Kant, Coleridge, Plato and their abuse of the medieval subjective

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 This is how an etymologist might approach the word Objective, the word Subjective and Kant's influence on English Language Usage:

 "He - Kant - makes the objects of experience to be at once real (as in real) and phenomenal (as in what goes on in the mind) and .... these objects of experience..... what Kant generally means by the objective character of a proposition is the force which it derives from the thing itself compelling the mind, after examination, to accept it." 

 It is attested by 1838, of persons, art, writings, etc., "unbiased, impersonal, intent upon external objects of thought rather than one's sensations; setting forth external facts of matters as they exist or are supposed to exist and avoiding one's emotions and personality." 

And of course it was influenced by this sense from the 1500's of the subjective as ,"characteristic of one who is submissive or obedient," from Late Latin subiectivus "of the subject, subjective," from subiectus (a feminine word) "lying under, below, near bordering on," figuratively "subjected, subdued."

The final area for Etymologists is Objective, Subjective as used in early Modern English : "relating to or of the nature of a subject as opposed to an object," hence "existing, real" (which was the common later meaning of objective)

In these wanderings through meanings it sometimes helps to think of Kant's "Existing in the mind" this way. The "Mind" is thought of as "the thinking subject" and it is this "thinking subject" that was the meaning that caught on with Kant and his front row contemporaries. This way in 1767  in art and literature, "personal, idiosyncratic.... was ..... characterized by prominence given to individual mental operations."

 For Kant a human mind isn't a bucket that collects, it is an active processor. When the real thing hits our mind we send it through a sieve that reduces it to space, time, cause and effect, which gives us an object with adverbs we then pass this along to our consciousness - here defined as awareness - with a "do what you can?"

  In other words, Kant split the world into two separate zones. One zone was a Real Thing with a real presence in the world - the thing in itself - called The Noumenon. And the other zone of thing is a presence in the mind - the thing-as-appears in the mind - called The Phenomenon.

 "And what about the Ancient Mariner?"

 English speaking Poets like Coleridge who had partied with German idealists like Kant came away with the an infectious idea that an "I Am" - a subjective appearance in the mind - the phenomenon - was as good a judge as any of what lay beyond the Curtains of the Mind.

 "And what about Plato?"

 He, and this was well over two thousand years ago, would have looked at the medeival understanding of subjective, the fundamental, bedrock of reality and he'd have agreed that yes indeed "In 1300 AD When you're talking about this or that Subjective Thing you're talking about my Ideal Forms."

 "What about now?"

  Plato might have rolled his eyes, looked at his sundial and answered with something like : "I think I might have mentioned something about caves and shadows on cave walls. Let's see, I died on the 7th day of Thargelion during the Arthonship of Theophilus. When did Kant die?"

"12th of February1804."

"I blame the Romans! I cannot believe it's taken you this long to realize that shadows are cast by real things, and those shadows are all we got to work with, not the real thing that casts the shadow."