THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCEOF SUBJECTIVITY

GORDON KNIGHT

Iowa State University

Let us start out by assuming that God is a conscious being. If God isconscious then it seems that there must be some fact of the matterconcerning what it is like, subjectively, to be God. But this fact issomething I cannot in principle ever come to know. For I am a finite,imperfect being, and it is impossible in principle for a finite being to cometo know what it is like to be infinite and perfect. Furthermore, this is notjust an accidental fact about me that could be easily altered by giving mesome new experience. It is not like the case of the person blind from birthwho does not know what it is like to see purple. The congenitally blindperson does not to know what it is like to see purple, but there is noinconsistency in supposing that such an individual may come to get thisknowledge (perhaps by means of some sort of eye surgery). For thecongenitally blind person, it is a contingent fact about their sense organsthat restricts their capacity to understand colour. Indeed it may even bepossible that God or some clever neurologist might be able to give theblind person knowledge of the concept of colour without the usualaccompanying colour experience. On the other hand, while it is true thatGod may give me all sorts of insights into the divine nature that I amcurrently ignorant of, it is not possible even for God to give meknowledge of what it is like to be God. For, in order for me to have thatsort of knowledge I would have to leave my present, finite perspective onthe world and take on the perspective of an infinite deity. In a word, Iwould have to become God.

This however, is impossible for a finite, imperfect being like myself.What I want to focus on in this paper is the converse situation: is itpossible for an infinite, perfect, being to come to know what it is like be afinite, imperfect one? If the ontological gulf between God and finitecreatures makes it impossible for a finite creature to knowwhat it is like tobe God, does the same gap also make it impossible for God to know whatit is like to be an imperfect, finite creature?

r The Editor/Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

HeyJ XLVI (2005), pp. 1–10

I

The claim that there are subjective facts of the sort I am discussing wasmade famous by Thomas Nagel in his classic paper, ‘What is it like to bea Bat’.1 Nagel persuasively argued that in addition to the objective factsabout a conscious being’s behaviour and physiology there are also other,subjective, facts that concern what it is like to be that individual. Thefamiliar point is simply that while one may know all there is to knowabout bat physiology and behaviour, this knowledge is quite distinct fromknowledge of what it is for the bat to live and experience the world. Mereknowledge of the physiology of sonar perception or of the outwardbehaviour of bats so perceiving is not sufficient to give one knowledgeof what it is like to experience the world in this way. The point can begeneralized: for any conscious being there is subjective experience of whatit is like to be that being. Consciousness is thus radically unlike all otherthings in the universe. There is, most people believe, no subjective experi-ence of what it is like to be rock, a planet or a water molecule. TimothySprigge, who also emphasized the significance of subjectivity in hischaracterization of consciousness, expresses this point this way:

If a spider was conscious over a certain period, that is as much to say that thereis a truth as to what it was like being a spider over that period. But no one needknow the answer for it to be true that there is such a thing as the consciousnessof the spider. You may well say that the spider knows the answer, at least at thetime. Well I agree that in a certain sense, granted the spider is conscious, thespider does know this. But it knows it in a very special sense in which certainrealities are the knowing of themselves. The being of the spider’s consciousnessor experience is its knowing of itself, the being of experience, that is, is theexperience’s own knowing of its own character. Experience is the only thingwhich has this kind of being in which being and knowing are one. I consider thisanother way of defining consciousness or experience. A state of these is one withits own knowing of itself. However, this is a very special, non-discursive kindof knowing.2

Sprigge is making two related claims here. One is that subjectivity is thedefining characteristic of consciousness. The other is that this subjectivityprovides the individual in question with a special kind of knowledge,knowledge of what it is like to be that individual. This spider knows whatit is like to be a spider in virtue of being a spider. Similarly I haveknowledge of what it is like to be me simply in virtue of being me. To be ina conscious state is, ipso facto, to grasp or understand what that state is.This knowledge is clearly something very different from propositionalknowledge. The spider does not understand or affirm propositions aboutits own consciousness. Presumably, a spider cannot entertain anypropositions at all. Nevertheless, on the assumption that the spider isconscious, there is some subjective experience of what it is like to be aspider, something the spider knows ‘from the inside’ even though it may

2 GORDON KNIGHT

not be able to think discursively or reflect on this experience. Thisexperience is known intimately by the spider, despite its obvious intellec-tual defects. It may be argued that the sort of immediate consciousnessa spider may have ought not to be dignified by the name, ‘knowledge’,but as far as I can see this objection can only amount to a verbal quibble.On the assumption that it is like something to be a spider, there is a fact ofthe matter that can be known by the spider, but may not be known byanyone else.

