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                   Subjectivity *is* the truth

     As all readers of Kierkgaard's Concluding Unscientific
Postscript know, the assertion that subjectivity is the truth
appears there as the centerpiece and logical foundation of his
thought.  As Descartes deduced knowledge from individual
consciousness, so Kierkegaard, who eloquently expressed his
admiration of Descartes, identified individual consciousness to
be the criterion of truth.  His use of the term "subjectivity" is
the key to Kierkegaard's interpretation of the scientific and
political culture in which he lived.  It is also the key to his
understanding of himself and of his religious experience.
Subjectivity becomes the basis, on the one hand, on which
Kierkegaard repudiates Hegels identification of truth with am
externally manifest, objective spirit and the basis, on the other
hand in which Kierkegaard denies a positivistic reality such as
is implicit in natural science and defined for example by Auguste
Comte.

     If Kierkegaards assertion that subjectivity is truth was
inconsistent with the culture of his day, it is, if anything,
even more incongruous with the contemporary scene.  It is at odds
not only with what we practice but also with what we preach.  The
hypothesis that subjectivity is truth contradicts not only the
dogma that we are taught and that we teach, it is an indictment
of the way we live, foot soldiers in the army of scientific
progress in which we have enlisted, and nonentities in the
bureaucratic empires whose slaves we have become.

     At the same time Kierkekegaard's claim requires of us a
radical revision and reinterpretation of our social world.
Trapped as we are in an ever tightening web of increasing
population density and more intimate bureacratic controls.  As a
fellow student with Hegel at Tuebingen had complained 40 years
earlier: "Und es fordert die Seele Tag fuer Tag der Gebrauch uns
ab."

     In general, we moderns avoid the issue.  Obviously it is
only a miniscule fraction of us that finds it worthwhile even to
read Kierkegaard.  And those of us who do by and large either
blame the embarrassment on the pseudonym, or we purport to find
it contradicted and in effect rescinded by various other passages
in Kierkegaards voluminous writings.

     Such efforts are all the more difficult because the
assertion that subjectivity is the truth is for Kierkegaard not
merely an epistemological one.  Kierkegaard goes further.  He
claims that the truth of Christianity is subjective; that to
become a Christian is to become subjective.  that subjectivity is
the way to salvation:

     Rather than to weasel out with equivocations It seems to me
therefore not unreasonable to take Kierkegaard's word at face
value, and to explore the implications of his statement: for
example to ask what, if anything, it might mean for a
mathematician, for a physicist, for a chemist, or for a biologist
to become or to be subjective.  I suspect that accepting
Kierkegaards challenge is to discover oneself upon an
extraordinarily promising path of epistemology.

     We do not have a definition of subjectivity.  This is a real
handicap.  When subjectivity is discussed on a list such as this,
it is likely, if not indeed inevitable that although we avail
ourselves of the same term, we have in fact very different things
in mind.  At the same time, Kierkegaard did not try to define
subjectivity, perhaps for the reason as has been suggested, that
any definition would by its nature be objective, and to that
extent invalidated by that which is was intended to elucidate,
namely that subjectivity is the truth.

     While admitting that analogous objections may be made
against the presumption of defining the term "objective", I
nonetheless venture to do so, on the grounds that the
communication of all concepts is inherently and unavoidably
objective.  The untruthfulness of objectivity is to an extent
compensated in the processes of communication.

     Subjectivity is definable negatively, - as God has been
defined by negation -, as that which is not objective.
Objectivity, then, has a number of implications.

     I call a thing objective when it presents itself as a
defined entity outside of myself, of whose existence I convince
myself by revisiting it sufficiently often to maintain my
confidence in its characteristics.  Most importantly, the object
of whose existence I convince myself is similarly apparent to
other individuals similar to myself and similarly situated.

     Thus objectivity is a social, a societal, a communal mode of
apprehending reality, all the more so, inasmuch as the objects of
cognition are not only the physical objects in space; but those
objects as they are described in words, and concepts as the
meaning of words even where it refers to physical objects only
obliquely or not at all. The totality of the objects both
physical and conceptual upon which the majority of men is able to
agrre is called common sense, which plays so great a function in
empirical British philosophy.  Objective conceptualization also
has the power to recapitulate the past and to represent it in a
reality approaching the reality of the present.

     Thus objectivity provides the intellectual armamentarium
with which we build our communities, on which our culture, our
technology and our science and our goverment depend. No wonder we
have difficulty in reconciling our reliance upon an objective
world with Kierkegaards dictum that subjectivity is the truth and
its corollary that objectivity is not.

     I think for a beginning as a point of departure, one could
do worse than to explore the meaning of Kierkegaards assertion in
a literary context.  Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" may be
construed as an account of the subjective truth in the story of
Abraham and Isaac.  I have found it useful to review the mythical
account of Oedipus with reference to the assetion that
subjectivity is the truth.

     There is an interesting and important parallel between the
story of Abraham and the story of Oedipus.  In both instances
truth is divinely defined - receives a divine definition, - in
both fables, a father prepares to sacrifice his son: In order
that Abraham' children and his childrens children should live
Abraham journeyed with Isaac to Mount Moriah to fulfill God's
command; but Laius exposed Oedipus on an unnamed mountain to
frustrate the decree of Apollo and to preserve his own life.

