Kant, Consciousness and the World

I''m in the middle of reading a "hot" book (Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos), which has generated considerable critical reaction as well as extended analysis by Edward Feser over at his blog. Feser has developed a wonderful metaphor to describe the philosophical problem materialism (and, indeed, any philosophy founded in the Enlightenment views of Hume, Descartes and Locke) has with the mind: One may get rid of dirt in a house by sweeping it all into a pile and then sweeping the pile under a rug. And this is certainly effective in getting rid of all the dirt in the house, at the price of collecting all the dirt under the rug. But this same method is obviously unavailing as a way to get rid of the dirt under the rug now that it is there. Some other way must be found if we want to get rid of that dirt.

Feser says that this is analogous to the modern problem of the mind. Hume and Locke swept all the "secondary qualities" (e.g. color, taste, sound) out of the world and into the mind, classifying them as subjective responses to the "real" world, which is composed solely of colorless, tasteless, soundless particles in motion. Contemporary materialist philosophers now want to dispose of the mind (i.e. color, taste, sound as we subjectively experience them) in a similar manner, which is just like trying to get rid of the dirt under the rug.

My purpose here is not to go further into Feser's metaphor, but to show that the metaphor can also be interpreted in terms of Immanuel Kant's views on the mind, views that also expose problems with the contermporary understanding of the mind but from a different perspective. My starting point will be a quote from page 51 of Nagel's book:

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world.

This is true as far as it goes, but it carries the danger of shortchanging consciousness in ways that Immanuel Kant would not approve. Writing of the existence of consciousess as a thing "about the world" misses the fact that consciousness is not a feature of the world, but is rather the constitutor of the world. Consciousness is the ground on which there is (for me) a world at all; it is the thing with reference to which anything at all can be said to be "about the world." There is nothing "about the world" for a book, a stone, the number five, or 5:00 pm, for none of these things is conscious and therefore they have no world. And as Nagel made clear in his famous 1974 article "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?", the world of a bat is likely so very different from our own that it is nigh on inconceivable to us. Now physical science is one of those things that is "about the world" for human beings; not being conscious, books and stones have no physical science, and not being men, bats don't have it either. Physical science is a creation of man and is therfore a product of his consciousness. This makes it problematic, then, to suppose that physical science can "say" anything about consciousness at all, let alone say it the same way it says things about everything else. To adapt the rug metaphor to the Kantian point I am making, it's not just secondary qualities like taste and sound that have been swept under the rug of the mind in modern philosophy; everything has been swept under the rug, including the physical sciences. The reason the physical sciences cannot ultimately grasp consciousness is because they are under the rug rather than outside it, and what is under the rug is in no position to grasp the rug itself.

Let me flesh out this point by applying it to physics. Physics deals with things like force, mass and acceleration. But force, mass and acceleration as we understand them in modern science are not things we just stumble across walking down the street. They are theoretical constructs with which the scientific mind analyzes the world. Any physics student understands how this works. In physics 101, the student is presented with problems involving blocks on a ramp or weights and pulleys. The first step in the solution, and often the most difficult step, is to analyze the blocks, ramps and weights into forces and masses. The block on the ramp is the relevant mass, the relevant forces are directed down the ramp and also straight down (the force of gravity on the block), etc. Once this analysis is complete, the student then plugs the quantities into the relevant Newtonian equations and cranks out the answer, which is then mapped back from the forces and masses back onto the blocks and pulleys (e.g. the block will take 10 sec to travel down the ramp).

Everything about this problem has an ineluctable reference to consciousness. The "block" is a block because I perceive it as such; a bat would not perceive it in this manner nor would a stone. The relationship of the block to the ramp ("the block is on the ramp") is only such because my consciousness perceives both the objects and the relationships between them. The mapping of the objects to the theoretical constructs of Newtonian physics is most obviously dependent on consciousness, as is the mapping back once the problem is complete. My point is not the solipsistic one that the world is a creation of consciousness; it is that the ground of our experience of the world is consciousness, and therefore the attempt to draw conclusions about the ultimate nature of consciousness from experience via modern scientific methods is problematic; in fact, it is doomed to failure. It is in the end an attempt to sweep the rug under itself.

