γνῶθι σεαυτόν (Know thyself.)
Unknown
Does truth matter to ethics? Ethical truth is a highly vexed notion. In addition to a virtual chaos of views concerning right versus wrong courses of action in applied issues, philosophers have encountered perennial difficulties in the attempt to theoretically specify what ethical truth could be. As James Rachels notes, whatever it is, it is not like planets, trees, or spoons; ethical truth is not “out there” in the usual sense.1 But then, perhaps it is inappropriate to talk about ethical truth at all.
Such considerations prompted the late Richard Rorty to declare that the concept of truth had outlived its usefulness and that other discourses and practices could do a far better job of exciting the ethical imagination. As Rorty says, human solidarity is “not a fact to be recognized by . . . burrowing down to previously hidden depths,” but is rather a goal to be achieved.2 Rational reflection or establishing theoretical grounds cannot determine the value of this goal, which is “to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.”3 Further, solidarity “is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.”4 Thus narrative, not theory, is important to moral progress. The novel, journalistic report, and movie replace the sermon and the treatise.
It seems that if Rorty is right, something like ethical imagining ought to replace a truth-oriented ethical understanding. We usually take understanding to be related to truth in some way; but if we take truth out of the picture, what seems to be left is the free play of the imagination. I want to argue that Rorty is right about the importance of the ethical imagination, but wrong about the advisability of eliminating the concept of ethical truth. Indeed, I believe that his account requires a conception of ethical truth in order to work, and that a proper understanding of ethical truth is crucial to the growth of the ethical imagination. But it is important to be clear about what sort of truth grounds ethical understanding. I will call this truth existential truth, and following Kierkegaard and others in the existentialist tradition I will argue that it has a subjective character. However, lurking in both Rorty’s proposal and my response to it is the bogey of subjectivism.
When Jean-Paul Sartre announced over half a century ago that “existentialism is a humanism,” he wished to encourage the view that existentialism was, far from being an unethical nihilistic philosophy of brute self-assertion, in fact deeply ethical. He observed that existentialism was often taken to task for its subjectivism,5 which seems to imply “anything goes”; and certainly this, if anything, is hostile to any conception of normative ethics.
But why does subjectivism appear to have this implication? One could make the case that the very idea of subjectivity arose as a formal point of contrast to traditional philosophical conceptions of truth as objective. According to such conceptions, objective truth is defined by fixity and self-standing independence; it pertains to the state of things as they are in themselves, independent of any particular perspective. Further, truth is said to have a kind of Parmenidean absoluteness: it either is or is not. Subjectivity, by contrast, implies the opposite of all this: fluidity, flux, and contingency, as well as the distorting prism of individual perspective. As compared to the fixity of objective truth, subjectivity implies arbitrariness and changeability.
Hence, ethical truth will presumably have all the essential characteristics of truth per se, which are in principle divested of the vagaries and distortions of subjectivity; ethical truth will stand in principled contrast to mere subjectivity. Indeed, the three dominant perspectives in foundational ethical theory – deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics – do seem in different ways to honour this precept. Some stable conception of ethical truth is used to overrule a resistant or unruly subjectivity and to determine right courses of conduct. What then of Sartre’s existential ethics, which explicitly embraces subjectivism? Does it imply a slippery slope into epistemic and moral nihilism, the aforementioned attitude of “anything goes”?
No one more astutely or provocatively elicits what is at issue than Søren Kierkegaard, the thinker who anticipates the existentialist tradition. In the course of attempting to develop a conception of truth that is at the core of ethics, with a canny awareness of the assumptions of traditional philosophy, he declares in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “subjectivity is truth.”6 This truth may be regarded as distinctively existential truth, something that pertains to the very basic fact or actuality of one’s existence. But what sort of fact is this? In a celebrated essay, philosopher Thomas Nagel discusses the mystery of consciousness and contemporary attempts to explain it in more familiar scientific terms, for example, in terms of brains, behaviours, or software.7 What those attempts all fail to account for is, as he says, “the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena”:8 that there is something that it is like to be someone or something. He refers to this as the subjective character of experience, a sphere that is sometimes also referred to in terms of qualia.9
We may therefore ask, for example, what are the facts about a person named “John.” There is John; it is a fact that he exists, he is sitting in that chair, he is reciting poetry, etc. But there is also what it is like to be John, as he exists sitting in that chair reciting poetry. This distinction suggests there are two rather different types of facts about John’s existence. The first type has an objective character: John is material, he occupies space, multiple parties can observe him, and so on. But the second type of fact is quite different, and has a subjective character: John feels a certain way – happy, sad, pained, relieved, and so on, as he sits and recites. Such feelings are elements of the subjective character of John’s experience.
