OBJECTIVISM. — A tendency or orientation, common to philosophical systems that are otherwise diverse, according to which knowledge does not attain only subject (v.), but refers and is proportioned to reality in itself, actual reality. Extended from the strictly epistemological field to the scientific, ethical, aesthetic, religious, etc., field, objectivism indicates the conception according to which science, ethics, art, religion, etc., are founded upon reality and being, and upon their ontological values.
Further determinations of objectivism depend on the meaning attributed to objectivity. In its most common sense, objective is that which belongs to the object as actual reality (to the ontological-transcendent object [V. OGGETTO]), and therefore is, and must be, universally valid. It is consequently opposed to what is subjective, both in the sense of “belonging to the purely subjective modalities and conditions of knowledge” and in the sense of “individual and relative.” It should be noted that objectivity neither refers nor can refer to reality as it is in itself independently of knowledge, since such a reality would be inaccessible: objectivity is therefore, in the ontological sense, that which presents itself and asserts itself in knowledge as real, actual, and therefore universal; in the epistemological sense, it is the correspondence of knowing to what is real and actual—a correspondence revealed in the characteristics of necessity, universality, and absoluteness that accompany intellectual apperception and affirmation (v. GIUDIZIO).
In the last-mentioned sense, the philosophies of Platone and Aristotele, scholasticism (v.) in its principal currents, are objectivist. In modern philosophy, objectivism is particularly defended by Descartes, who holds that reason, by virtue of its divine derivation, is in itself consonant with reality. Spinoza’s system is also objectivist: “ordo et connexio idearum est idem ac ordo et connexio rerum”; “id quod in intellectu obiective continetur debet necessario in natura dari” (Ethica, part 2°, prop. 7; part 1°, prop. 30). In Kant, the proper object of knowledge is only intuition (v.), and since only sensible intuitions are possible for human knowledge, only representations in space and time (phenomena) are objects of our knowledge. Concepts, or categories, of the understanding, on the other hand (contrary to what rationalism held), “are mere forms of thought without objective reality”: “they acquire objective reality, that is, application to objects that can be given to us in intuition, but only as phenomena” (Kritik der r. V. Transzend. Logik, I, 1, chap. 2, §§ 23, 24). For Kant, therefore, the objectivity of intellectual knowledge consists not in its conformity to an order of real intelligible values, but solely in its reference to and applicability (a priori and therefore universal and necessary) to sensible intuitions as phenomena. Hegel (v.), objectivity has a double meaning: a) “standing opposite the self-subsistent concept”; b) “being that which is in and for itself”: in the first sense, the objective is the world as distinct from the I, which the I, in an infinite struggle, absorbs and resolves into itself; in the opposite sense, “the objective means that which is in and for itself, that which is without limitation and without opposition,” that is, “the being in and for itself of the concept” (Wissenschaft der Logik, III, sec. 2°; Italian trans. by A. Moni, Bari 1925, p. 185). In this sense, Hegelian idealism, because of its absolute resolution of the real into the concept, is absolute objectivism. Similarly, G. Gentile: “The actualist wants the subject-object pair in their absolute opposition; but … he wants, beyond the opposition, the unity of the two terms” (Introduzione alla filosofia, Milan-Rome 1933, p. 262). “The advocate of actualism is more objectivist than his critic” (ibid., p. 263), insofar as he recognizes the totality of the object in the concreteness of its principle (the act), and not, abstractly, severed from II. In Windelband and, generally, in the theory of values (Russel, Scheler), objectivism indicates not the reference of knowledge to an actual reality in itself (realism), but rather to the pure ideality of values, which nevertheless possess an “objective” consistency independent of individual subjects.