ‘consciousness of itself’, as the first stage of philosophical inquiry, and, following this, the subject became the person who was engaged in perceiving or thinking, as opposed to the object of that perception or thought.4 This overlap and exchange of meanings recurs through the history of objectivity and subjectivity and was hardly settled by the time the word accrued its current meanings. In the middle of the seventeenth century, subjective could still, as it had in the Middle Ages, refer to the intrinsic qualities of a thing (things ‘as they are in themselves’) as opposed to the objective or relative qualities (things ‘as they are perceived or conceived by the mind’). Hence the prominent ecclesiastic (and later Bishop) Jeremy Taylor’s remark in 1647 discussing whether it was St Peter’s confession or his person upon which Christ would build his church: ‘This confession was the objective foundation of Faith, and Christ and his Apostles the subjective, Christ principally, and S. Peter instrumentally’.5 Taylor’s definitions are rooted in scholasticism: the subjective being the essential truth (‘Christ and his Apostles’, things ‘as they are in themselves’), whereas the objective is the experience of things in the mind (the instrument of confession), which is their human truth. It is not difficult, then, to misread Taylor by applying present-day meanings of objective to his writings. OBJECTIVE Happiness is all the Goodness that is fit to be enjoyed either in GOD or in his Creatures: while Formal Happiness is an active Enjoyment of all Objects by Contemplation and Love, attended with full Complacency in all their Perfections.6 So it is the objective that is now ‘all the Goodness that is fit to be enjoyed either in God or in his Creatures’ – total God; doubleplusGod – and (if obsolete today) Traherne’s use of the term resonated through the writings of eighteenth-century divines and nineteenth-century theologians.7 Concurrently, the word also had significance in the field of lenses, optics and perception, which was directly connected to philosophical inquiry (and theology) at the time – most obviously in the investigations of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.8 In optics, the objective was a qualifying term for the nearest focal point to a viewed object, as if the closer one approached the godhead the greater the clarity; the term was still common enough in the following century to be cited in Ephraim Chambers’ standard reference work, the Cyclopædia (1738).9 Certainty according to the School is distinguish’d into Objective and Subjective. Objective Certainty is when the Proposition is certainly true in it self; and Subjective, when we are certain of the Truth of it. The one is in Things, the other is in our Minds.10 There is no sense, nor sensory nor any thing like sense or sensory in God. Sense implies an impression from some other being, and denotes a dependence in the soul which hath it. Sense is a passion; and passions imply imperfection.12 Berkeley’s God, in Watts’s terms, is therefore also subjective because He is beyond the limitations of the human perception of the world and free from the sway of personal emotions; while objective ‘Certainties’, in contrast, are sensory and consequently distorted. These examples show that the terminology is clearly unstable, vacillating; words swap meanings. The definition of subjective, recorded even earlier than objective, has its roots in the subject of a ruler – i.e., subjection, social subservience – which also has a theological basis in Western Christianity insofar as humans are subjects of God, as well as being the heirs to Heaven. But the subjective increasingly related to unique personal experience, which chimed with a growing emphasis on individuality in British politics, driven by the thinking of seventeenth-century Protestants and eighteenth-century Whigs. The Whig world-view prized individualism and originality, creativity and entrepreneurship, over traditional Tory values of social hierarchy, deference to the past – especially to classical history and culture – and autocratic rule, which translated into philosophical works from the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1711) to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into […] the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). These key treatises privileged what existed or was felt in a unique mind rather than what was governed by external laws, values and ideology imposed on an individual and a community through the authority of a sovereign or ruling class. And these were the very values that kick-started the British Romantic movement.13 Romanticism raised the original creative genius in the arts to prophetic heights – although there was also a dark side to this, and so the subjective was occasionally and derisively conflated with delusive individual fantasies and phantasms: the stereotype of the mad poet. Nineteenth-century uses of the term objectivity therefore emerge as subjectivity is being revitalised as the crucible of truth and authenticity in Romanticism. They were also influenced by – if not beholden to – the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who enduringly theorised the dislocation between these different discernments. It is at this point that the specific words objectivity and subjectivity enter the English language. The first use of the word objectivity (as a noun) in English appears in a lengthy unsigned review of Charles Villers’ Philosophie de Kant (Metz, 1801), published in The Edinburgh Review for January 1803; the review was written by the Scottish philosopher and poet Thomas Brown (1778–1820), a founder of the journal and later, in 1810, Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University.14 Although Brown died prematurely and before he could publish much of his work himself, he has been described as ‘immensely popular with students’, and so when his lectures posthumously appeared in print they were ‘rapturously received and widely read, running through a great many editions, both in Britain and America, for several decades’.15 But before assessing Brown’s review, there is an important caveat to be made: Brown had not read Kant – he had only read Villers.16 What follows, then, is not an account of Kant’s influence on the meaning of objectivity, or even Brown’s version of Kant’s influence, but Brown’s version of Villers’ Kant – and Villers, according to the illustrious critic René Wellek, ‘never properly understood the actual point of Kant’s philosophy’(!).17 Wellek continues: ‘Brown’s attack, which is frequently enough very penetrating, is therefore an attack against a ghost created by Villers and not against the actual Kant of history.’18 But Brown’s review is nevertheless of considerable import in the etymology of objectivity – not least as it was for many years (to quote Wellek again), ‘the chief source of popular knowledge of Kant’.19 Brown’s review is wide-ranging: he begins by challenging the idea that the ‘Republic of Letters’ is not governed or defined by any geopolitical borders, as he sees these very borders writ large in Villers’ rather louche book. According to Brown, Kant’s German transcendental idealism is supposedly stymied by French ‘sensualism’, which is both oblivious to its cryptic charms and also exemplified by Villers’ stylistically ornate account – peppered as it is with ill-chosen metaphors and persistently distracted by recent revolutionary history and Napoleonic empire-building.20 For Brown, ideas are inherently contextual and do not travel lightly; they must be personalised. Brown then considers the relationship between philosophy and belles-lettres, suggesting that in Europe poets and novelists have superseded ‘the sage’ (ER, 254). Indeed, according to J. C. Stewart-Robertson, his most recent biographer, Brown himself attempted to combine philosophy with poetry, making several attempts ‘to render philosophical insight and “the spirit of love” into the charm of verse’.21 This, moreover, characterised Brown’s later reputation, leading the nineteenth-century political writer and Whig historian Sir James Mackintosh to describe Brown as possessing the ‘soul of the lonely visionary’. According to Mackintosh, Brown observed ‘man, and his wider world, with the eye of a metaphysician’, and that consequently ‘the dark results of such contemplations, when he reviewed them, often filled his soul with feelings which, being both grand and melancholy, were truly poetical’.22 In relation to its belief of external things, philosophy [according to Brown’s reading of Villers’ Kant] is empirical when it believes them to exist exactly as they appear to us in each particular case; it is transcendent, when, using reason to correct the false representation of the senses, it believes that the objects of our senses exist in a manner really known to us, after this correction, though different from their immediate appearance in particular cases. In both these views it [philosophy] has relation only to their objectivity, or to their qualities as independently existing in themselves. (ER, 258) Brown’s conception of Kant (again, as promulgated by Villers) thus emphasises unknowability. In other words, empirical philosophy understands the world to be entirely legible and therefore intelligible; however, transcendental philosophy (the Kantian game) introduces ‘reason’ – or rather the ‘critique’ of reason: this critique of reason is not rationality or logic, still less a higher metaphysical or visionary fantasy of reason, but is the mind’s work in both making and perceiving the limitations of a priori judgements.24 For Brown, things are not as they appear – they are, in his words, ‘different from their immediate appearance in particular cases’ – but, again, for Brown both the empirical philosopher (who believes that they can perceive the totality) and the transcendental philosopher (who believes that they cannot) things do share qualities as ‘independently existing’, and those can be identified by ‘reason’. Brown was, to an extent, a Humean empiricist, and is here endeavouring to suggest the precariousness of Kantian transcendental idealism by introducing the term objectivity to describe the qualities of things ‘as independently existing in themselves’. For the empiricist, these qualities constitute the mind’s experienced reality, for the transcendentalist he considers them apparently unobtainable. However (and Brown appears understandably oblivious of this), the Kantian turn is not to deal with things or the cognition of them ‘directly’, but ‘rather turns around and engages instead with the art or the way of our cognition by which we perceive those objects’: Kant thus presents a ‘critical examination of the source as well as the limitations of pure reason itself’.25 To these absolute ideas we are led, by an irresistible impulse of our nature[,] towards infinitude. They are forms existing a priori in the mind; for our senses give us the perception only of that which is divisible, limited, caused. With the unity of the human mind, or the infinity of the universe, or the great source of phenomenal nature, no corporeal organ can make us acquainted. (ER, 261) man is known to himself by consciousness. All other beings he knows only subjectively. Himself, however, the sole exception in nature, he knows in objective noumenal reality. (ER, 262) In one circumstance, however, we [i.e., Brown himself] differ from the transcendentalist. We own the subjectivity of our perceptions; but we are convinced of the impossibility of analysing them [these elements] into objective and subjective elements; because they must ever coexist, by the laws of our nature. (ER, 265)26 It would not be more absurd to assert, that an eye, on which blue and yellow rays were continually poured together in one unvaried