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     The dyadic terms subject and object, subjectivity and
objectivity, must be interpreted as a couplet that forever
reflects our perplexity with our experience. The enthusiasm
and optimism of youth might have persuaded me that these
concepts are the keys which will resolve the dilemma they
express; but if they solve anything at all, the solution is
facilitated if not feigned by the fading, and ultimately by
the dying of my mind. They have facilitated my own
intellectual existence and survival. What more they might
mean is beyond me.

     It is of some value to be reminded how drastically the
meanings of subject and object have changed in the past
five hundred years.  Just as the subject of a book or a
lecture refers to the underlying reality that the
publication brings to the fore, so in the ancient physics
and metaphysics, subject refers to the underlying reality,
the hypokeimenon of any given phenomenon.  To be objective
is to be accidental, zufaellig, but to be subjective is to
be real.  Objective refers to the circumstances which
befall the subject, in which it happens to be involved, but
by which it is by no means defined.

     To explain why and how in the seventeenth and
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meanings of subject
and object became virtually reversed, is a task for
intellectual history that has not been accomplished and the
significance of which seems not even to be recognized. My
own understanding suggests that the subject-object
inversion occurred at a time when there was a drastic
transformation of the nature of society and hence of the
knowledge created and preserved by that society.  During
that period the center of gravity of knowledge shifted from
the individual to the society. Knowledge became less and
less an expression of individual insight and understanding,
- the astrologers and alchemists famously functioned in
isolation , - knowledge became more and more a social, a
public, and hence also a political phenomenen.

     It is not surprising therefore, that the significance
of the individual's insight faded while the importance of
public knowledge grew. What was "subjective" to the
individual mattered less and less. The knowledge and
intellectual experience that was or might be common,
received the designation "objective", where that apparently
anomalous term came to signifify primarily if not solely
the denial or suppression of intuition, individuality and
inwardness. (Innerlichkeit).  In my own thinking,
therefore, I denominate objectivity as reference to the
communicable and social, hence to the public reflection and
expression of experience, for whose benefit the individual
inward subjective experience has been systematically
ignored, denied, or deprecated.

     It is not by accident that historically the ascendancy
of objectivism was concomitant with the decline at least of
public expression of religion, and that the rediscovery of
subjectivity, at least so far as Kierkegaard was concerned,
occurred in a religious context.

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Copyright 2007, Ernst Jochen Meyer
