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.
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