The word "objectivity" has a somerault history. Its cognates in European languages derive from the Latin adverbial or adjectival form obiectivus/obiective, introduced by fourteenth-century scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (The substantive form does not emerge until much later, around the turn of the nineteenth century.) From the very beginning, it was always paired with subiectivus/subiective, but the terms originally meant almost precisely the opposite of what they mean today. "Objective" referred to things as they are presented to consciousness, whereas "subjective" referred to things in themselves. One can still find traces of this scholastic usage in those passages of the Meditations de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641) where Rene Descartes contrasts the "formal reality" of our ideas (that is, whether they correspond to anything in the external world) with their "objective reality" (that is, the degree of reality they enjoy by virtue of their clarity and distinctness, regardless of whether they exist in material form). Even eighteenth-century dictionaries still preserved echoes of this medieval usage, which rings so bizarrely in modern eras: "Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objective, when it exists no otherwise than in being known; or in being an Object of the Mind."
The words objective and subjective fell into disuse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were invoked only occasionally, as technical terms, by metaphysicians and logicians. It was Immanuel Kant who dusted off the musty scholastic terminology of "objective" and "subjective" and breathed new life and new meanings into it. But the Kantian meanings were the grandparents, not the twins, of our familiar senses of those words. Kant's "objective validity" (objektive Gultigkeit) referred not to external objects (Gegenstande) but to the "forms of sensibility" (time, space, causality) that are the preconditions of experience. And his habit of using "subjective" as a rough synonym for "merely empirical sensations" shares with later usage only the sneer with which the word is intoned. For Kant, the line between the objective and the subjective generally runs between universal and particular, not between world and mind.
Yet it was the reception of Kantian philosophy, often refracted through other traditions, that revamped terminology of the objective and subjective in the early nineteenth century. In Germany, idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlied Fichte and Friedrich Schelling turned Kant's distinctions to their own ends; in Britain, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had scant German but grand ambitions, presented the new philosophy to his countrymen as a continuation of Francis Bacon; in France, the philosopher Victor Cousin grafted Kant onto Descartes. The post-Kantian usage was so new that some readers thought as first it was just a mistake. Coleridge scribbled in his copy of Henrich Steffen's Grundzuge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft (Foundations of Philosophical Natural Science, 1806): "Steffens has needlessly perplexed his reasoning by his strange use of Subjective and Objective - his S[ubjectivity] = the O[ubjectivity] of former Philosophers, and his O[ubjectivity] = S[ubjectivity]." But by 1817 Coleridge had made the barbarous terminology his own, interpreting it in a way that was to become standard thereafter: " Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call NATURE, confirming the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis."
Starting in the 1820s and 1830s, dictionary entries (first in German, then in French, and later in English) began to define the words "objectivity" and "subjectivity" in something like the (to us) familiar sense, often with a nod in the direction of Kantian philosophy. In 1820, for example, a German dictionary defined objektiv as a "relation to an external object" and subjektiv as "personal, inner, inhering in us, in opposition to objective"; as late as 1863, a French dictionary still called this the "new sense" (diametrically opposed to the old, scholastic sense) of word objectif and credited "the philosophy of Kant" with the novelty. When the English man of letters Thomas De Quincey published the second edition of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1856, he could write of "objectivity": "This word, so nearly unintelligible in 1821 [the date of the first edition], so intensely scholastic, and consequently, when surrounded by familiar and vernacular words, so apparently pedantic, yet, on the other hand, so indispensable to accurate thinking, and to wide thinking, has since 1821 become too common to need and apology." Sometime circa 1850 the modern sense of "objectivity" had arrived in the major European languages, still paired with its ancestral opposite "subjectivity." Both had turned 180 degrees in meaning.
The words objective and subjective fell into disuse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were invoked only occasionally, as technical terms, by metaphysicians and logicians. It was Immanuel Kant who dusted off the musty scholastic terminology of "objective" and "subjective" and breathed new life and new meanings into it. But the Kantian meanings were the grandparents, not the twins, of our familiar senses of those words. Kant's "objective validity" (objektive Gultigkeit) referred not to external objects (Gegenstande) but to the "forms of sensibility" (time, space, causality) that are the preconditions of experience. And his habit of using "subjective" as a rough synonym for "merely empirical sensations" shares with later usage only the sneer with which the word is intoned. For Kant, the line between the objective and the subjective generally runs between universal and particular, not between world and mind.
Yet it was the reception of Kantian philosophy, often refracted through other traditions, that revamped terminology of the objective and subjective in the early nineteenth century. In Germany, idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlied Fichte and Friedrich Schelling turned Kant's distinctions to their own ends; in Britain, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had scant German but grand ambitions, presented the new philosophy to his countrymen as a continuation of Francis Bacon; in France, the philosopher Victor Cousin grafted Kant onto Descartes. The post-Kantian usage was so new that some readers thought as first it was just a mistake. Coleridge scribbled in his copy of Henrich Steffen's Grundzuge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft (Foundations of Philosophical Natural Science, 1806): "Steffens has needlessly perplexed his reasoning by his strange use of Subjective and Objective - his S[ubjectivity] = the O[ubjectivity] of former Philosophers, and his O[ubjectivity] = S[ubjectivity]." But by 1817 Coleridge had made the barbarous terminology his own, interpreting it in a way that was to become standard thereafter: " Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call NATURE, confirming the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis."
Starting in the 1820s and 1830s, dictionary entries (first in German, then in French, and later in English) began to define the words "objectivity" and "subjectivity" in something like the (to us) familiar sense, often with a nod in the direction of Kantian philosophy. In 1820, for example, a German dictionary defined objektiv as a "relation to an external object" and subjektiv as "personal, inner, inhering in us, in opposition to objective"; as late as 1863, a French dictionary still called this the "new sense" (diametrically opposed to the old, scholastic sense) of word objectif and credited "the philosophy of Kant" with the novelty. When the English man of letters Thomas De Quincey published the second edition of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1856, he could write of "objectivity": "This word, so nearly unintelligible in 1821 [the date of the first edition], so intensely scholastic, and consequently, when surrounded by familiar and vernacular words, so apparently pedantic, yet, on the other hand, so indispensable to accurate thinking, and to wide thinking, has since 1821 become too common to need and apology." Sometime circa 1850 the modern sense of "objectivity" had arrived in the major European languages, still paired with its ancestral opposite "subjectivity." Both had turned 180 degrees in meaning.