How might one argue that the subjective character of finite exper-ience can create a limit to God’s possible knowledge of creation?One way of doing this has been proposed by David Blumenfeld.3

Blumenfeld bases his argument on a principle he calls ‘conceptempiricism’. According to concept empiricism, there are some conceptsthat can only be known by an individual if they have had the experience ofwhatever it is that the concept applies to. For example, while one may getthe concept ‘aardvark’ without experiencing one, it is not possible to getthe concept of ‘red’ without experiencing something red. Blumenfelddoes not say so, but it is natural to suppose that what distinguishes ‘red’from ‘aardvark’ in this case is that ‘aardvark’ is complex and ‘red’ issimple. It is possible to come to an understanding of what a complex iswithout experiencing it, but this is only because one also has theexperience of the simple components of the complex.4 In the philosophyof mind, this principle has been used effectively by Frank Jackson tochallenge the plausibility of materialism. Jackson gives the example ofMary who knows all there is to know about the physiology of colourperception and yet has have lived her entire life in a completely blackand white room. Suppose that Mary comes out of that room and sees,for example, the blue sky, isn’t it clear, in this case, that Mary has cometo know something new here? Before Mary only knew the objective,material description of colour perception, now she comes to know what itis like to see a colour.5

But we don’t really need to appeal to farfetched examples to makeconcept empiricism seem plausible. Consider a child who has never had aheadache and hears her parents talk about their headaches. The childknows the sound of the word, knows that it is a kind of painful thing, butdoes the child who has never had a headache know the specificphenomenal character of headache pain? Surely not. Or take thepsychological state of falling in love. Is it not plausible to suppose thatin order truly to understand what it is to fall in love, a person must havethe experience of falling in love? In a similar vein, Blumenfeld argues thatthere are psychological states such as fear and frustration that Godcannot, in virtue of his omnipotence ever experience and therefore cannever fully understand.

THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SUBJECTIVITY 3

II

In a recent paper,6 Torin Alter has considered two arguments of thesort Blumenfeld presents. The first argument, which is actually presentedby Blumenfeld, involves the claim that because God is omnipotent,God cannot know what it is like to feel fear or frustration. The secondargument is analogous to the one actually proposed by Blumenfeld.According to the second argument, God, in virtue of being morallyperfect, cannot have a true understanding of what it is like to have an evildesire. Let’s call the psychological states in question here, ‘ungodlikemental states’. In his criticisms Alter proposes three different ways inwhich God could know these ungodlike states without God having tohave them. I believe that while Alter has persuasively shown that God cancome to some understanding of these states, he has not shown that Godcan come to a full understanding of what it is like for finite creatures tohave these states. It is this latter sort of fact, what it is like for a finitecreature to feel or desire something, that presents the strongest challengeto the classical concept of omniscience. Alter’s three proposalsmay be sum-marized as follows:

(1) God may come to know the character of ungodlike mental statestelepathically.

(2) God may be aware of the component qualia of each ungodlike stateand use this knowledge to construct the concept of what it is like tohave those states without actually having them.

(3) God could gain knowledge of these mental states by means of falsememory traces. God could remember, for instance, being frustrated,and thus know what it is like to be frustrated without actually everbeing frustrated.

Let us start our considerations with possibility (1). It is certainly quiteplausible that God knows the inner hearts and minds of all God’screatures, whether such creatures are engaged in silent prayer or simplygoing about their daily business. It is even plausible to suppose that, giventhe human tendency towards self-deception, God may telepathicallyknow us better than we know ourselves. Furthermore, such telepathicawareness seems sufficient to satisfy the demands of concept empiricism.If God, for example, is telepathically aware of my fear of the dark, thenGod has had an experience of that fear, and this is all that conceptempiricism requires for knowing what the psychological state of fear is.But if we bear in mind not just the question of whether God can knowwhat a particular desire or fear is, but whether God can know what it islike to have an evil desire or to experience a fear or frustration, Alter’sproposal is quite inadequate to this task.

