In this essay, I briefly sketch the trajectory of the “objective” or “objectivity” in three canonical German philosophers: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. My motivation for pursuing this essay is looking backwards from the place of “objectivity” today, especially as the word has been variously contested in the last forty years or so in the emerging field of science and technology studies (e.g., by Donna Haraway). Too often, in these debates objectivity is deployed as a strawman, a crude caricature of logical positivism to be hacked away at by (often equally crude) postmodern critiques. A more sophisticated account of objectivity is given by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their seminal 2008 book, Objectivity, which traces the rise of successive “epistemic virtues” through a close study of scientific atlases from around 1750 to 1950. There have also been recent attempts to recuperate objectivity as part of the broad coalition of movements grouped under the “ontological turn.” I think a move of this sort was anticipated by Hannah Arendt in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I think all these discussions would be enriched by a more nuanced understanding of the history of this word.
But enough of this talk. This paper is more proximately driven by a fundamental foreignness I perceived when reading the German philosophers of the early nineteenth century, for whom “objectivity” seems to mean something else quite different. For the purposes of this essay, I want to reconstruct as faithfully as I can the various meanings of objectivity and objects in the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I bracket both my motivations and the later development of the term to focus on an immanent account of each of these thinkers in turn. One more preliminary note: part of the foreignness can be attributed (as so often it is) to difficulties of translation. In particular, “subject” is also a Latinate term in German (Subject or Subjekt). By contrast, “object” can be either Object/Objekt (the Latinate term) or the Germanic Gegenstand, whence also Gegenständlich (“objective”) and Gegenständlichkeit (“objectivity”). Gegenstand has the distinction that it literally “stands against” something. Kant talked mostly of Objecte — but not really, since he divided the world into the realm of appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves. The Subjekt has a double meaning, of course: it is both subject-matter (“what is the subject of this book?”) in which case it can be rather synonymous with “object”; and it is the ethical or epistemological subject, the self that knows or acts. So much for a bird’s-eye view of the development. Let us now dive in and get our hands dirty.
I. Kant
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write:
Immanuel Kant’s philosophical reformulation of the scholastic categories of the objective and the subjective reverberated with seismic intensity in every domain of nineteenth-century intellectual life, from science to literature.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 205. They discuss Kant in greater detail in chapter 1, p. 30 ff.
It is no understatement to say that our entire framework for thinking about subjectivity and objectivity derives from Kantian philosophy (and, it must be said, misreadings thereof). As Daston and Galison go on to say:
By the mid-nineteenth century, dictionaries and handbooks in English, French, and German credited Kantian critical philosophy with the resuscitation and redefinition of the scholastic terminology of the objective and the subjective. Words that were once enmeshed in the realism versus nominalism debate of the fourteenth century and that had by the eighteenth century fallen into disuse except in a few treatises in logic were given a new lease on life by Kantian epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.
Ibid., 206.
Tracing this popularization and broad influence of Kant is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I ask: how did objectivity figure in Kant’s project, and particularly in his Critique of Pure Reason?
The Copernican revolution Kant proposes aims to secure the possibility of knowledge that possesses both “objective validity” and “objective reality.”1 He demonstrates the possibility of such knowledge by demonstrating the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. (In crude terms, these are judgments that are both ampliative, i.e. producing genuine additions to knowledge, and are prior to experience; Kant thinks that arithmetical truths of the sort “7+5=12” are exemplars of such judgments.) It is important to emphasize that the objective character of this knowledge depends on the objectivity of judgments; unlike is popularly assumed today, the objectivity of objects depends on the objectivity of judgments, not vice versa. Kant proposes the Copernican revolution to get around the problems of traditional metaphysics, which claims to derive knowledge about objects from a few basic principles. This is ridiculous, Kant thinks. How can you derive knowledge of objects from a priori principles? Thus, he writes:
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. (B xvi)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Following parenthetical citations (given in standard format) are to this translation.
Kant clarifies this dilemma by introducing his terminology: where previous metaphysics was a “groping among mere concepts” (B xv), i.e. analytic, he thinks that metaphysics must bear some relation to objects, i.e. be synthetic. At the same time, he agrees that philosophy must provide knowledge of objects that is universally and necessarily true — or else it would collapse into physics and mathematics, which are a posteriori sciences that remain provisional and fallible. Metaphysics has to find its place between logic, mathematics, and physics (the existing secure sciences) by threading the needle: demonstrating the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments.