One might attempt to explain subjective feelings in objective terms. For example, if John were to experience intense physical pain, we might try to determine the physical causes of the pain, the physical processes that accompany it, and so on; but something crucial remains: the subjective experience of the pain itself, that is, what it is like to be in pain. If it is appropriate to speak of “the truth of John’s pain” in objective terms, it is at least as appropriate to speak of the truth of John’s pain in subjective terms; indeed, it is difficult to understand what theoretical or practical meaning the objective truth of John’s pain could have absent its subjective truth.
Thus, it seems reasonable to suppose that the subjective character of experience is a kind of truth, as deserving of the honorific as its objective counterpart. Nagel calls this acknowledgment “realism about the subjective domain.”10 But unlike their objective counterparts, subjective facts “embody a particular point of view.”11 Therefore, to grasp the nature of subjective truth is to acknowledge the actual existence of a particular point of view, one that has a distinctly subjective character or feel. It is, in Kierkegaard’s language, to acknowledge the profound actuality of an existing individual. By contrast, to understand the nature of objective truth is, perhaps paradoxically, to leave particular perspective behind and to aspire to, as Nagel says, a “view from nowhere.”12 As the understanding moves toward objective truth, as it tries to apprehend the states of things, relationships, and processes in space and time, it strives to counteract or even abandon the limitations and distortions of perspective. However, the opposite must be true as regards subjective truth. The experience of these so-called distortions and limitations are the precise focus. If we want to grasp the subjective character of experience, it makes no sense to leave subjectivity out. In these sorts of cases, apart from trying to subjectively understand what it is like to be a certain way – to be in love, to be seeing red, to be hearing the high note C – there is no “truth” to apprehend.
I began by saying that Kierkegaard was reaching for a conception of truth that is at the heart of ethics, namely existential truth, which pertains to the very basic fact of one’s existence. But what is the nature of that fact? As Nagel says, it is a subjective fact, that is, a fact that irreducibly pertains to a particular point of view with a particular feel, subjective quality, or character. These are elements that constitute an actually existing perspective. However, Nagel’s phenomenology is too thin and normatively barren to determine whether these considerations have ethical import. Kierkegaard points the way: he says “the existing [human] subject [is] infinitely interested in existence.”13 This is both a constitutive and normative claim about the character of human subjectivity: subjectivity does not merely experience its existence; it is passionately interested in that existence. Or to use the language of Heidegger, who was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, it cares whether it is or is not.
Once again, the central contrast is with objectivity. If subjective truth is in its essence an interested, caring point of view characterized by a consciousness of what it is like to exist, strict objective truth is characterized by a lack of any point of view whatsoever. It therefore can only be indifferent to its own existence.14 This indifferent, objective truth exerts a peculiar kind of gravity on the subject; at the level of reflection it contributes to a kind of dissolution and existential amnesia. Kierkegaard says, “The way of objective reflection turns the subjective individual into something accidental and thereby turns existence into an indifferent, vanishing something. The way to the objective truth goes away from the subject, and while the subject and subjectivity become indifferent, the truth also becomes indifferent . . . The way of objective reflection now leads to abstract thinking, to mathematics, to historical knowledge of various kinds, and always leads away from the subjective individual, whose existence or nonexistence becomes, from an objective point of view, altogether properly, entirely indifferent.”15
Through the lures of an objective understanding, embodied particularly in modern science, one acquires the sense of one’s own absolute insignificance as an existing individual, a “little self,” an existential speck of dust in what Bertrand Russell calls “the vast death of the solar system.”16 Ultimately I do not count because, objectively speaking, nothing counts. By contrast, the care involved in understanding something as counting, as being significant in some way, is an essential aspect of subjectivity. But I can endeavor to understand my own subjective existence in objective terms, which for Kierkegaard means systematically draining it of the constitutive passion and care that is essential to the existing subject; one begins to forget one’s own being with an indifference to oneself that mirrors the essential character of objective truth.
