Objektivering

Here’s a latinate, Danish word, that isn’t in everyday use, and doesn’t have any natural translation into English: objektivering, from the noun at objektivere, which literally means ‘to objectify’. So, objektivering might be translated as ‘objectification’.

Bohr doesn’t ever, to our knowledge, use this word. But it’s relevant to his view, as it plays an important role for the philosophers who were most immediately relevant to Bohr’s intellectual formation. Indeed, Bohr sees what happens in quantum measurement as an instance of objektivering, where a line is established between subject and object.

Sibbern

The earliest use we have found (so far) of ‘objektivering’ is in Sibbern’s Psychologie of 1843. (Here the word is spelled with a ‘c’ as objectivering.) The corresponding German word, ‘Objektivierung’, can be found scattered in the works of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, so one wonders if Sibbern lifted it directly from one of them — most likely Schelling, who was his direct inspiration.

Sibbern says that an objektivering is the same thing as a forestillen, i.e. a placing before onesself.

N.B. H.L. Martensen seems also to use ‘objectivering’, perhaps as early as 1840 in his book about Mester Eckart.

Nielsen

Objektiveringslov