<i>Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity</i>

In this engaging and sharply written book, Linda Zagzebski thoroughly explores an underdiscussed question for classical theistic metaphysics: whether and how God is ‘omnisubjective’, perfectly grasping creaturely conscious states as they are experienced by their subjects. She argues that theists have several strong reasons to suppose that God is omnisubjective; offers four ways one might understand this divine capacity, each with pros and cons; rebuts arguments that it is inconsistent with six other standard divine attributes; argues that it extends to all possible (and not merely actual) creaturely subjective states; applies it with novel implications to the Christian doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation; and argues that subjectivity is primary in God, with God’s ‘objective nature’ depending on God’s choice to create a world with an objective nature. She also briefly suggests some implications of the foregoing to the problem of evil.Zagzebski opens chapter 1 by stating, “What I mean by subjectivity is consciousness as it is experienced by the subject of conscious states, not consciousness as an object of personal reflection or empirical investigation or theoretical description.” (1) She allows that physicalism might be true, conceived as a thesis about either the fundamental objects or all the objective facts in the world. But that would not reduce subjectivity to a physical phenomenon since, in her view, “the objective does not exhaust reality” (8). The idea of subjectivity is absent from Descartes’s theory on which mental properties or powers are wholly distinct from physical properties and born by a distinctive sort of object, the I, the conscious substance. Though dualist, this ontology represents the mind as no less objective than physical reality. It posits a mental substance but no self (later described as “the inside of a person” 145). Indeed, according to Zagzebski, the very idea of subjectivity was unknown to Descartes or any of his predecessors in human history, emerging only in subsequent philosophical critiques of Descartes’s theory.Such bold claims raise many questions. But for the moment, let us merely note that they set a high bar for accounting for God’s omnisubjectivity. It is not enough that God should know all the facts about the subjective states of all His creatures; He must also grasp perfectly what each such state is like for its subject. God must perfectly grasp the qualitative character of bat echolocative experience, despite not having echolocative sensory apparatus. Further, He must grasp what it is like to have such experience within the biological and cognitive confines of bathood, and further still, within the narrative trajectory and other idiosyncrasies of a particular bat. Most challenging of all, He must be able to distinguish the irreducible ‘for-me-ness’ of two qualitatively duplicate bats (150–51). How might this go? Zagzebski notes that two natural proposals, on which God has an idealized imaginative empathy for, or a more-direct-than-sense perception of, a creature’s experiences, will inevitably fall short, insofar as they maintain some kind of epistemic gap between God and creature. “Provided that there is any distance at all, God as knower does not really grasp what you are experiencing in the way you experience it as the subject of the experience.” (72) She then notes that one might close the gap by rejecting classical theism in favor of panentheism, on which every created thing is within God (as a part), although God is more than the totality of created things. But panentheism is saddled with the burden of explaining how particular evils can be parts of a perfectly good God, and it forces us to reconceptualize the dynamics of prayer, the very religious practice that made pressing the project of accounting for God’s omnisubjectivity. The final (and to this reviewer, most promising) approach that Zagzebski considers is to tease out implications of the idea that God is (continuously) First Cause of the world. As Thomas Aquinas famously contends, God does not know created reality ‘after the fact’. Rather, He knows each created thing in the first instance by knowing His own creative power that continuously gives being to the thing in all its particularity: its qualities, powers, and thisness. Zagzebski suggests that we think of creation as streaming forth like light, such that each creaturely subjective state is a distinctive color in the full rainbow contained within the uncreated white light of God’s creative consciousness. In this way, the divine light “bathes and infuses objects without being identical to them” (81).On most accounts, the actual creation does not exhaust the scope of what might have been. In knowing created things by knowing Himself, then, God must fully grasp counteractual things and their states no less than the ones He contingently willed into being. (‘Counteractual’, not ‘counterfactual’, because subjectivity is not a subdomain of objective facts and cannot be fully expressed propositionally [116]). Here Zagzebski’s usual clarity falters. She emphasizes the role that imagining possible subjective states (of actual persons or fictional characters) plays in our own lives, and on this basis she suggests repeatedly that the line between the actual and possible is blurred in some way that is underappreciated in canonical possible-worlds theorizing. In some instances, she qualifies her point, as when she writes that “there is not a sharp line separating actual and counteractual in the imagination” (124; emphasis added). If this means only that our imaginative representations of counteractual states make a difference to