By contrast, the notion of an insignificant person is, from the standpoint of subjective truth, oxymoronic. That is because the very ideas of significance and value, however they may be extended and in whatever direction, derive from the immediate reality of subjective truth – the subjective dimension of individual existence that is characterized by an interested, caring awareness of that existence. An individual’s existence viewed subjectively is a bottomless well of significance. Thus Kierkegaard says in a pointed conflation both “the ethical is and remains the highest task assigned to every human being” and also “becoming subjective is the highest task assigned to a human being.”17 Becoming ethical and becoming subjective are for Kierkegaard the same task.
The remark that they are both a task is worthy of special attention. Nagel’s thin description of the subjective character of experience – that there is what it is like to be someone – is a mere starting point. For Kierkegaard, the ethical imperative built into subjective existence is to cultivate and intensify a certain serious, passionate, caring awareness of that existence; it is, in more familiar language, to become a more fully human self. Only through this process of actualization can one know the intrinsic significance of being a human self. This is, as Kierkegaard says, an “essential knowing [that] is . . . essentially related to existence and to existing . . . only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing. But all ethical and all ethical-religious knowing is essentially a relating to the existing of the knower.”18 This internal deepening in ethical knowing or understanding, with its concomitant increase in the sense of individual human significance, runs directly contrary to the vector of objective knowing, where the knower is left behind, and whose individual significance is, in the best case scenario, eliminated. Accordingly, “the demand of abstraction . . . [on the knower] is that he become disinterested in order to obtain something to know; [by contrast] the requirement of the ethical upon him is to be infinitely interested in existing.”19 By attending to this requirement, one begins to grasp one’s own actuality: “Actuality is interiority infinitely interested in existing, which the ethical individual is for himself.”20
Lest all this sound excessively egoistic or even solipsistic, I should address an important question. Is not ethics, in most recognized conceptions, necessarily oriented toward others? This question implies a challenge to existentialist ethics generally, and it is perhaps the primary challenge expressed in charges of subjectivism: how do we move from what looks like a normativity of self-absorption to an ethical regard for others?
For Kierkegaard, any outward-directed ethics derives from the “infinite passionate interest” that constitutes one’s selfhood. So the claim must be something to the effect that if one wants to carry through the traditional ethical program of regard for others, one ought to understand the nature of what grounds that regard. Ethical relations to others depend on a certain kind of relation to oneself, which creates the conditions that make possible the kind of “imaginative identification” with others that Rorty urges. Kierkegaard captures this idea: “In order to study the ethical, every human being is assigned to himself.”21 Kierkegaard does not recommend an exotic form of ethical egoism, which is the notion that one ought only to act out of self-interest. Nor does he point to an absolute ethic of self-sacrifice for the good of others. Rather, there are repeated indications that Kierkegaard attempts to outline (to again use the Hegelian trope) what kind of self-relation is requisite for a proper relation to others. To properly regard others as the ethical selves they are requires a full-blooded subjective grasp of what it is like to be a self that values being that self. This can only be accomplished through deepening and actualizing the passionate interest in and radical experience of one’s subjectivity; the attempt to understand oneself is “an absolute condition for all other understanding.”22
But if it is the case that “there is only one ethical observing . . . self-observation,”23 how specifically do we extend our inner ethical understanding outward? The answer pertains to the role of what I have referred to as the ethical imagination; in Kierkegaard’s language, we must regard the actuality of another in the mode of possibility. Apropos this issue, Kierkegaard pointedly invokes Aristotle’s famous contrast in the Poetics between poetry and history: whereas “history presents only what has occurred . . . poetry has possibility at its disposal.”24 In response to his great teacher’s uncompromising attack on poetry and its allegedly systematic incapacity to capture truth, Aristotle in the Poetics (Book IX) opens up a distinctive space where the imaginative play of possibility is, he argues, a legitimate mode of revealing truth, indeed “higher” than the mere display of “particulars,” which are the sorts of objective facts that constitute history. Kierkegaard appears to wish to apply this insight to the ethical relation an individual establishes to another:
With regard to every actuality outside myself, it holds true that I can grasp it only in thinking. If I were to actually grasp it, I would have to be able to make myself into the other person, the one acting, to make the actuality alien to me into my own personal actuality, which is an impossibility . . . This also means that ethically there is no direct relation between subject and subject. When I have understood another subject, his actuality is for me a possibility, and this thought-actuality is related to me qua possibility.25
The only direct actuality for me is my own, that immediate subjective truth that constitutes what is like to be me. The other’s possibility is more or less vivid to me, but remains in the mode of possibility. Thus, the traditional other-regarding imperative of ethics depends on how well I am able to translate my immediate experience of my actuality into a vivid sense of the other’s actuality – in other words, imagine it – within the terminal mode of possibility. My immediate ethical understanding of my own actuality must ground my imaginative identification26 with the other’s actuality, but qua possibility.27
None of this is to deny that certain forms of egoism and subjectivism are rightly the focus of ethical disapprobation. Such forms are expressed in the attitudes of individuals who are unable to grasp how or in what way others count. Perhaps the potential for such attitudes relates to a general uneasiness that we may have acquired here – that by emphasizing the ethical imagination, something that we take to be important to moral theory goes missing. That missing element pertains to the way in which moral rules are generally taken to carry the force of obligation.28 The moral legitimacy of a rule determines its authority over us and obligates us to act in accordance with it.
But it is noteworthy that there is an old problem with this picture of moral obligation that prevents a rejection of existential ethics simply based on the observation that traditional moral theory emphasizes obligation. This is the problem of the binding nature of moral rules: what makes a moral rule binding?29 In the absence of literal force, whether or not an individual commits to acting according to the obligatory force of a moral rule is up to the individual herself; or to put it in Kant’s language, her will must determine itself to act in accordance with what the rule necessitates. Hence, even within a rigorous deontic framework there is an irreducible subjectivist moment that determines the moral outcome. The present discussion’s emphasis on the ethical imagination is neither more nor less plagued by the same difficulty, if we want to know what ensures that the ethical imagination will extend outward to include regard for the actuality of others. I believe the Kierkegaardian answer is that, regardless of whether we have some sort of method that ensures an imaginative regard for others, the growth of such regard is radically grounded in a powerful sense of one’s own actuality – in one’s own “subjective truth.”
I might raise another objection that is useful to formulate in terms of a familiar problem with “golden rule” ethics: What if whatever it is that I “do unto myself” is recognizably perverse? Shall I go ahead and “do unto others?” To translate this complaint into the present discussion, what if “deepening the self” for me means deepening a rather strange and perhaps destructive self? Should I extend my bizarre internal self-relation outward to others? In general, do we want strange, destructive selves following the golden rule? Kierkegaard implicitly recognizes this problem by referring to Don Quixote as “the prototype of the subjective lunacy in which the passion of inwardness grasps a particular fixed finite idea.”30 There is no systematic solution to this possibility offered; however, Kierkegaard does suggest contemplating an alternative objective lunacy to see if it is any more savoury: the “parroting lunacy” of mass conformism that springs from a kind of internal deadness, the only reaction to which can be “cold horror.”31
Based on the above considerations, I tentatively conclude the following: regardless of the infinite array of possible human pathologies and the warped subjectivities they may entail, there is no other meaningful ethical referent than that of subjective truth, which is not merely the ground for understanding my ethical significance, but for understanding ethical significance per se. The danger of not engaging in the highest ethical task of subjectively attending to oneself is objective lunacy, the cultivation of a kind of objective indifference to oneself and others. This is one form of the existential amnesia alluded to earlier. To view oneself objectively means to move in the direction of that absentminded indifference as regards oneself, where the self is understood to be that insignificant “little self” in a sea of other tiny little selves, in society and in history. The consequence of not understanding one’s own ethical significance is not understanding anyone’s ethical significance. But what does it mean to understand one’s ethical significance, and why exactly is it tied to understanding that of others?
