Subjectivity and Objectivity  —  Historical Changes

In the West, the mainstream of Enlightenment thought looked on nature and society as having only instrumental significance — potential means to the satisfaction of human desire and nothing more (e.g., Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Bentham). These views seem natural to those of us in the Enlightenment tradition and alienate us from non-Western cultures because of how thoroughly the Enlightenment altered Western understanding of being, knowledge, identity, and morality.

With the conceptual revolution of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the world was transformed from a meaningful order — a sign from God — to an inert, manipulable thing. Orderliness that the Greeks and their intellectual heirs in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance took to be in the world, came to be thought in the modern era of as orderliness in our minds that we project onto a contingent earth. 

Notions of subjectivity and objectivity changed. Formerly, meaning had been thought to be in-the-world and in things such that material objects could be sacred or embody meaning. For example, groves or mountains could be holy. 

In the Enlightenment, however, meaning came to be thought of as only for a subject. With the Reformation, humanity's relationship with the Divine was internalized. It ceased to be meaningful to talk about subjects other than humans as having meaning, value or rights. Only reasoning, communicating humans could be subjects. There could be no meaning in the world in-itself. Only humans confer value and have intrinsic value — that is, value in-itself and not merely as means toward (human) instrumental ends.

People came to define themselves no longer in relation to a cosmic order, but as subjects who possessed their own picture of the world within them, their own purposes and drives. With this new notion of subjectivity went an objectification of the world.

The old view of the world as a cosmic order to which people were essentially related was replaced by a domain of neutral facts, mapped by tracing correlations and manipulated in fulfillment of human purposes — our modern notion of science. 

(Some Christians today believe in transubstantiation - the host is literally the body (etc) of Christ, but many others believe the the host is symbolically the body of Christ and the meaning of communion lies within us and our relationship to God - not literally in the bread.)

Objectification extended beyond external nature to englobe human life resulting in a certain vision of humanity: an associationist psychology, utilitarian ethics, atomistic politics of social engineering and ultimately a mechanistic social science to go with the mechanistic natural science (Berlin 1979, Taylor 1985a, Toulmin 1990). This has led to a profound sense of alienation.

Ethical notions of identity changed in the Enlightenment. Self, that had been defined in relationship to family, guild, community or hierarchy, changed to an atomistic, individualized ego. Later, in the Romantic Period it changed again to a self-determining autonomous subject. 

Notions of the 'good life' changed from public service to the community or contemplation of Ideal Forms beyond the self, to private, autonomous, self-fulfillment and self-realization, freely chosen according to one's own lights.