     God stayed Abrahams arm after his faith and his obedience
had been proved.  Apollo preserved Oedipus by a wandering
shepherd who brought him to the court of Polybus, where is was
raised as the kings son.  Having grown to manhood, Oedipus heard
the prophecy taht he should kill his father and marry his mother;
and again, as had his natural father Laius, seeking to frustrate
Apollos purpose, Oedipus left home for Thebes.  On the way he had
an altercation with a stranger who unbeknownst to Oedipus was his
father whom he killed, so that the orcale was proved true;
Oedipus proceeded to Thebes, solved the riddle of the sphinx, was
rewarded by being made king and given the widowed queen, his
mother, unbeknownst to him to wife.

     For reasons not clear, Apollo delayed many years, until
Oedipus and Jocasta's children had gown to adulthood, before
sending the plague to punish them for their sin.  Then Jocasta
hanged herself and Oedipus put out his eyes.

     The fable of Oedipus is commonly advanced as an example the
the Greek assumption, so clearly articulated articulated by
Plato, that wrongdoing flows from ignorance and that no man
knowingly does wrong.  I would not dispute this interpretation;
but I would offer some addition observations.

     The truth that led Abraham set off on the journey to Mount
Moriah It was communicated directly to Abraham and only to
Abraham.

         God did tempt Abraham and said unto him,
         Abraham: and he said Behold, (here) I (am).
                                  Genesis 22:1

God then instructs Abraham specifically what he must do.

         And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven
         and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here (am) I.

     Again God instructs Abraham specifically what he must not
do.  Abraham speaks to God elliptically: "idou ego", in the
Septuagint and in the King James Version as: "Behold I" and "Here
I"
                                    (Genesis 22: 1, 11) The
sparseness of the reply is indicative of the mode of
communication between Abraham and God. For God does not need
Abrahams full name, address and social security number in order
to identy him objectively. "Here I" is enough.  I construe the
ellipsis in which Abraham conceals his reply as a stigma of the
subjectivity of the truth that was communicated. But, like the
old man whose fascination with Abraham's story Kierkegaard
describes, I don't know Hebrew, and if I did, my interpretation
might be different.  The voice of God that spoke to Abraham was a
subjective voice and it spoke a subjective truth; the oracle that
came to the ears of Laius was a public statement, a memorandum
from Olympus addressed to all the world.

     Both fathers took action in response to the divine
directive.  Abraham set out with Isaac and two servants to Mount
Moriah ait et tolle filium tuum unigenitum quem diligis Isaac et
vade in terram Visionis atque offer eum holocaustum super unum
monitum quem monstravero tibi

     Laius gave Oedipus to a servant to be left stranded on a
different mountain top to be exposed to the elements, to die of
cold or thirst or starvation, or to be devoured by wild animals.

     Abraham acted from faith in the truthfulness of God.  Lauis
acted to thwart Apollo's design, to controvert the Oracle and to
save his own life.

     God spared Isaac by rescinding the demand for his sacrifice
and through him made Abraham the father of uncounted generations
of His people.

     Apollo spared Oedipus having him found by a shepherd and
brought to the court of Polybus to be raised as the son of a king
not his father, and to become sire to an accursed generation that
would end his lineage.

     Blessing comes upon Abraham because of his faith in God.
The reason for Apollo's curse on Oedipus seems more complex.
Several observations are apposite: For Abraham and his God truth
is subjectivity.  Fot Oedipus and Apollo, truth is objectivity,
specifically the truth of biological parentage.  It is not
because Oedipus is "bad" that he is destroyed, but because the
objective truth of his parentage has been concealed from him, and
he acts in ignorance of objectivity.  But the objective world
view which the Oedipus fable reflects is not entirely consistent
with experience.  The relationship between a child and its parent
is anything but an objective one.  The mother and the father are
the first two individuals whom the infant learns to know.  The
infant's recognition of its mother's face is utterly subjective.
The infant has no notions of the mothers objective identity other
than the comforting and nurturing apparition that it learns to
call mama.  And mutatis mutandis the same can be said about the
childs relationship to its father.  Subjectively, therefore it
was Polybus, not Laius, who was Oedipus' father.  and
subjectively Oedipus judgments were correct: that the man Lais
whom he killed for blocking his way was not his father, and the
widowed queen Jocasta with whose hand he was rewarded was not his
mother, since though she had borne him, she had never nursed him,
never changed his daiper, and never wiped away his tears.  If for
that reason only in the land where subjectivity was truth, there
could be no Oedipus tragedy.

     I ask if the fable of Oedipus with the focal and pivotal
role it assigns to objectivity both on earth and in heaven might
not be emblematic of the Greek exerience of human nature, which
is literally the root of all occidental politics and science.
Perhaps we should distinguish from this the judeo-christian
tradition with its emphasis on the individuals direct and simple
relationship to his God. If this is the case, then the conflict
between science and religious experience so vividly dramatized in
Kierkegaards writings, is very very old, and is not likely to
disappear.

     The story of Oedipus is the tragedy of objectivity.  Had
subjectivity been recogniozed and accepted as truth, there would
have been no sin and no punishment.

     The story of Abraham is the tragedy of subjectivity.  The
god who intercepted and averted Abrahams murderous blow is a
different god from him who commanded it. And the deus ex machina
who cancelled the tragedy is much less credible than the deus in
conscientia that inspired it.

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