Kierkegaard reserves special scorn for the (allegedly) Hegelian preoccupation with world history. In this latter conception the ethical is thought to be seen better in world history “where everything involves millions”; but according to Kierkegaard this “incessant quantifying” rather distorts it.32 The reason has again to do with the kind of truth an ethical knowing or understanding must grasp. There is a problem when “the ethical does not become the original, the most original, element in every human being but rather an abstraction from the world-historical experience.”33 Kierkegaard argues that to really know the ethical, one must grasp the original element in every human being, that is, the subjective truth of what it is like to be a human being. For Kierkegaard, this original element is the source of ethical significance. However, when dazzled with immense numerical reckonings of human suffering, the order of ethical priority is inverted; in such situations it appears that the primary ethical truth to be discerned is something objective, like a particular quantity of sufferers. Depending on how many sufferers are involved, actions and events can be weighed for ethical significance, as when a commander says, “The airstrike was well executed; there was a minimum of civilian casualties.” This remark expresses the utilitarian outlook that measures the moral goodness of actions according to weighted distributions that determine sum total happiness over unhappiness. However, if we are inclined to nod our heads with the utilitarian commander, we are victims of the sort of existential amnesia alluded to above – we have forgotten that ethical significance is rooted in a subjective truth, namely, the infinite passionate interest in the existence of the existing individual. To see the incommensurable divide between the objective and the subjective here, alter the general’s comments so that you are the subject of the sentence: “The airstrike was a success, only I and those dear to me were killed.” This admittedly strange locution captures the subjective dimension that is lost in any objective moral calculus. Apropos this sort of scenario, Kierkegaard says, “for me, my dying is by no means something in general; for others, my dying is some such thing.”34
These considerations hearken to remarks made by the philosopher Don Marquis, who I believe offers a distinctively existential argument for the moral wrongness of killing.35 Usually, moral arguments presume in one fashion or another that killing is generally wrong, but do not make explicit why. Marquis argues the reason becomes explicit when asking the question, “Why is it wrong to kill me?” The primary reason killing me is wrong cannot be because it would brutalize my killer, and cannot be because others would experience my absence as a loss. Killing me is wrong quite simply because I would experience the greatest possible loss I can suffer: the loss of myself. All other notions that surround the ethical wrongness of killing must derive from the simple fact that an individual will primarily and irreplaceably value her own life and, if killed, will no longer have the potential and actual subjective experience of being that individual. Ethical positions regardless of stance on, for example, euthanasia, the death penalty, or (Marquis’s particular concern) abortion, are senseless without consideration of this basic existential datum.
To return to my initial question: does truth matter to ethics? I have suggested that Kierkegaard’s remarks about existential truth help show in what way truth matters to ethics. The question of whether this kind of existential ethical truth can be of service in what is taken to be an important desideratum of modern moral philosophy – the generation of ethical rules or imperatives for right action – remains to be seen. However, I take the kind of ethical truth outlined here to serve a more immediately intelligible function: to guide and regulate the ethical imagination. Through the ethical imagination we will either identify or fail to identify with others; actions follow accordingly.
This brings me back to a consideration of Rorty’s suggestion that the ethical imagination is better off when not tethered to a concept of truth, and that goals such as human solidarity are better achieved through “imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives”36 than through philosophically understanding some common human essence like “rationality” or “personhood.” Accordingly, narrative forms such as journalistic reporting, ethnographies, or novels have increased significance for ethical life and moral progress, whereas more traditional discourses in philosophy and theology diminish in relevance. Again, I believe that Rorty is partly right, that imaginative identification, made possible through the dissemination of a wide variety of human narratives, is crucial to the growth of the ethical imagination. But, contrary to Rorty, I believe that such a process remains unintelligible unless we can speak meaningfully of how it is related to the development of a distinctively ethical understanding, accessible in principle to all, that is grounded in the distinctively ethical truth I have been outlining. Indeed, apart from such considerations, it is hard to understand what Rorty means by “imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives.”
As an example of what I mean, I will again focus on what most everyone can agree involves ethically catastrophic dimensions, namely, war. The reason we regard war as ethically catastrophic can be made plain with reference to the distinction I have been drawing between objective and subjective truth. The “objective truth” of war is these participants, these military objectives, this number of combatants, this chain of command, this wave of military deployments, these targets bombed, this number dead, and so on. Certainly, “number dead” has immediate ethical significance. But why? This can only be answered with reference to the “subjective” or existential truth of war, namely, the perspectives of those who are killed, maimed, terrified, or traumatized.