Consciousness cannot be just another "thing about the world", or a variable in a physical description of something, as other things are. This is to misunderstand the relationship of consciousness to science. Take the basic elements of Newtonian physics:

They do not exist for us in this undifferentiated, unrelated manner. They have existence, and indeed only have meaning in the relationship specified by Newton:

Here X is the consciousness that is the ground for the scientific relationship between force, mass and acceleration. The arrows indicate that the consciousness X is the ground both of force, mass and acceleration, as well as the mathematical relationship between them. Again, I want to stress that the point is not that scientific constructs are purely subjective, but that they only have meaning in light of a consciousness that can ground their meaning. Someone uneducated in Newtonian physics may use the words "force", "mass" and "acceleration", but they will mean other things than they do for the Newtonian physicist, and will have meanings bound up with his non-Newtonians comprehensive understanding of the world (or, perhaps, lack of understanding). The relationship of consciousness to science is as the ground and constitutor of science, not as one of many "things in the world" analyzed by science.

What happens when we attempt to investigage consciousness as though it were as amenable to scientific investigation as anything else? Consider that Newton's Second Law (F=ma) can be written in terms of a function:

Again, X is the consciousness that serves as the ground of the scientific understanding of the world. Now a scientific account of consciousness, whatever it's specific content, can be cast in terms of a generalized function:

X is consciousness as it appears under scientific investigation, and the arguments of the function are possible elements in a scientific account of consciousness; the ellipsis indicates that the list may go on indefinitely or have whatever elements one might suppose. Notice the difference between X and Y; consciousness X is now a thing in the world in the world constituted by consciousness Y. It has changed from being what consciousness really is (the constitutor of the world) to being what it is essentially not (a thing in the world). When science attempts to understand consciousness, what it inevitably ends up understanding is consciousness reduced to what is amenable to science, that is, a thing in the world - which is finally not consciousness at all.

Can't consciousness Y just be the same as consciousness X? Even if this could be so it doesn't change the fact that consciousness has changed its essential nature in going from the constitutor of the world to a thing in the world, so what ends up being understood about consciousness in science is something much less than is necessary to ground the scientific consciousness in the first place. This is why Kant says that ultimately our rational natures are opaque to us and must remain eternal mysteries. And this accounts for the "shell game" impression given off by much of the scientific writing about consciousness these days; books have grandiose titles like Consciousness Explained or The Synaptic Self, but when these titles are cashed out in terms of what is actually explained in the works, the reader can't help but feel he has been given the bait and switch. The "consciousness" explained seems but a pale shadow of the consciousness we were hoping to be explained.

There is also the problem that an explanation should not include in its explanation that which is to be explained. F=ma can't include force on both sides of the equation if it is to explain force. But this is what happens if we take consciousness Y to be the same as consciousness X. Consciousness Y is implicit in all the terms on the right side of the equation that form the basis of the explanation of consciousness. Worse than this, it is implicit in the relations between the terms themselves. In terms of the rug metaphor, what we have here is the attempt to sweep the rug under itself.

Of course, if the rug (and the dirt under it) is going to be swept somewhere, it can only be swept under a yet larger rug that is big enough to hold the first rug and its dirt under it. Consciousness Y is that larger consciousness under which consciousness X is swept. But consciousness X is not really swept under the rug of consciousness Y, for consciousness X is in itself a constructor of the world, and it is only swept under the rug of consciousness Y as a thing in the world of consciousness Y.

One of the peculiar features of the philosophy of mind is the manner in which the participants seem to talk past each and cannot agree on even the apparently simplest things. John Searle tells us that "all of the most famous and influential theories are false." The exasperation of Daniel Dennett is palpable in much of his writing. Imputations of bad faith abound. The reason for this is that each participant takes for himself the role of consciousness Y, the transcendent consciousness or constitutor of the world, and from that vantage point tells all other consciousnesses (which he treats as things in the world) how things are. This is done in hilariously explicit manner in Dennett's Consciousness Explained:

If you want us to believe everything you say about your phenomenology, you are asking not just to be taken seriously but to be granted papal infallibility, and that is asking too much. You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. (p. 96, emphasis in original)

Now while you may be entirely mistaken about the meaning of your consciousness (nothing in your consciousness has any metaphysical gravity until it has been subjected to heterophenomenological analysis), the author of Consciousness Explained is in no such predicament. His consciousness is reliably in contact with reality without it first needing to go through the heterophenomenological boot camp. This is how a transcendent consciousness (consciousness Y) talks to a consciousness immanent with respect to Y's scientific constructs (consciousness X). And a good thing, too, at least if you want books like Consciousness Explained to be written, for it could not be written otherwise. But then we must remember that Consciousness Explained at most explains consciousnesses of type X and never of type Y.

All this was thoroughly understood by Kant back in the 18th century and explicated in his Critique of Pure Reason.  It is captured in his fancy terminology as the synthetic unity of apperception.

... it is only because I am able to comprehend the manifold of representations in one consciousness, that I call them altogether my representations, for otherwise, I should have as manifold and various a self as I have representations of which I am conscious... It is true, no doubt, that this principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself identical, and therefore an analytical proposition; but it shows, nevertheless, the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold which is given in intuition, and without which it would be impossible to think the unbroken identity of self-consciousness... I am conscious, therefore, of the identical self with respect to the manifold of representations, which are given to me in an intuition, because I call them, altogether, my representations, as constituting one. This means that I am conscious of a necessary synthesis of them a priori, which is called the original synthetical unity of apperception...
(from Basic Writings of Kant, Modern Library, p. 73). 

Kant is responding here to Hume's argument that, since we find no self in empirical experience, we are unjustified in thinking that there is some substantial core to ourselves that goes beyond the chain of impressions that constitutes our experience. Kant's answer is not a metaphysical argument for the self, but a consideration of "pure reason" (i.e. logic independent of empirical experience), to the effect that some unifying principle must be assumed in experience merely to allow me to claim my experiences as mine. More significantly for my purposes, Kant argues that our experience is not purely passive, but that we actively construct our experience in some measure (this is the "synthesis of the manifold") and therefore there must be some principle unifying that construction. This is all the more significant when it comes to science, for things like Newton's Second Law (F = ma) or theories of consciousness are not things we stumble over in nature; they are very definitely constructions of the human mind. Kant takes the truth that Hume saw - that there is no self encountered in empirical experience - and drew the correct conclusion that Hume missed, which is that the self is not in empirical experience because it is the ground of empirical experience.

Kant's aim was to save science and modern philosophy from the extreme skeptical empiricism of Hume (while retaining the authentic insights of Hume), while also ruling out the metaphysical speculations of the classical philosophers. In other words, he wished to show that the nature of human thought is just what modern thinkers want it to be: Metaphysics is a waste of time, and the only true way to know the world is through empirical science supported by logical thought. Kant saw that the price to be paid for this resolution is that the conscious self must ultimately be a mystery to itself. The only legitimate way to know the world is through empirical science, but the relationship of the scientific consciousness to science is not as one of the things in the world of science, but as that which grounds and underwrites the constitution of the scientific world itself. Thus the scientific consciousness will always slip behind any attempt to understand consciousness through science.

Jeff Jacoby on Papal Infallibility

Jeff Jacoby has an opinion piece in the Boston Sunday Globe today entitled "Supreme - but not infallible" which gives his take on the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall so I can't link to it here. But I can quote enough from the article to show that Jacoby misunderstands the doctrine.

Jacoby himself quotes several times from Lord Acton, a 19th century critic of the doctrine when it was affirmed at the First Vatican Council. "There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it" says Acton. But of course Papal Infallibility has nothing to do with sanctification, and the quote reveals the typical basis of the misunderstanding, which is to mistake the doctrine as being primarily about the Pope when it is really primarily about Jesus Christ. Paragraph 890 of the Catechism reads:

The mission of the Magisterium is linked to the definitive nature of the covenant established by God with his people in Christ. It is this Magisterium's task to preserve God's people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates. To fulfill this service, Christ endowed the Church's shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. 

 What is a "charism?" It is a gift from God, a grace; the infallibility of the Pope is therefore a gracious act of God primarily, and only secondarily an act of the Pope.

Jacoby compares the authority of the Pope with authority found in Judaism:

But infallible? As an observant Jew, I come from a religious tradition that has always expressed a very different view of religious leadership and authority. In normative Judaism, not even the greatest leader, the wisest sage, or the most renowned rabbi is infallible. The Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem was the supreme legal and religious authority in ancient Israel: its 71 justices were required to be men of humility, integrity, and compassion, known as much for their scholarship in religious matters as for their wide-ranging knowledge of science, mathematics, and languages. Their credentials were stellar, and their rulings were final.

The appropriate Judaic comparison with the Pope is not the Great Sanhedrin, however, but with Moses being given the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. It would be an obvious mistake to suppose that those who hold the Ten Commandments infallible are guilty of supposing Moses to be some sort of superman or "sanctified." For Moses is merely the messenger, and whatever his personal sins and limitations, they are irrelevant to the status of the Ten Commandments, the author of which is God. Similarly, when the Pope pronounces authoritatively from his office on matters of faith and morals, it is not he who is the author of the opinion, but God, and God is not fallible despite the flaws of his servants. Whether the Pope is a great leader or the wisest sage has nothing to do with it.

Jacoby also quotes Acton's famous aphorism about power: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." With respect to the Pope, this is a confusion of power with authority. For the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is actually a limit on the power of Popes; the current Pope is bound by the infallible pronouncements of all previous Popes. Those who say that the essence of Protestantism is that it makes every man his own Pope haven't quite gone far enough. The ordinary Protestant is not bound by the decisions of any other Protestant or even his own prior decisions, as the Pope is bound by all prior Papal pronouncements, his own as well as others. Protestant Pastor Joe may get up one day and after reading his Bible one more time, decide that John 6 really does mean that Christ is literally present in the Eucharist, and may preach that from his pulpit that evening. But Pope Francis can never get up one day, read his Bible to the effect that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is hooey, and preach the same that evening, for the doctrine of the Eucharist is settled and unchanging, no matter how wise or profound a skeptic of the doctrine may be.

The article ends with Jacoby telling us that

Pope Francis is described by those who know him as modest and self-effacing, committed to a church "that does not so much regulate the faith as promote and facilitate it." You don't have to be Catholic to pray that the cardinals have chosen well, and that the 266th pope will lead with wisdom, honesty, grace and an understanding heart. Ultimately it is those qualities, not "infallibility", on which the success of his papacy will depend.

Infallibility is another name for the promises Christ has made to the Church to be with her always; if the success of the papacy does not depend on it, then it doesn't depend on Christ or, in other words, it isn't what it claims to be and is really just another man-made institution. In that case, it really does come down to the personal qualities of the Pope. But, then, how could the Pope be wise and gracious if he is gravely mistaken about the very nature of his office?

The Pope and Conservatism

The Maverick Philosopher has a post here on the recent election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. He notes that people drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent and that conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary. In his view, "The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal." The Mav is not at all approving of the election of Pope Francis.

I am certainly of a conservative bent, and am sympathetic to preserving the ancient, but this misses the essence of Christianity. Christianity is not primarily about the eternal, or remembering the eternal, but is the news that the eternal has broken into the temporal in a decisive way. This gives the Catholic Church a fundamentally revolutionary nature despite its ancient Sacraments and rituals. Or, rather, the Catholic Church embodies the paradox of ancient rituals in service of ongoing revolution. Chesterton captures this perfectly in his description of Christianity as the "Eternal Revolution."

The mission of the Church is to preserve and proclaim the Gospel to the world, and to provide the concrete encounter with Christ in the Sacraments. The conservative aspect of the Church comes from the fact that it is the authorized proclaimer and interpreter of the Gospel, but is not its author and has no authority to modify or "improve" the Gospel message in any way. Christ established the means of transmission of the Gospel through a Church founded on twelve hand-picked apostles, the successors of whom are the bishops, and the Church has no authority to modify this structure (by making the Church a democracy, for instance, or making the authority of bishops subservient to biblical scholars).  The revolutionary aspect of the Church comes from the fact that the Church is charged with challenging the world (and itself) with the Gospel, as Christ challenged the world when he walked the Earth. The paradox of this revolutionary challenge is that it loses its force as it is routinely proclaimed; the words are worn down to nubs and gradually lose their ability to effectively communicate, and the Church, despite itself, settles into a worldly conservatism that has nothing to do with the genuine conservatism of the Gospel. At such times a radical personality is called for, one who renews the Gospel challenge, with words, yes, but words proclaimed in new ways and also, and perhaps more significantly, with his actions - a St. Francis.

Our new Pope seems to capture this truly Catholic paradox of the Eternal Revolution. The progressive types aren't even writing their usual false hopes that the new Pope will change basic doctrine on abortion or married priests, as Francis has been rock solidly orthodox on doctrinal matters. On the other hand, Francis's ascetic life, obvious humility, and public eschewals of the perquisites of status are an existential rebuke to our indulgent, celebrity obsessed and self-absorbed culture. Just the man the times call for, it seems.

The Pope and the President

The contrast between our new Pope and the current President is hard to miss. Francis is a man who eschewed the episcopal palace in Buenos Aires in favor of a small apartment, road the bus around town instead of a limousine, did his own cooking in his apartment, and frequently wore the simple cassock of an ordinary priest. Barack Obama, famous for the crease in his tailored pants, has given new meaning to the Imperial Presidency with his lavish lifestyle, hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities, and 40 car motorcades to go golfing with Tiger Woods. Not to mention his patent disdain for the common people ("bitter clingers") he supposedly champions.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course, has embraced a specific religious calling that involves simplicity and sacrifice that Obama has not. Nonetheless, the office of the President of the United States was created in specific contrast to the prerogatives of the European royalty against which Americans originally rebelled. The Presidency was supposed to be a secular office of limited power and perquisites, elected to perform certain specific functions necessary to the maintenance of a free republic. It has now been transformed to the point that, as Mark Steyn notes, the yearly maintenance of the Presidency costs more than that of all European royal houses put together.

There is a reason the Catholic Church has endured for more than 2,000 years, and the secular democracies of Europe and, now, the United States, may be entering their twilight years after no more than 200. The broken nature of man, a consequence of original sin, is a fact for secular democracies as much as it is for the Church, even if the former do not acknowledge it; and the only cure for original sin is submission to the Divine Physician.

The great puzzle for secularists is why the Church hasn't disappeared after its many failures and scandals. The reason is that the Church is under no illusions about the fallen nature of man, and does not hope in itself in the manner of a political institution, but places its Hope in the Savior, who promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. So when yet another scandal occurs, as in the recent Vatileaks brouhaha, the Church does not lose hope, but finds that God has raised a simple priest from Argentina to reform it. In contrast, our nation seems unable to correct itself from the path of spending, debt and crushing government regulation that is driving us to ruin; at a time when we desperately need a man of virtue to restore simplicity, transparency and frugality to our government offices, we put in place a man who seems to think of himself as Good King Barack the First, and us his subjects who should be duly awed.

Debt and Empire

Does this sound familiar? From The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark:

"Even so, the wealth of the empire was largely illusory when account is taken of its truly staggering debts. It began with Ferdinand and Isabella, who never managed to balance their budgets, so that Charles V assumed their very substantial debts at his coronation. Charles expanded these debts on a properly imperial scale, starting with a sum of more than half a million gold guilders borrowed from Jakob Fugger to gain the Holy Roman emperorship. This too was but a drop in the bucket. During his reign Charles secured more than five hundred loans from European bankers, amounting to about 29 million ducats. Much of this amount still had not been repaid when his son Philip II ascended to the throne in 1556, and a year later Philip declared bankruptcy. Nevertheless, only four years later imperial debt was again so high that 1.4 million ducats, more than 25 percent of the total annual budget, was paid out as interest on current loans. Worse yet, by 1565 the imperial debt in the Low Countries alone stood at 5 million ducats, and interest payments plus fixed costs of governing produced an additional deficit of 250,000 ducats a year. The same pattern held for the empire as a whole - debt dominated everything. During the first half of the 1570s, Phillip II's revenues averaged about 5.5 million ducats a year, while his total expenditures often nearly doubled that amount, with interest on his debts alone exceeding 2 million ducats a year. No one was too surprised when again in 1575 Phillip disavowed all his debts, amounting to about 36 million ducats. By doing so, however, he left his regime in the Netherlands penniless."

Of course the Spanish monarchs were constrained by a monetary system based on precious metals, so they had no choice but to honestly declare bankruptcy when they were, well, bankrupt. We have another option: Print our way out of debt!

Goldberg on the Meaning of Life

In his latest G-File (an emailed newsletter), Jonah Goldberg ruminates on the meaning of life. After mentioning Robert Wright and Wright's interview with Edward Fredkin, and Fredkin's take on information as fundamental to the universe, Goldberg gives his view of things: 

But here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether it is literally true. It is metaphorically true. And in a way, metaphorical truth is more important. The meaning of life is found in the living of it. This not a materialistic, "you only live once" argument for hedonism. Rather, I'm simply acknowledging the fact that whatever meaning there is to our existence can only be gleaned from existence. If all you've got are shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, you learn what you can from the shadows.

We are all individually working out the math. I don't mean to belittle or sidestep religion, but to bolster it. Religion is metaphorical too, insofar as God's will is always a mystery and out of reach. But religion helps most people look beyond the material to the deeper purpose of all things. Atheists who hate religion, it seems to me, often really hate the language of religion because it doesn't speak to them or because they lack the imagination to see it in anything but the strictest and most literal terms.

Meanwhile, John Donne was right in the small-c catholic and big-C Catholic sense: No man is an island. And whether you want to say that we are "Each ... a piece of the continent, a part of the main," or whether you want to say that we are each working on our own little bit of the big math problem, you are still grasping at the shadows to describe a truth too big for your hands to recognize, but that your soul can feel. 

There are some things well said here, in particular "The meaning of life is found in the living of it." The reason is that what is known in the meaning of life is one and the same with the process of knowing it; the life that knows the meaning of life is no other life than the one for which the meaning is known. This is different from an objective pursuit like science, where the life of the scientist knowing science is entirely separate from the science known. It is thus possible to know science well but be utterly confused about the meaning of one's own existence. On the comic side, this results in shows like The Big Bang Theory, which feature brilliant scientists who give disquisitions on quantum mechanics one minute and display a childlike level of sophistication in social relationships, empathy and ethical reasoning the next. On the sinister side, it results in the phenomenon of Nazi scientists, who could perform experiments on subject persons that followed the strictest scientific protocols but were justified by the most crude moral reasoning. In contrast, a man such as Socrates, who understands the meaning of his own existence, necessarily reveals this knowledge in the manner in which he lives (see Crito and Phaedo). Offered an opportunity to escape from prison in the Crito so that he might pursue philosophy in some other city than Athens, Socrates demurs because such an escape would prove he is not truly a philosopher. The knowledge Socrates seeks is self-knowledge, which is nothing other than the meaning of his own life,  and since his reasoning has convinced him the citizen must submit to law, he must live that meaning in his own life or prove he doesn't really know what he says he knows.

But where Goldberg goes astray is in the common assumption that since the meaning of life must be found in the living of it, that meaning must be murky or only something you feel. The example of Socrates contradicts this. There is nothing murky or merely emotional about what Socrates tells us in the Crito. In fact it is perfectly clear and stated with Socrates's customary equanimity. What confuses us is that, unlike a solution to a math problem, we can't really know what Socrates tells us merely through his telling it; we can only know it to the extent that we have subjectively appropriated it, and no one can do that but ourselves. As Kierkegaard tells us, the subjective thinker understands that the difficulty with subjective knowledge is not knowing what is required, but in doing it. The modern way of thinking, however, only recognizes the objective aspect to knowledge, and so sensing that something is missing in the objective assertion of the meaning of life, but not grasping the missing element as a subjective thinker, the modern thinker collapses that missing subjective element into the objective equation, perceiving what is in fact plain to be murky or merely a matter of emotion.

There is also the unwarranted conclusion that since God is greater than us, God's will is always a mystery and out of reach. This is true if the only way we can know God's will is through our own efforts, i.e. our own attempts to reach up to God. But what if, rather than leaving us to our own devices, God chooses to reveal Himself to us in a manner that we can appropriate? Then we again have the situation where the real problem is not the objective content of what is known, but the manner and fact of its subjective appropriation.

Objective and Subjective Morality, with reference to Kierkegaard

Steven Novella has a post on objective and subjective morality at his blog here.  He introduces the discussion this way:

The discussion is between objective vs subjective morality, mostly focusing around a proponent of objective morality (commenter nym of Zach). Here I will lay out my position for a philosophical basis of morality and explain why I think objective morality is not only unworkable, it’s a fiction. 

First, let’s define “morality” and discuss why it is needed. Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good. The question at hand is where do morals and morality come from. I think this question is informed by the question of why we need morals in the first place. 

I maintain that morals can only be understood in the context of the moral actor. Humans, for example, have emotions and feelings. We care about stuff, about our own well being, about those who love, about our “tribe.” We also have an evolved sense of morality, such as the concepts of reciprocity and justice.

and later describes his position in this way:

Much of the prior discussion came to an impasse over this issue – are moral first principles, therefore, objective or subjective. This, I maintain, is a false dichotomy. They are complex, with some subjective aspects (the values) and some objective aspects (explorations of their universality and implications).

Novella subscribes to the Enlightenment derived fact-value distinction (empirical facts only describe the way things are, not the way they should be), which is the reason he says values are subjective. By "subjective" he means not rationally justifiable in a way that is publicly compelling, i.e. the way math and science are rationally publicly compelling.

Kierkegaard is invaluable in understanding what is really going on in these kinds of discussions. For we learn from Kierkegaard that this way of using "subjective" and "objective" obscures the truth, the existential truth, of our situation, and in that obscurity ethics can never appear. In fact Novella's entire discussion is taken objectively, and subjectivity is only considered objectively, when in truth subjectivity can only be understood subjectively.

There is only one truly subjective paragraph in the post, and that is the first:

I am fascinated by the philosophy of ethics, ever since I took a course in it in undergraduate school. This is partly because I enjoy thinking about complex systems (which partly explains why I ended up in Neurology as my specialty). I also greatly enjoy logic, and particularly deconstructing arguments (my own and others) to identify their logical essence and see if or where they go wrong.

The subject of a truly subjective statement can only be me; if I speak about someone else's subjectivity, I am speaking objectively about subjectivity. Truly subjective statements inevitably involve a story of becoming, as Novella mentions how he ended up in Neurology. And that is not by accident, because the basic truth of our existence is that it is one of becoming. This is the existential truth that is obscured by speaking about subjectivity and objectivity from a purely objective standpoint, for there is no becoming in objectivity. And it is the truth that provides the only genuine foundation of morality.

"Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good" Novella informs us. This is perfectly stated from the objective standpoint, but it will never result in an ethics that is subjectively compelling. For what does such a code have to do with me? At what point does the objective discussion of such a code end, or get to the point that I must stop debating it and start following it? Kierkegaard, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, shows us that objective thought can never result in something that is subjectively compelling, precisely because the subject is removed at the outset. The only way to get the subject back in, that is, to make the results of objective thought subjectively compelling, is for the subject to reinsert himself through an act of the will; I must choose to apply the results of objective thought to my life, and that act of choice is beyond reason, for it is "subjective" in the modern (non-Kierkegaardian) sense. This is the real reason for the "fact-value distinction" in modern thought. 

Better, Kierkegaard tells us, is to never lose the subject in the first place. Rather than beginning with a fictitious objective origin to morality in facts about our feelings or evolution, which isn't really a beginning at all, a subjective origin may be found in the fact that I am becoming. This simply means that my being is not static but dynamic. Everyday I wake up I am a day older; every act I do or avoid doing changes me in some way. I am becoming something; the process is unavoidable, and the only question is what am I becoming.  

There is an analogous situation with dieting (or, rather, dieting is a response to the physical fact of becoming). I must eat to live, and what I eat determines what I become. Eat too much or the wrong things and I become fat; do not eat enough and I become weak and underweight. There are people who take a great deal of interest in what they eat and investigate various diet plans to achieve certain physical outcomes, and others who take no interest at all. But whether one takes an interest in diet or not, the existential fact of "becoming what you eat" remains nonetheless, and existence forces one to deal with food one way or the other. There is no mystery, then, in the origin of dieting. I don't need to look for an evolutionary explanation concerning our feelings about food, about what I care and don't care about. I need only recognize that eating is a fact of life, my life, and the only question is whether I will eat well or poorly. A response to food (which is what dieting is) is inevitable given the nature of our existence.

The point may be made general. Life forces me to act, and my actions change me in one way or another, and the only question is whether I will act well or badly, i.e. what will I become through my actions? Note that I become something through eating whether or not I take an interest in what I become. The man who is not interested in dieting and eats nothing but coke and chips all day will get fat and ruin his health; he is not exempted from the consequences of his eating simply because he does not acknowledge that eating has consequences. Similarly, I become something or other through my actions in general, and those consequences follow whether or not I acknowledge them. Ethics is my response to the fact of becoming, just as dieting is my response to the fact of eating.

One criticism of Kierkegaard is that in works like the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he spends very little time debating what most moderns consider the important ethical questions: Rules of behavior and how to tell right actions from wrong ones. This is because, contra our modern view, the answers to those questions are really the easiest part of ethics; they only seem hard to us because we have lost the true starting point for ethics in subjectivity. This becomes apparent when we are brought to a point of approaching ethics subjectively (despite ourselves) through art.

An example of this is the film It's A Wonderful Life, which I explore in detail here. At each critical moment in his life, George is faced with a choice between fulfilling his own ambitions or sacrificing those ambitions for the sake of others. At each point, he denies himself and does what we all know is the right thing to do, sacrificing his own ambitions for the sake of others. The film works because the filmmaker can count on the fact that his audience knows what the right thing to do is in each successive dilemma; the drama is found in whether George can meet the ethical challenge, not whether the ethical challenge can meet some inappropriate "objective" standard of ethics. 

And it is not an accident that Hollywood tends to make films with a pro-life message (e.g. Knocked Up) despite its leftwing political bent. For a film is a story, and therefore a story of becoming, and therefore a story of becoming good (at least if it is a comedy rather than a tragedy). Knocked Up wouldn't work if Seth Rogen abandoned Katherine Heigl, for whatever "objective" reasons he might offer, because we know it is the wrong thing to do and Rogen would just be rationalizing. Similarly, Katherine Heigl can't get an abortion, because the audience, whether or not they are politically pro-choice, cannot but admire a woman has the child more than one that aborts it.

We can agree with Novella that morals can only be understood in the context of the moral actor. But that context must start in subjectivity, not end there.