So what role does objectivity play in this new metaphysics? Well, before Kant the “objective” meant that which was presented to the senses; the “subjective” was that which exists in the cognition of the subject. There was no firm connotation of impartiality or certainty. For Kant, objective data are the phenomena as they are “given” through our senses. This sensible data does not exist independently of our mind, however. Both the mind and the sensible data are involved in the act of synthesis that produces meaning, i.e. identifiable objects:
Thus pure intuition contains merely the form under which something is intuited, and pure concept only the form of thinking of an object in general. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (B 75)
After Kant, both the mind and objective phenomena (i.e. those presented to our senses) are involved — just like how after Copernicus, both the movement of the Earth and the movement of the stars and planets are involved in producing the phenomena of the movement of the heavenly bodies. For knowledge to be objective is for cognition to be dependent on both intuition and understanding. As Kant puts it:
Intuition and concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. … Further, these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. … Only from their unification can cognition arise. (B 74–76)
Here it is worth making a terminological note. Today, “objective knowledge” is often taken to mean “true knowledge.” Strictly speaking, in most epistemology (including Kant’s) there is no other form of knowledge. The worthwhile distinctions, as we have noted above, are of kind — synthetic vs analytic and a priori vs a posteriori. Kant is particularly interested in universally valid knowledge about the objects of human experience, which he understands as by definition secured by synthetic a priori judgments. Kant’s proposal, his transcendental turn, is that only by investigating the necessary and universally valid conditions of human cognition can we yield the necessary and universally valid ontology of human experience.2 To talk about objects, we have to talk about the subject. In particular, to produce objective judgments about objects of cognition (i.e. those presented to us by our senses) we must involve the subject of cognition, since the objects must conform to the conditions supplied a priori by the subject. As Kant writes:
The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience, and on this account have objective validity in a synthetic judgment a priori. (B 197)
These conditions of possibility are primarily space and time: as a subject we supply the framework that combines with objective data to produce phenomena. No experience and no knowledge is possible without the involvement of the subject in this way. Universal and necessary knowledge of objects (i.e. the contents of metaphysics) necessarily involves both the object and the subject in the production of synthetic a priori judgments. Ultimately, for Kant, objectivity does not exist as such; it is a characteristic of judgments.
II. Hegel
To some extent, “objectivity” plays only a cameo role in Kant’s philosophy. “Objective” as an adjective can be attached only to judgments (i.e. statements or propositions) about reality, not to types of being. Kant shifts the ground of metaphysics from ontology to epistemology: his Critique of Pure Reason, as we have seen, revolves around the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. Objectivity is involved in making these judgments, but objects do not take on an ontological role per se. It is in Hegel’s Logic that we really see subjectivity and objectivity take on ontological meanings. With Hegel it is now possible to call something subjective, i.e. to attribute the characteristics of subjectivity to it, in particular those of self-referentiality, self-organization, and self-determination.
In some ways, Hegel is simply radicalizing Kant’s transcendental turn. Thus, with the move from Kant to Hegel we get a double transition. In the first place, the phenomena and the things-in-themselves are no longer separate — rather, they are conjoined as objects (Gegenstände). Simultaneously, Hegel radicalizes Kant’s transcendental turn to make the subject no longer about subject-matter but rather now entirely about the self, or in Hegelian terms, the spirit (das Geist). Kant had already moved “subject” away from the meaning of “subject-matter” to focus on the self; Hegel goes a step further and calls this self the world-spirit. Similarly, Kant had already proposed that cognition is produced by the synthesis of subjective concepts and objective intuition; Hegel now proposes the unity of the subject and the object in the world-spirit. Indeed, this world-spirit gobbles up everything: it encompasses the self, the world, thought, and spirit. Thus, in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes:
The spiritual alone is the actual; it is the essence, or, what exists-in-itself. … This means that it must be, to itself, an object, but it must likewise immediately be a mediated object, which is to say, it must be a sublated object reflected into itself. … Insofar as the object for itself is also for itself, this self-engendering, the pure concept, is, to itself, the objective element in which it has its existence, and in this manner, it is, for itself in its existence, an object reflected into itself. (§25)
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Terry Pinkard and Michael Baur, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Following parenthetical citations are given to this text.
