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     "Subjective" is the adjective that I apply to everything
which a human being can know about his own past, present, and
future consciousness.  "Objective" is the adjective that I
apply to everything, that a human being can know about the
world, past, present, and future, in concert and conjunction
with one or more of his fellow human beings.  Since a human
being can have no knowledge of another's consciousness,
objective knowledge and subjective knowledge are mutually
exclusive.

     Man is a social creature, and his objective knowledge is
social knowledge.  Objective knowledge is knowledge with and
through society.  Most prominently, language in particular, 
is a product of society.  Language arises from and is possible
only in consequence of interaction between two or more human
beings.  Similarly objective knowledge of the world: science,
including both the moral sciences, (J.S.Mill) (Geisteswissen-
schaften, history, humanities) and the natural sciences,
are inherently communal and social, developed, nurtured,
communicated and expressed via linguistic and mathematical
symbolism.

     However, his commitment to public knowledge notwithstanding,
man is so disposed that all his social, objective experience of
the world elicits in him a unique, individual, private resonance. 
This individual resonance which coincides with his awareness of
himself is also properly identified as subjectivity.  Subjective
experience resounds within the individual independent of and
ofttimes in conflict with the general, publicly noticed knowledge. 
One characterizes subjectivity as inward, because a man's physical
body appears to him as a vessel deep within which he seems to
perceive the workings of his consciousness.

     The representations of the objective world, past,
present and or future, in which human beings live and which
they report to each other, we call history.  History is what
human beings have experienced or might have experienced; it
is the verbal account of what has happened, or what might
have happened in the past, the account of what is happening
now and/or what may happen in the future.  Ordinarily such
representations of the objective world are, by their nature,
instigated, stimulated, modulated and controlled by men's
immediate and mediate experience.  Accounts which do not mesh
with or correspond to experienced reality are stigmatized as
false, erroneous, untrue; are segregated, secreted, denied,
and expunged from the communal memory.

     The limitations of the realms of experience of
individual human beings make it necessary to endorse,
corroborate or confirm the validity of the historical
tradition by faith or belief.  The individual not only
cherishes a faith in general truth; he also believes that the
specific details of whose transmission he is the beneficiary
are true.

     Since the realm of human experience is very broad, and
since the individual is unable to test for its verity all
that is transmitted to him, i.e. to test it for the
possibility and probability of past present or future
experience, truth testing, i.e. deciding whether a given
fragment of history is true or false, becomes an important
component of his intellectual activity.

     But even truth testing is a social endeavor.  Wide-
ranging traditions evolve concerning what should be
considered true and what should be dismissed as false.
Nontheless junctures arise, and not at all infrequently, when
each individual is required to confront a given account and
to arrive at a decision, to make a judgment whether that
account is to be believed or to be doubted.  Thus belief and
doubt become tokens of individual experience.  Moreover,
those moments when faith or doubt distinguish individual
insight from the general, public conviction are the moments
in which ones individuality, ones subjectivity becomes
distinct and undeniable.  In experiences of faith and of
doubt, the intangible Self of the human being is uniquely
expressed and revealed.

     It requires a not very profound analysis of history to
demonstrate:

1) that the linguistic historical description reflects but a
pale, anemic image of reality, and that a continuous infusion
of the imagination and phantasy of the individual is required
to make almost any historical tradition plausible and
convincing.

2) that the linguistic tradition is by no means consistent
and reliable in its determinations of truth.  On the
contrary, the conventional tradition of truth is invariably
suspect.  Its truth remains forever questionable.  There is
a large body of history which its social and cultural contexts
at one time seemed to make believable but which must now be
rejected as being specious.  The history whose truth can no
longer be trusted is now conventionally derogated as myth.

     The notion of myth does not refer, as is commonly
assumed by many authors including Cassirer and Schelling, to
a clearly definable and delimited segment of the historical
tradition.  The notion of myth describes a characteristic
which inheres, to a greater or lesser extent, in all
historical writing, in everything that is told, in everything
that is remembered.

     1) The persistence of myth is evidence for the
unreliability of history as an objective socially sanctioned
representation of reality.  Thus myth is a pointer to the
circumstance that faith and doubt are indispensable
conditions for truthful expression and representation.  In
this way, myth points to the essential role which self, which
subjectivity, has in the determination of truth.

     2) All history is tinged with the characteristics of
myth.  Myth points to the unreliability of history, and to
the untrustworthiness of the objective, interpreted world
which history purports to describe.  To the extent that myth
demonstrates the unreliability of conventional objective
historical reports, myth creates a spiritual space for the
existence of self; plausibly so, because, like myth, self by
virtue of its "inward" nature can exist only in the absence
of objectivity.  Doubt and belief, scepticism and faith are
the means by which myth, in a dialectical manner, rescinds
the validity of history.  Myth cannot be eradicated from
history.  Its persistence in the fabric of conventional
thought makes a laughing-stock of common sense; and by the
same token, proves that subjectivity is indispensable to the
determination of reality.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