Rorty speaks of the ethical imagination as being stimulated by effective journalism. But recall that truth telling is understood to be a cardinal virtue in journalism, and whether it stimulates or impoverishes the ethical imagination depends on the kind of truth that is told and how it is told. Despite a reflexive acknowledgement of the ethically catastrophic dimensions of warfare, many of us have acquired a kind of moral callousness toward its perennial representation in media. We have the distant, detached sense that “wars happen,” and indeed they are happening all over the globe. Facts and figures, troop deployments, political analyses, and so on are meant to represent the objective truth of war, but accordingly, is it not appropriate here to speak of that feeling of objective indifference that accompanies existential amnesia? The objective truth of war is flattened out onto the plane of objectivity in general, where one indifferent fact stands in relation to another. In a newspaper the objective facts of war are typically presented alongside other facts about the stock market, the local arts fair, sports teams, and so on. They are put on par with one another, the psychological effect of which is to generate a feeling of normalcy. Normalization is, in a sense, the arch-enemy of ethical consciousness. Feelings of normalcy refer to statistically “normal” states of affairs: celebrity romances, weather patterns, drops in the Dow – and war. We typically process these kinds of normal facts in a kind of distracted haze, a state of mind that Walter Benjamin once celebrated as marking the critical-emancipatory potential of modern media, a judgment that now seems to be naive.37
Journalism’s truth-telling imperative is unmasked as empty, perhaps even destructive, ideology when distinctively ethical truth is obscured rather than revealed by the principled but ethically decontextualized presentation of objective facts. The ethically out of context, objective presentation of facts, figures, and stratagems pre-interpret war as in some sense normal rather than as the absolute human catastrophe that it is. Journalism’s truth-telling imperative is properly served in accounts and narratives that capture the subjective truth of war, which is the only proper way to ethically contextualize the brute presentation of objective facts. The subjective truth of war is its ethical truth: the truth of what it is like to be in a state of unquantifiable terror and suffering. George Weller’s recently discovered account of Nagasaki in the days following the detonation of the atomic bomb is a case in point.38 Long suppressed by military censors, it challenges the official rhetoric of normalization and “necessary evil” in Truman’s ethically barren utilitarian calculus by providing a firsthand account of the horrifying suffering Weller witnessed. The truth of the hideously cruel effects of the atomic bomb spurs the ethical imagination; the calculus that surrounded their allegedly appropriate use blunts it.
As another example, consider the possible reactions to the staggering numbers of people displaced and killed by floods in Pakistan in 2010. This seems to be entirely a question of how far our ethical imagination can extend, not to objective facts about which villages are now under water, which dams failed, and so on, but to the subjective reality of what it is like to see one’s village disappear and one’s family with it. I suggest this imaginative identification can only occur with a proper understanding grounded in distinctively ethical truth, in the passionate “what it is like to be” dimension of existence. This is the basis of any imaginative identification with those brutalized by catastrophe. Absent this dimension, a catastrophe is the meaningless (if massive) vibrations in Russell’s vast and dead solar system.
To conclude, I have borrowed key notions from Kierkegaard in order to present the beginnings of an account of what kind of truth ethical truth is, how it generates an ethical understanding,39 and how that understanding is important for the growth of the ethical imagination. Contrary to what Rorty suggests, such growth cannot be a substitute for a concern with ethical truth. Rather, the former relies on the latter. To see this, all we must do is ask what precisely is involved in the kind of “imaginative identification” that Rorty advocates. As indicated at the outset of this discussion, such identification involves “the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers,” which involves “increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.”40 This implicitly acknowledges that ethical empathy is not always forthcoming. Empathy involves the capacity for a close kind of emotional identification, and it tends to be dispensed more easily to those who fall within our familiar range of ethical relations: family members and friends. Where such empathy is lacking, it seems appropriate to speak of the need for an exercise of our ethical imagination to help us identify with those unfamiliar to us, or more precisely, to help us identify with the truth of unfamiliar sorts of people’s pain and humiliation. This truth is subjective truth.
But the only subjective truth that we have immediate access to is our own. Therefore, an ethical grasp of the possibility of another’s subjective truth depends upon our own deepened understanding of what Kierkegaard calls our ethical actuality, the subjective truth of our own existence. More precisely, a deepened sense of my infinite passionate interest in and care for my immediate subjective actuality – my existence – grounds my understanding of ethical truth, which makes possible the extension of my imagination to others who, because they are human beings, have an infinite passionate interest in and care for their subjective actuality.