For Hegel, philosophy as a science is built by the spirit knowing itself. Here we get to the crux of the matter: for the spirit to know itself it must be both subject and object. On a basic level, this is about epistemology: as with Kant, to know is to involve both the subject and the object. But for Hegel, philosophy as science is not the investigation of the conditions of possibility of such knowledge; it is the totality of this knowledge. The Phenomenology presents the path to this science, as the progression of knowing that the spirit undertakes. This science of spirit involves traditional metaphysical concepts as “foundation stones”:
Subject and object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are, as is well known, all unquestioningly laid as foundation stones which constitute fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The movement proceeds here and there between those points, which themselves remain unmoved, and it thereby operates only upon the surface. (§31)
In this knowledge, as I have mentioned, the subject becomes the object and then comes around again — a process that Hegel describes using the language of alienation:
spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of becoming an other to itself, which is to say, of becoming an object to its own self and of sublating this otherness. And experience is the name of this very movement in which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract … alienates itself and then comes round to itself from out of this alienation. It is only at that point that, as a property of consciousness, the immediate is exhibited in its actuality and in its truth. (§36)
Objective knowledge for Hegel consists in this process of spirit alienating itself and then reuniting and coming round again. In other words, knowledge is produced by the dialectic, the motor of history. Hegel makes this explicit when he talks about negation, which should be understood as a properly logical term. Being as subject is the proposition; being as object is the negation; and coming round again brings itself to its conclusion. Together, this dialectic constitutes science:
They no longer fall apart into the opposition of being and knowing but instead remain in the simplicity of knowing itself, and they are the truth in the form of the truth, and their diversity is only a diversity of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is logic, or speculative philosophy. (§37)
Objective truth, as with Kant, is produced by the unity of subject and object. In this sense Hegel follows and radicalizes Kant’s Copernican revolution. But Hegel makes the case that judgments do not happen in an instant. Instead, objective knowledge is a matter of the whole of the movement. Now we can finally talk about subjectivity and objectivity as predicates. For in the spirit’s path, it sometimes takes on the character of the object, and is in this sense objective, and it sometimes takes on the character of the subject, and is in this case subjective.
Here we come to a divergence in the reception of German idealism. Is the path taken from Kant to Hegel an aggrandizement of the subject? Or is it in fact the very opposite, a movement against subjectivism and towards greater realism and naturalism? In one reading, Hegel is one by one removing the guard rails Kant had placed on his transcendental self to make it not just the source of forms but also of the content of experience. As Frederick Beiser puts it,
the Kantian transcendental self, which was essentially only a construct to explain the possibility of a single objective experience, gradually became converted into a metaphysical principle, the single universal self that is the source of all of nature and history. On this account, German idealism becomes something like a transcendental revival of Christianity, theology through philosophical means.
Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5.
What this disregards is the objective character that I have described above. The spirit is not just the aggrandized Kantian subject but also includes the object. Beiser believes this crucial misunderstanding stems from two conflated senses of the term “ideal”:
the ideal can be the mental in contrast to the physical, the spiritual rather than the material; or it can be the archetypical in contrast to the ectypical, the normative rather than the substantive. Idealism in the former sense is the doctrine that all reality depends upon some self-conscious subject; idealism in the latter sense is the doctrine that everything is a manifestation of the ideal, an appearance of reason.
Ibid., 6.
Hegel invites this misunderstanding, to be sure. The Bildung of the spirit is so easily conflated with the development of the subject. But Geist is not Subjekt.
The crucial distinction can be best understood by thinking about the status of objects. Is it the case that there is an originary subject, which occasionally takes objective form? Or are both objective and subjective forms merely instances of a larger absolute? A different way to stage this divide is to consider Hegel with respect to two very different intellectual forebears: Kant and Spinoza. Understood as the radicalization of Kant, Hegel does indeed seem to be taking Kant’s transcendental thesis, that the subject supplies the structures of expriences, to its logical end: the subject supplies the objects of experience, too. (In other words, there is no realm of things-in-themselves with a mysterious link to the phenomena that constitute objective knowledge; there are only phenomena generated by the mind.) The different understanding comes to light when considering Spinoza. In this case, the subject and the object are both instances of something greater — in Spinozist language, modes of one Deus, sive natura. I do not want to settle on either interpretation. Suffice it to say that I think Spinoza may have had a greater influence upon Hegel than we commonly understand — an influence that was not made explicit perhaps because Spinoza was still understood as a dangerous atheist, someone no civil servant in the Prussian state would be caught dead flirting with. But, of course, that is precisely what the Young Hegelians undertook to do. Thus, this tension between Spinozist and Kantian interpretations of Hegel comes to a head with Marx, to whom we now turn.
