In philosophy, the concept of an object was finally formed only by the middle of the 4th century BC, in the classical era of Plato and Aristotle. Prior to this, numerous philosophical studies concerned mainly the explanation of cosmological and ethical issues. The problems of cognition of the surrounding world were not particularly addressed. Interestingly, before the birth of the ideal world of Plato, none of the Greek sages shared the world in which a person lives and the individual perception of this world. In other words, the surrounding things, phenomena and actions of people in the Pre-Platonic era were not “external” to the philosophizing ancient observer. Accordingly, for him, neither an object nor a subject existed - in the epistemological, metaphysical or ethical meaning of these concepts.
Plato, on the other hand, made a mental revolution when he managed to demonstrate that, in fact, three independent worlds coexist: the world of things, the world of ideas and the world of ideas about things and ideas. This approach made us consider the usual cosmological hypotheses in a different way. Instead of determining the primary source of life, the description of the world around us and an explanation of how we perceive this world come first. Accordingly, it becomes necessary to clarify what an object is. And also what constitutes his perception. According to Plato, the object is what the person’s gaze is directed at, that is, “external” to the observer. The individual perception of the object was taken as a subject. From this it was concluded that two different people can have opposite views on the object, and therefore the external world (world objects) is perceived subjectively. Only the world of ideas can be objective or ideal.
Aristotle, in turn, introduces the principle of variability. This approach is fundamentally different from Platonic. In determining what an object is, it turns out that the world of substances (things) is divided into two components, as it were: form and matter. Moreover, “matter” was understood only physically, that is, it was described exclusively through empirical experience, while the form was endowed with metaphysical properties and related exclusively to problems of epistemology (cognition theory). In this regard, the object was the physical world and its description.
Such a dual understanding of the object - physical and metaphysical - has not changed over the next two millennia. Only the emphasis of perception changed. Take, for example, the medieval Christian mentality. The world here is a manifestation of God's will. The question of what an object was was not raised at all: only God could have an objective look, and people, because of their imperfection, had only subjective positions. Therefore, material reality, even if recognized as such (Francis Bacon), still turned out to be subjective, disintegrating into separate, autonomous from each other, substances. The concept of an object was born later, in the new time and era of classicism, when the surrounding reality ceased to be perceived solely as an object of philosophizing. The world has become objective for a booming science.
Today the question is “What is an object?” It is more of a methodological than a philosophical one. An object is usually understood as a field of research — moreover, it can be either an object or thing, its individual property, or even an abstract understanding of this property. Another thing is that often an object is described from subjective positions, especially when determining the essence of new phenomena. By the way, think: interactive communities and Internet networks - what in this case is an object, and what is a subject?
And in this sense it is clear: the question of what an object is is reduced exclusively to the problems of scientific legitimacy. If the proposed concept or theory receives recognition, then we can witness the birth of a new object. Or, conversely, the deobjectivization of a thing or phenomenon. In this world, everything is relative.
