In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTERI E I G H T The Subjective IssueTruth Is Subjectivity (Pages 189--300) But to become involved with God in any way other than being wounded is impossible, for God himself is this: how one involves himself with Him. As far as physical and external objects are concerned, the object is something else than the mode.... In respect to God, the how is what. He who does not involve himself with God in the mode of absolute devotion does not become involved with God. (JP 2.1405) Objectively put, the question of truth focuses on what I believe ; subjectively put, on how I believe. Put more specifically in terms of the religious question, objectively the question is whether what I am related to is "the true God," while subjectively the question is whether my relation "is in truth a God-relation" (199). "Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said" (202). What was called the adverbial -ethical in the previous chapter here becomes an adverbial theory of truth as subjectivity. Attention is shifted from the said to the saying.l Nothing in Postscript is as notorious as the suggestion that truth is subjectivity. Is this not, for better or for worse, the skeptical subjectivism that means first relativism, then nihilism, and finally cynicism? Is it not (for better) the liberation from all restraints ? or (for worse) the destruction of all order and decency? Is it not the epistemological version of the famous slogan "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"?2 But Climacus is no atheist, and God plays an important role in his epistemology, as we have already seen. Like Kant, he regularly contrasts human with divine knowledge. First, reality is a system for God but not for any human knower (118); then God is the only proper observer of world history, the only one for whom die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, since human observers are I 114 115 I Truth Is Subjectivity responsible actors who are located within, not beyond, its becoming (158, 141). Thus he denies neither the system nor the worldhistorical perspective, only the availability of these modes of knowledge to humans, who in his technical, temporal sense ofthe term, exist. In the present context, Climacus returns patiently to the same distinction. Truth, as the agreement of thought and being, obtains for God but not for any existing spirit, "because this spirit, itself existing, is in the process of becoming" (190). The identity of thought and being is a "chimera" for us, "not because truth is not an identity, but because the knower is an existing person, and thus truth cannot be an identity for him as long as he exists" (196). The human knower is "situated in existence" (213), which means that both the subject and often the object of knowledge are in process (189). "Existence," as Climacus uses the term, is the denial of idealism's claim to have transcended the human condition in order to see the world sub specie aeterni, whether in the transcendental immediacy ofthe pure I-lor in the dialectical mediation of the subject-object, that is, the unity of subject and object in spirit's final self-consciousness (189-92; cf. 197-99). But just as he did not deny either system or the world-historical perspective earlier, so here he does not deny eternal truth as the identity of thought and being, only the presence (presentness) of such truth to human subjects, whose present is always on the move. As with Kant before him and Derrida after him, Climacus finds the radical temporality of the human condition to be the barrier to absolute knowledge.3 While denying human access to the divine objectivity, Climacus, like Kant, affirms a certain human objectivity. By abstracting from everything subjective, human thought attains objective knowledge in such areas as mathematics and history.4 Climacus may have selected these examples to include two different modes of human objectivity, one formal and tautological, the other tied to approximation and the leap.5 But in either case, objectivity is purchased by abstracting from everything subjective -which is to say from just that first-person dimension of human life without which the ethical and religious become meaningless . This renders the objectivity that is available to us inappropriate when it comes to understanding ourselves ethically and religiously. To try to impose the objectivity of the disciplines on the ethical and religious aspects of my existence...

Share