III. Marx
For Hegel, objects are subjectively constructed — prefabricated by logic, if you would. After all, he is an idealist. By contrast, for Marx objects are given before they are subjectively reconstructed. In other words, Marx thus introduces materialism to the picture. As a miniature of this movement, let us take up Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition (New York: Norton, 1978), 144.
Let us take this thesis phrase by phrase. The “question” at issue is precisely the question I elaborated on above: can objective truth be attributed to human thinking? In other words, is the crude idealist interpretation of Hegel as radicalizing Kant’s transcendental self accurate? Marx wants to steer away from this question. He doesn’t want to choose between Kant and Spinoza when reading Hegel. Instead, he thinks the question of truth is not something theoretical but rather practical. What does this mean? Well, Marx is right to call the “dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking” — is the subject the mind or is it nature? — a “purely scholastic question.” It is interesting to entertain, sure, but what relationship does it have with the real world, the realm of practice and action? None. Instead, Marx proposes, we should consider the notion of objective truth in practice. This is a crudely pragmatist view: the idea of truth depends not on correspondence with some objects out there, nor on a purely conceptual analysis, but on whether it achieves some desired outcomes.
To return briefly to Kant: he took the facts of Newtonian physics to be objectively true — the motion of a ball falling from a tower can indeed be described by the force of gravity. What does this mean? Well, we take in the phenomenon of the ball falling, structure that experience with our a priori framework of space, and produce a synthesis of understanding. Kant is trying to balance the tension between having a point of contact between subject and object, which is necessary to produce knowledge, and keeping a separation between the subject and object, to guarantee that there is a real world outside of us. It is easy to take either of these interpretations and run with them, resulting in either the objectivist or subjectivist forms of German idealism.
But Marx wants out. This does not mean he wants to cast doubt on the objective truth of Newtonian physics. Instead, he thinks that Kant is deceiving himself about the source of this knowledge. Kant claims to be after a priori conditions of possibility of Newtonian physics, but for Marx it is clear why he takes Newtonian physics for granted — because of the reality of technological advances, in short because of industry. The proof of physics is proven by the undeniable reality of industry. So far so good. But where is the place for human freedom? Isn’t this precisely what Kant rightly wanted to avoid — a deterministic universe where even our thoughts ultimately derive from laws of nature?
Indeed. Marx, too, wants to carve out space for human freedom. Take the third thesis on Feuerbach:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. … The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
Yes, we are products of our circumstances. But we can change those circumstances. To change the world is not to undertake a revolution in theory, of the sort Kant undertook in the mold of Copernicus. It is, rather, to make a revolution in practice.
Kant’s understanding of human freedom and of practice relies (at least early in his career) on elaborating Hegel’s idea of alienation. In articulating the painful alienation caused by modern capitalism, objectivity plays an essential role:
In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being … This production is his active species life. … The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 76. Following parenthetical citations are to this text.
This is very Hegelian, as we can now see. Spirit, Hegel says, produces objects through activity. In this process, spirit simultaneously does the activity of philosophy. Thus Marx goes on to say that in objectification man
duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also, actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity. (76)
This is profoundly violent! Man realizes himself in the free activity of objectification — the transformation of inorganic labour. But in capitalism, labour is estranged from man (because it is commodified). Free activity is degraded: “estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.” By rights (and by Hegelian logic), objectified man must return to man. But estrangement through private property creates alienated, i.e. permanently estranged, objects:
If the product of [man’s] labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. … Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour — i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man. (78–9)
This is deeply Hegelian, of course. As Marx himself writes:
Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy — the alienation of man in his knowing of himself, or alienated science thinking itself — Hegel grasps as its essence. (112)
I will not go further in my reading of Marx. Suffice it to say that objectivity has come into view properly. In these early manuscripts we see clearly how Marx receives and interprets the Hegelian notions of subjectivity and objectivity. Earlier, we saw how Hegel himself related to the much different notions of objectivity and subjectivity we find expressed in Kant. While this essay may not have produced anything like a proper conclusion, I have now completed my purpose: to set aside our received understanding of “objectivity” in order to take these three canonical German philosophers on their own terms.
- In this section I have found particularly helpful the articulation provided by Klaus Brinkmann, “The Problem of Objectivity in Classical German Philosophy,” 16, http://www.hegelpd.it/hegel/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Brinkmann-The-Problem-of-Objectivity-in-Classical-German-Philosophy.pdf.
- Kant defines “transcendental” thusly: “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori” (B 25).
excellent