The abandonment of truth by Rorty and other moral skeptics arguably rests on the entrenched philosophical habit of conceiving of truth as objective truth. Rorty does broach the question of subjective truth, but only to reject it as a discourse that is tied to notions of “inner essence” or deep “human nature.” However, Rorty’s rejection is not fully considered, especially in light of what he himself advocates. Though he is right to emphasize the importance of imaginative identification with other people’s suffering, such imaginative identification requires a prior understanding that is grounded in the kind of truth that I have been urging, the truth of what it is like to be an existing individual who has a passionate investment in that existence. A proper understanding of ethical truth as subjective truth provides the very conditions for the possibility of the kind of imaginative identification Rorty advocates. An understanding of ethical truth is required for the growth of the ethical imagination.
1 James Rachels and Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, fifth ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2007), 44.
2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), xvi.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 23.
6 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 204. The following discussion exclusively focuses on Kierkegaard’s sustained attempt in this particular text to elaborate his claim that “subjectivity is truth.” I will follow Kierkegaard’s lead in this text in my attempt to frame an ethical conception that, though it may ultimately imply a conception of God as absolute ethical telos, does not presuppose or assert it. Further, I would like to forestall hermeneutic controversy by acknowledging that my reading is one particular way of reading Kierkegaard’s famous claim, a way that is tied to the goal of developing a general ethical perspective for which the concept of truth is important. This ethical perspective is meant primarily to account for our ethical stances toward our fellow human beings; it does not directly account for our ethical stances toward different species, the environment, and so on. If the following account is right, the nature of these latter ethical stances would require either a separate theoretical account(s), or a significant elaboration of the present one.
7 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83 (October 1974): 435–50.
8 Ibid., 436.
9 There is a whole literature on qualia, specifically as regards issues in the philosophy of mind; such issues are not the direct concern of the present discussion. But as regards the term in the present context, perhaps it is a fair characterization to say that we are interested in the ethical significance of qualia.
10 Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” 441.
11 Ibid.
12 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
13 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 317.
14 The “middle” case of organic processes presents an interesting difficulty about the nature of “proto-subjectivity.” To develop this thought here would lead too far into speculative waters for the purposes of the present discussion, which is focused on the either/or phenomenological contrast between subjectivity and objectivity.
15 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 193.
16 Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” quoted in Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 53–4.
17 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 159.
18 Ibid., 198.
19 Ibid., 316.
20 Ibid., 325.
21 Ibid., 141.
22 Ibid., 311.
23 Ibid., 320.
24 Ibid., 318.
25 Ibid., 321.
26 Note that this picture of imaginative identification is not meant to model all human relations; For example, in Either/Or, Kierkegaard acknowledges and discusses at length the existence of the “aesthetic” relation, which as one might expect is more sensuously characterized.
27 Kierkegaard’s account goes some way toward explaining why we appear to have ethical responses to fictional characters, and why reading fiction can hone our ethical outlook generally. However, much remains to be said about this.
28 I am grateful to the audience (one audience member in particular) of this paper at the Truth Matters conference (Toronto, 2010) for raising the issue of moral obligation, as well as the issue of “pathological subjectivities,” discussed below.
29 Robert Brandom articulates this problem with great perspicacity in “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy 7 (August 1999): 164–89.
30 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 195.
31 Ibid., 195–6.
32 Ibid., 142.
33 Ibid., 144.
34 Ibid., 167.
35 See Don Marquis, “Why Abortion is Immoral,” in The Right Thing to Do, ed. James and Stuart Rachels, fourth ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2007).
36 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 190.
37 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York, Schocken Books, 1969). See in particular section xv.
38 See George Weller, First into Nagasaki (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006).
39 By emphasizing “understanding,” I am pointing to an epistemic relation between the subjective truth of one’s existence and a kind of immediate awareness that is grounded in it. Though the relation remains obscure (if only because “immediacy,” strictly speaking, suggests the absence of a relation), it seems appropriate to retain some idea of such a relation in light of Kierkegaard’s comments (discussed above) concerning “ethical knowing.”
40 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi.