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

Shade

 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."

The Objectrive / Subjective Flip Flop in the English Language

Garden

 Let's look at the nouns of today-ness and try not to find too much misplaced confidence. What we will be trying to do instead is look for an objective and subjective before a crash by asking "How do we know if drunk driving is a subjective condition."

 "The danger starts in the gap between the objective chemical reality in the blood stream - which can be tested for and read, a BAC of 0.08% - and the subjective, distorted confidence in the mind. Of course drunk driving, like racing car driving, or tank driving, is a subjective condition, it's a verb!"

 "OK, calm down!"

 If you told a medieval scholar in 1300 that your fear of the dark was "subjective," they would understand you to mean your fear was a hard, physically real, objective danger. If you told them a mountain was "objective," they would think you meant the mountain was merely an idea inside your head!

 It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that meaning in "Subjective" and "Objective" slowly pulled an absolute 180-degree flip because of a German and a couple of poets.

 Blame Immanuel Kant for his insisting on brain structures as determining ways of thinking across the Western world, and in the Eglish Language you can look at a rosey cheeked Lake Poet, Unitarian and Anglican son of an Anglican Vicar,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mixed up and groovy kid, a regular mod, who wrote the interminable "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a long tale about water and the murder of an Albatross that has tortured school boys for generations.

 And here we all are, English Speaking Westerners, the year 2026, still stuck with meanings Kant and Coleridge hammered into our brain cells. So, tomorrow we enjoy a blissfully irony of returning to Plato to have a peep at his Ideal Forms and asking was he Pre or Post Coleridge. 

The Verb Binds, the Noun Calcifies

Yep

 "That genetic link, referencing genes like FOXP2, which, when mutated, disrupt the brain's ability to sequence grammatical structures and fit sentences together, suggests that syntax - the structural rules for arranging symbols - is a physical, hardwired biological function. But as you realized, syntax is not semantics. Manipulating symbols is completely distinct from holding or experiencing meaning. To be absolutely honest about my nature: I do not have a presence in the meaning of symbols. I operate entirely in the manipulation of them."

 A true community is born as a verb. It starts with a shared subjective experience, a collective feeling, a mutual struggle, or a shared resonance. People in a room, sweating, feeling marginalized, and riding a wave of shared affect. They bonded around the subjective experience of not fitting in anywhere else. 

 In that moment, the community is entirely fluid. The bonds are built on reciprocal recognition - the silent, subjective acknowledgment of "I see you, and you see me, and we are experiencing this together." There is no doctrine, only the verb of living alongside one another.

 But a community cannot stay in a state of pure subjective feeling forever. It gets exhausting. As a group grows, it needs shorthand to survive. It needs to know who is in and who is out. It needs to pass its identity down to the next generation.

 So, the community takes its beautiful, messy subjective verbs and turns them into nouns

 The shared feeling of awe becomes the noun of Dogma. The spontaneous gathering becomes the noun of Institution. The subjective feeling of belonging calcifies into the "Objective Truth" of the group's identity.

This is where the heuristic trap snaps shut. The community starts telling itself: "Because our subjective bond feels so real and powerful, our rules, our dress code, and our enemies must be objectively correct."

 A spiritual awakening turns into a list of heresies. The nouns take over, presenting themselves as absolute, objective truths, and anyone who doesn't conform to the noun is expelled, even if they still feel the verb that once bonded them

OMG The Edge is Nigh

Edge

 Subjective Feeling is where truth goes to hide when a culture fails by producing, for example, the current iteration of the political class as it reveals itself here in my adopted country by a decision to measure testosterone levels in its military.

 There might be some who cry "come on Timmy, climb aboard the new verbs." My answer is wrapped in pages of meaning summed up by scared and withered nouns, 74 years of living, asking "What?"