Consider the following analogy: suppose that human scientists haverigged a machine that can give a person direct access into the mental life

4 GORDON KNIGHT

of a bat. Suppose you are the brave and curious volunteer who is riggedup to the machine and is suddenly given those bat experiences. What haveyou learned from this experiment? Certainly you have learned muchabout bat experience. You have learned how bats themselves feel whilehanging upside down, what it is like to experience the world via sonar,how insects taste to the bat palate, etc. You have certainly now added toyour conceptual apparatus new concepts that can meaningfully andintuitively refer to the subjective character of bat experience. The phrase‘bat sonar experience’ now has a definite, experientially grounded,meaning. Granting all of this, have you now come to know what it is liketo be a bat? Not at all. For what you have come to know is not what it islike to be a bat, but what it is like for a human being to be given batexperiences. To know what it is like to be a bat, to experience sonar as abat experiences it, you must be able to experience the presumably limitedsphere of bat consciousness. For the bat, there is bat experience and thatis all. The ‘that is all’ here is partially constitutive of what it is like to be abat. For you, hooked to the machine, there is consciousness of batexperience embedded in the broader context of human consciousness.You have not lost your human perspective, but merely added to thatperspective the experiences of a bat. In a like manner, God’s knowledge ofthe psychological states of finite creatures will always be embedded withinthe context of the infinite divine mind. This context is partially consti-tutive of ‘what it is like’ to be God. God cannot lose this perspectivewithout losing some of God’s divine attributes. Therefore, while Godmay come to know a great deal about finite creaturely life by means ofdivine telepathy, such knowledge is not sufficient to give God completeinsight into what it is like to be a finite being.7

It should be clear that the limitation on God’s omniscience I am urginghere is not restricted to certain kinds of desires or emotional states. ForGod to know what it is like to be any finite being is impossible, given thatGod is not finite. The crucial question is not whether God can come upwith the same empirical concepts that human and other finite minds havebased on their finite experience. The question is whether God can actuallycome to know what it is like for us finite beings to experience the worldas we do. Paradoxically God’s very perfection limits – what God can inprinciple come to know about finite creation.

III

Alter’s next suggestion is that God may know what a particular evil desireis by imaginatively putting together the different qualitative componentsof the desire. Since the having of the component parts of an evil desireneed not implicate God in having any evil desires, God may, by a kind ofcut and paste, come to know what it is like to have an evil desire without

THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SUBJECTIVITY 5

actually having that desire. So God may be able to abstract from a gooddesire simply the idea of a desire, and then combine that with some otherobject of God’s knowledge in order to know what having the evil desire islike. For example, God knows what it is to desire that everyone be savedand also knows what it is for innocent people to be tortured. By means ofa kind of mental cut and paste, God can then come to know what it is liketo have the desire to torture innocent people. To buttress his case, Altergives the example of John, who for some period of his life has never hadan evil desire, but still has learned everything that can be known aboutevil desires without having one. Then, on the day of his corruption Johnhas an evil desire. Has he learned anything new? Alter thinks not.8 Forwhile there may be phenomenal features that distinguish desires fromthoughts, intentions, and beliefs, it is unlikely that there is a special evilqualia that is present all and only when a person has an evil desire. Absentthe existence of this evil qualia, there is no reason to doubt that Johncould come to understand what it is like to have an evil desire withoutactually having to have one.

It should be clear that the previously mentioned limitations on divinetelepathy also apply here. For even if God can come to know what an evildesire is, by means of mixing and matching, that is not the same thing asknowing what it is like for the evil person to have that desire. But there isanother problem with this second suggestion. While I agree with Alterthat there is no special evil qualia that accompanies evil desires, there isanother assumption that Alter is making that strikes me as dubious. Thisprinciple may be stated as follows:

(3) If a person knows the component parts of a complex mental state, thenit is always possible for that person to know what it is like to have thecomplex mental state.

Let us call this the principle of analysis. It seems to me that thisprinciple is confronted with an indefinite number of counterexamples.Here are just a few of them:

(4) I am aware of who George W. Bush is, and I am aware of what it is tohave a strong sexual attraction. I do not, however, know what it is liketo be sexually attracted to George W. Bush.

(5) I am aware of the taste of lima beans, I know what it is like to find ataste pleasurable. I do not, however, know what it is like to find thetaste of lima beans pleasurable.

(6) I know what it is like to be upset, and I know what it is like to eat acandy bar, I do not know what it is like to be upset at not being able toeat a candy bar (or conversely, being upset at being made to eat acandy bar).

Of course I am not completely ignorant in any of these cases. When myyoung son is upset at not getting candy, I know he is upset, and I know

6 GORDON KNIGHT

why he is upset, but I do not thereby know what it is like to be in hismental state. I do understand the proposition, ‘I am upset that I am notgetting any candy’, but such propositional knowledge does not exhaustwhat it is like to feel or experience a mental state. It is interesting that theprinciple of analysis does seem plausible when it comes to certain sensoryor cognitive mental states. If I know the meaning of ‘space aliens’: and‘congress’ it is not at all difficult to understand the proposition ‘there arespace aliens in congress’. Nor is it hard in this case to conceive of what itis like to have the belief, ‘there are space aliens in congress’, even thoughI do not actually have this belief. When it comes to physical objectperception, it may be that I can come to understand truly a perceptualexperience, perhaps of a many-headedmythological creature, even when Ihave not experienced that creature, as long as I am adequately acquaintedwith the creature’s component parts. But the principle of analysis failswhen it comes to emotions and desires. Why should this be so?

Desires and emotional states differ from beliefs and perceptions in thatwhen someone desires something, the desire is clearly not something thatcan be isolated from the object of desire as that object is perceived. If Idesire to eat lima beans, my desire is not some separate mental thingdistinct from the object, but actually constitutive of the object as it ispresent to me. The lima beans are presented as delicious, desirable things.One who does not desire to eat lima beans is of course still aware of thebeans, but the beans will not be present in the same way. Desire, we maysay, is internally related with the object of desire. It is not as if there aretwo things, one the lima beans, the other the desire, each of which is laidbeside the other forming the complex, ‘desire for lima beans’. The desire isconstitutive of how the object is present in nature.

Or consider the case of sexual desire. If I find Sally attractive, herattractiveness is not some special psychological addition that can beanalytically separated from the woman as she is perceived. Her at-tractiveness is part of how I perceive her. True, another person mightperceive Sally and not find Sally attractive, but for that person Sallyactually appears different, she lacks the attractiveness quality. The factthat, on reflection, we distinguish someone being found attractive fromtheir actual physical characteristics does not take anything away from thepoint that in actual lived experience, attractiveness or being desiredcannot without falsification be divorced from the object desired. This is apoint that is a familiar feature of the phenomenological tradition and hasbeen forcefully presented by Sartre. If I pity Peter, I am aware of Peteras ‘having to be helped’. The pity is found in the world. It coloursmy perception of Peter, constituting for me a quite different object than,for example, if I happened to find Peter repulsive.9 It is important to notethat in order to accept this point one need not adopt Sartre’s larger thesisthat emotions and desire are found only on the side of the object ofconsciousness. One need only accept what any adequate description of

THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SUBJECTIVITY 7

the phenomenological facts will not let us deny: to feel a desire involvesnot merely a change in the psychological state of the person having thedesire, but also a change in the intentional object itself. One cannot feel adesire for a hamburger without also seeing the hamburger as desirable.

The principle of analysis, therefore, is a myth. It is simply not true thatmerely by understanding the component parts of a mental state, onethereby comes to understand what the mental state itself is. Contra thespirit of analytic philosophy, a whole cannot always be understoodsimply by understanding the parts. God cannot understand what it islike to have an evil desire, for instance, by simply understanding thecomponent psychological parts of that desire.

IV

Let us now come to the third avenue Alter presents, that of false memorytraces. Suppose God has the false memory trace of being a finite humanbeing with frustrations, fears, and the occasional evil desire. The fact thatthis memory trace is false does not interfere with God’s omniscience, sinceGod may know that it is false. But while false, it is still insightful. Byremembering what it is like to a finite individual God comes to knowwhatit is like to be a finite individual.

This third option is, to my mind, the strongest of the ones that Alterproposes. Its strength derives from the fact that in memory it seems we dohave the ability to know what it is like to be a person who is in some waysvery different from our present self. Recall the earlier example of my notunderstanding what it is like to be upset at being able to eat candy. It isnatural to suppose that it is possible for me to achieve an understandingof this mental state if I have now the ability to recall or recollect being ayoung child in the mist of a tantrum. Similiarly, if God has a memorytrace of being afraid or feeling an evil desire, then it seems God couldcertainly have an increased insight into what it is like to have thesedesires. This hypothesis also has an advantage over the divine telepathy inthat memory seems to give us more of internal, inside view of what it islike to be something, whereas telepathy connotes a more or less externalawareness of a mental state. For me to remember my anger is for me to beconscious of myself being angry. For me to telepathically be aware ofBob’s anger is for me to be aware of someone else experiencing the stateof anger. It is hard to be clear on these matters, but it looks as if memorytraces can, in principle, give a person more of an insight into what it is liketo be another than telepathic awareness can.

Nevertheless, even this hypothesis fails to adequately give God theknowledge of what it is like to be a finite person. The reasons for this echothose given earlier. If God remembers being a finite person from thestandpoint of his perfection, then the memory experiences are themselves

8 GORDON KNIGHT

part of a broader context and thus not present in the way they would befor the individual herself. On the other hand, if God were to literally enterinto the memory experience and feel what it is like from the standpoint ofthat finite individual, then God would, in a sense, become a finiteindividual. Such an event would be a kind of imaginary incarnation, andwould suffice to explain how God could know what it is like to be a finitecreature, but only at the cost of having God lose, at least temporarily,the Anselmian quality of goodness and omniscience that generate thedifficulty in the first place. Furthermore, given the huge number ofcreatures and finite experiences, God’s complete knowledge of all of thesewould, it seem, require a humongous splintering of the Godhead. Perhapsone can make sense of the unity of God’s mind among such splintering,but it is not immediately obvious how this could be done. (Here we havethe imaginative correlate not of a single incarnation, but a fully panthe-istic, or panentheistic, deity – a theological notion somewhat at variancewith the classical conception of God.)

V

If this is correct, then none of the three possibilities that Alter presentsto us genuinely provide a way for God to know all features of finiteconscious experience. What is the moral that we should draw from this?To answer this question adequately we must consider the traditionalunderstanding of divine omniscience. According to one understanding,God’s omniscience consists in God knowing all true propositions. If thisaccount of knowledge were correct, then God would know what it is liketo be a finite creature if God can know all the true propositions thatdescribe the conscious state of that creature. Interestingly, it is not clearthat the main thesis of this paper actually impinges on God’s capacity toknow in this way. This is because self-knowledge of the sort consciousbeings have of themselves is, as the example of the spider illustrates,nonpropositional. This is not to deny that there are propositions thatdescribe aspects of a spiders’s conscious life. But understanding andaffirming these propositions does not by itself constitute an adequateunderstanding of what it is like to be a spider. So it may be that God canknow all true propositions, including those propositions that describe theconscious states of finite creatures, and yet still not have a complete graspof what it is like to be a finite creature.

This limitation is not just a limit on God’s omniscience, it is alimitation inherit in any purely propositional account of knowledge. Tolimit one’s understanding of knowledge to propositional knowledge, is, inother words, already to limit the scope of divine omniscience to thosefacts that can be fully grasped propositionally. Thus while God may cometo know all true propositions, there are still be facts of the matter that

THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SUBJECTIVITY 9

God cannot know. Since the aim of the traditional account ofomniscience is undoubtably to maintain that God has a complete graspof reality, these leftover facts present a problem both for the traditionalaccount of omniscience and the propositional account of knowledge. Theproblem is most vividly presented when we realize that if the argument ofthis paper is correct, the facts that God cannot know are knowable by,indeed known to, finite creatures.

In this way, we can see that the limitation on divine omniscience posedby subjectivity is a more serious threat to the concept of God as all-knowing than the limit posed by the future free choices of individuals. Forwhen it comes to future contingents, it may plausibly be supposed that thefuture does not exist and therefore there is no fact for God to know. Onthe other hand, when it comes to the subjective ‘what it is like’ to be afinite creature, there is clearly a fact present. What is difficult (perhapsimpossible) to understand is how God could come to a complete under-standing of this fact. The natural theological remedy to this problem isnot to embrace atheism but to modify the concept of omniscience. Mostphilosophers already accept that divine omnipotence must be understoodnot to include the power to do the logically impossible. Perhaps it is timefor us to realize that divine omniscience also has logical limits.

Notes

1 The Philosophical Review, 83 (October 1974), pp. 435–50.2 Timothy Sprigge, ‘The Importance of Subjectivity: An Inaugural Lecture’, Inquiry, 25

(1982), p. 146.3 ‘On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes’, Philosophical Studies, 34 (July 1978), pp.

91–103; reprinted in ThomasMorris (ed.), The Concept of God (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,1987), pp. 201–215.

4 The classic exposition of this sort of view is found in Bertrand Russell’s empiricistphilosophy. See especially, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 11 (1910), pp. 108–128.

5 ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, in Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (1982), pp. 127–36.6 ‘On Two Alleged Conflicts between Divine Attributes’, Faith and Philosophy, 19 (2002),

pp. 47–57.7 Suppose we imagine a machine that does more than just give a human being bat

experiences, suppose the machine actually, for a time, limits the person’s experiences to onlythose of a bat. In this case, it is more plausible to suppose that the human experimental subjectwould know what it is like to be a bat. But in order to this, the human subject must, for a while,cease to be a human being and take on completely the character of a bat. I have argued elsewherethat the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, likewise may provide God with knowledge of whatit is like to be a finite being. See my ‘The Necessity of God Incarnate’, International Journal forthe Philosophy of Religion, 43 (January 1998), pp. 1–17.

8 Alter, p. 52.9 Jean-Paul Sartre,The transcendence of the Ego. Translated by ForrestWilliams andRobert

Kirkpatrick (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957) p. 56.

10 GORDON KNIGHT