actuality and you cannot understand our own subjectivity without taking into account the role that such episodes play in our own personal narratives, it will be entirely unobjectionable. However, other passages strongly suggest that she wants to make the stronger claim that the line between the actual and the possible is itself blurred, with the imagination serving as a portal between them: “The human imagination connects actual and counteractual subjectivity and the line between them is vague. When we think about our counteractual self, the actual and the possible blend and merge” (129). For example, “I imagine something funny that does not exist in the actual world and that makes me laugh” (130). What is the referent here of “that”—Zagzebski’s entirely actual imaginative state or the possible situation? As best I can judge, she intends the latter, but she fails to provide a clear case for the necessity of such a possibilist thesis over the actualist alternative.Zagzebski then turns to God’s grasp of actual and counteractual subjectivity. She sharply distinguishes imagination, with its representation and productive creativity, and intellect, characterized by abstract thought (134–35). She argues that imagination is “the only appropriate faculty for grasping subjective possibilities and it is a faculty superior to the intellect for grasping objective possibilities” (136). But missing is an argument that there is an either/or choice to be made. Certainly, in us these capacities have complementary roles in grasping either kind of possibility, with the intellect discerning the lineaments of essences and logical relations. As many philosophers and cognitive scientists emphasize, perception and imagination are infused by cognition. What would the former be without the shaping role of concepts and propositional understanding? Zagzebski might argue that for God, with a perfect intuitive (‘imaginative’) grasp of all possible things and their interrelations, the need for intellectual abstraction falls away. But why is it not more appropriate to say instead that there is a unitary mode of knowing that has both imaginative and intellectual aspects? Leaving that question aside, we may ask how God’s knowledge of all possibilities impacts the issue of actualism versus possibilism. Zagzebski writes that “all possible objects exist in the divine imagination, and in the creation, some objects go from the darkness of the possible to the light of the actual” (139). This way of conceiving the matter is noncompulsory. We may instead say simply that God has the unexercised power (or unactualized potentiality, if we are in the mood for provoking Thomists) to create any of innumerable kinds of beings in any of innumerable kinds of circumstance, and He represents these possibilities in fully determinate ways within His perfect imaginative/intellectual mode of knowing. Notice, too, that the objects so represented need not be (as Zagzebski seems to suppose) determinately individuals, preloaded with thisness in a way that gives rise to vertiginous and possibly paradoxical barely distinct possible individuals with the exact same qualitative profiles across possibility space.I turn, finally, to Zagzebski’s seemingly radical suggestion that there is a deep distinction between subjectivity and objectivity in God and that in God subjectivity is primary and alone uncreated. She equates objective nature with essence (144) and tells us that the divine essence or objective nature includes “attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and perfect goodness” (144). God’s subjectivity, on the other hand, “is not a component of the divine nature” because it cannot be “taken objectively” (145), which is to say grasped “from outside” and “communicated from one mind to another” (178). God’s subjectivity, however, is not bare subjectivity, since “God’s states of willing, knowing, and loving are subjective states” (145). But we (inevitably) conceive these “from outside” as omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, and this perspective “leaves aside the first-person aspect of these attributes” (145). The primacy of subjectivity in God thus appears not as radical a claim as it initially sounds. It amounts to saying that (1) unlike us, there is no unconscious aspect or capacity in God and (2) while we may truly say of God that He is, for example, omnipotent, we are precluded from grasping that power as it is in itself (infinitely creative subjectivity) and are confined to thinking of it ‘from outside’ as a theoretical quality analogous to ones we experience in and around ourselves. While there is much that is contentious in classical theistic metaphysics, this pair of claims is not. Zagzebski links (178–79) the primacy of subjectivity doctrine to Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity, on which God is being itself (ipsum esse), such that there is no distinction in God between essence and being. That is a radical claim indeed. But her thesis and Aquinas’s seem wholly independent. She offers her primacy thesis as an interpretation of a couple of passages from Aquinas propounding the simplicity thesis, but this interpretive move is odd, given that she told us earlier that the very idea of subjectivity was unknown prior to the post-Cartesian era.Space precludes my remarking on her intriguing discussions in chapter 6 of maximal subjective and intersubjective consciousness among persons of the Trinity and her use of subjectivity as the basis of the unified person of the dual-natured, incarnate Christ. Grappling with her proposals and arguments throughout the book was fruitful for developing my own thinking on several matters, and that is strong commendation for a work of philosophy.