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Subjectivity   /səbdʒɛktˈɪvɪti/   Listen
Subjectivity

noun
1.
Judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts.  Synonym: subjectiveness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Subjectivity" Quotes from Famous Books



... creates, he represents the ideas within him, and he loses the sense of life and consciousness and Will, which, according to Schopenhauer, is to be freed from constant demands, and strivings. He is no longer bound to the wheel of desire—he has no personal interests—no subjectivity. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne

... that not inconsiderable section of the public which has been aptly described as dominated by a "longing to combine a picturesque certainty devoid of moral discipline with unlimited transcendental speculations." All these cults combine a vague optimism with an extravagant subjectivity; all would have us believe that so far from things being what they are, they are whatever we may think them to be; all with one accord treat evil in its various manifestations as unreal, and maintain, as it has been neatly phrased, that "the process ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... the boundary-line of sense, and inquire after causes and entities which his reason assures him must lie beneath all sensible appearances. He must and will interpret nature according to the forms of his own personality, or according to the fundamental ideas of his own reason. In the childlike subjectivity of the undisciplined mind he will either transfer to nature the phenomena of his own personality, regarding the world as a living organism which has within it an informing soul, and thus attain a pantheistic conception of the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... Jemmy had risen to the occasion. The polished pewter vessels and the brass candlesticks shone resplendent from the background of black holly and veined ivy, and the red pearls of the berries. The comments, like all human criticisms, varied according to the subjectivity and prejudices of ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... the habit of putting oneself into what one writes can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at times a total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... learn from archaeological records is annalistic not historic, since such records have not passed through the transforming crucible of a human intelligence which reasons on events as effects of causes. The boundary between Prehistoric and Historic, however, depends too much on the subjectivity of individual historians and is too apt to vary with the progress of research to be a fixed moment. Nor can it be the same for all civilizations. As regards Egypt, for example, we have a body of literary ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... Eventually the whole Greek philosophy went out in scepticism. The three schools, the sceptic, the Epicurean, and the stoic, though widely differing in many ways, agreed upon one thing, in basing their philosophy on subjectivity, on mind rather than ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true pre-eminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself, which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... a combination of poetry with doctrine, and, by turning the mind inward on its own essence instead of letting it act only on its outward circumstances and communities, a combination of poetry with sentiment. And it is this inwardness or subjectivity, which principally and most fundamentally distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry. Compare the passage in the 'Iliad' (Z. vi. 119-236.) in which ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... reason; for even if the one, as some say, had been an hallucination, were those sick folk an hallucination? Was Pierre de Rudder's mended leg an hallucination, or the healed wounds of Marie Borel? Or were those hundreds upon hundreds of disused crutches an illusion? Did subjectivity create all these? If so, what ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson

... maintain that we cannot think of non-existence of space, even if we can leave out all objects in it; nor can we doubt the existence of time, for the existence of mind itself presupposes time. Their very argument, however, proves the subjectivity of time and space, because, if they were objective, we should be able to think them non-existent, as we do with other external objects. Even space and time, therefore are ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... according as he thinks or acts, antitypes of good or evil in the imagination of the world which is reflected upon the spiritual aura of the microcosm previous to taking on corporal form. While in this state they may be perceived by subjectivity, and thus the images seen are impressed on the dream mind during sleep, or on the passivity of the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... may say perhaps—a relegation of style to the subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament of the vision within, the one word, the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... gain and loss. The philosophical criticism of life may vary from the ideal objectivity of absolute truth, to the subjectivity of a personal religion. Philosophy aims to correct the partiality of particular points of view by means of a point of view that shall comprehend their relations, and effect such reconciliations or transformations as shall enable them to constitute a universe. Philosophy ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... they are and our impressions and thoughts concerning them—the possibility, if an outward world does really exist, of some faultiness in our apprehension of it—the doctrine, in short, of what is termed "the subjectivity of knowledge." That is a consideration, indeed, [138] which lies as an element of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the very foundation of every philosophical account of the universe; which confronts ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... serenity of a bird soaring in the still air. On such a height the air was so pure and rarefied that Christophe could hardly breathe. There he met artists who claimed the absolute and limitless liberty of dreams,—men of unbridled subjectivity, like Flaubert, despising "the poor beasts who believe in the reality of things":—thinkers, who, with supple and many-sided minds, emulating the endless flow of moving things, went on "ceaselessly trickling and flowing," staying nowhere, nowhere coming ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... justly remarked that madness is an excess of subjectivity; that is to say, a state in which the mind accords too much to mental labor and not enough to outward impressions. In the case of Thomas Roch this indifference was practically absolute. He lived but within himself, so to speak, a prey to a fixed idea which had brought him to the condition ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne

... subjective freedom. All the riches of imagination and nature are appropriated to that dominant existence in which subjective freedom is essentially merged; the latter looks for its dignity not in itself but in the absolute object. All the elements of a complete state—even subjectivity—may be found there, but not yet harmonised with the grand substantial being. For outside the one power—before which nothing can maintain an independent existence—there is only revolting caprice, which, beyond the limits ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... this cosmopolitanism, illustrated in the Haggada, whose pages prove that nothing human is strange to the Jewish race, it reveals, in its literary development, as notably in the Halacha, a sharply defined subjectivity. Jellinek says: "Not losing itself in the contemplation of the phenomena of life, not devoting itself to any subject unless it be with an ulterior purpose, but seeing all things in their relation to itself, and subordinating them to its own boldly asserted ego, the Jewish race is ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... that we have no knowledge at all of objective reality, that things are as they seem to us, and that we have no knowledge of what they are in themselves; "on this field," says SCHWEGLER, "they disported, enjoying with boyish exuberance the exercise of the power of subjectivity, and destroying, by means of a subjective dialectic, all that had been ever objectively established," such as "the laws of the State, inherited custom, religious tradition, and popular belief.... They form, in short, the German AUFKLAeRUNG ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... and barter, drives one to the indefinite subjective. Emerson's lack of interest in permanence may cause him to present a subjectivity harsher on the outside than is essential. His very universalism occasionally seems a limitation. Somewhere here may lie a weakness—real to some, apparent to others—a weakness in so far as his relation becomes less vivid—to the many; insofar as he over-disregards the personal unit in the universal. ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame

... incredible—utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once more—the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been the same scenes. Markenheim's masterpiece, executed in four days after the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery, and four thousand replicas had been ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... the results of his meditations forth at length. There was nothing, he said, that could not be accounted for by a very abnormal state of subjectivity. The fact that this ... this young person's name was in his mind ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson



Words linked to "Subjectivity" :   judgement, subjective, judgment, sound judgement, perspicacity, sound judgment



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