sensation [what he means by the objective], could, by the mere exertion of internal powers of thought [what he means by the subjective], discover the nature of the compound beam [i.e., green]. (ER, 265) As he had treated empirical and transcendental philosophies, then, Brown attempts to combine two states as a way of sidestepping them to imply the primacy of his own sense of ‘absolute ideas’ by which (to quote again from the passage above) we are led ‘towards infinitude’ by an ‘irresistible impulse of our nature’ because these are forms ‘existing a priori in the mind’. Brown’s partisan attack on Kant is written in a tone of patient, yet wearied (and, unfortunately, seriously mistaken) resignation – mainly, of course, because he is lambasting a straw man. He considers Kant’s theories to be derivative and condemns him for merely mixing together pre-existent philosophies, ultimately – and unhelpfully – concluding that transcendental idealism is ‘ludicrous’ (ER, 279); this, in turn, prompts his biographer Stewart-Robertson to judge the review a ‘(mis)reading’ of Kant in which ‘the disparaging tone […] probably retarded the study of Kant’s ideas in Britain’.27 Certainly Brown muddies the Kantian waters in the examples above by eliding the objective with the subjective in maladroit ways, as well as failing to grasp the notion of critique and misjudging a priori cognition. For Brown, the highest truths are achieved in the Romantic ecstasy of a simultaneously individual and inspired perception that creates an imaginative capacity: poetry. Objectivity – being as independently existing in – a false because it appears as an point at some from the and although the growing through the century was that objectivity presents a this for Brown, an that to be and as such is by definition In other words, for Brown – on the nature of – sensation and thought are from one is not the object of different from but a particular sensation is the of the But the point of the is to show that the word objectivity was as a term to the perceived of Kantian in a review by a leading Scottish philosopher who subjective as a for the highest is the immediate of the term at this time, the objective to be into the The historian for reviewed in his of to the full of philosophical ideas in presents of ideas as corporeal the and the passions and – the with the two by being to sense by the means of and – the objective in this into the But then the subjective is not the of the objective: that is a false If objective does have an it is more to be a term such as – as with to Immanuel Kant, and time are subjective, they are of our of – which us to Berkeley’s that all objects in were that all the in and which you are could be at this very would this be a great and to own […] the between and but to all those which are, to a mere of They are, therefore (I to and but a at the both of the passions and of the and above all and all which are the of that according to the I all the and of the of which, to make no one had a than I have more influence over my and than has […] I him the most of our time, even […] the there is more for thought – and the of thought – in than in all other As it was, later the of was his had in for the of object and In his he had the of the objective into the imaginative of the subjective – the of knowledge he ‘the objective and subjective are so that we to which of the two the Indeed, after Brown one of the uses of subjectivity was – – by in in a the of the and the object, we our own and and so the word had clearly on the of and individuality earlier with Whig thinking, while its objectivity, subjectivity a of different often in a person or his or not influenced by personal feelings or in and […] with or upon that which is external to the mind; with things or rather than or The same laws [i.e., not the who their in and the who in different are to to the of their nature, or to constitute into a and social an subjective like the and an objective like those of and the one and the other and the one and the other and the one not the other the one the other the one failing for of enough for the other for of enough to was to at in their relation to these subjective are and […] and […] not […] whereas an objective are and […] and […] and […] This – and – of the especially in the of objectivity, no less than in Brown’s and so even as the modern meaning it subjective, as well as at the same time that this sense of objectivity (as and the word was also by such as the In and of the the Charles – to the knowledge of God – not God the objectivity of The Romantic notion that ‘reason’ human subjectivity has been so that objectivity now and There is not only no objectivity the history of but there is really no objectivity in its sense at all in this account – objectivity is subjectivity with I still his and of in the and he and them into and with a of or as he To the man himself had in the of a and to it had been to all and all truly a of – but in such of in such and as had work with then, was in a with the and of human – his Romantic his – and that is one reason objectivity achieved primacy in the Objectivity became a from – and certainly no in – personal – This so in the was first so and, when by and words, so apparently on the other so to thinking, and to thinking, has common to any It is that objective could now be both to the of as well as the of a they who of as mere of – They are the by the they that combine them with reason the true of who the There is an here with Thomas Brown’s of but more than that a – which for was in the and of his writings on object and subject (and as and This is what is the meanings of objectivity and subjectivity – words that in different (and the have been in to our human relationship with different of We it at our is a of in English at the of and an at the of He has published over and editions, as well as more than a and on subjects from to the