Omnisubjectivity

Linda Zagzebski is one of the most proficient contemporary analytic philosophers of religion. Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity is a sequel to her 2013 book Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine Attribute (Marquette University Press) and several articles on the topic. In this most recent work Zagzebski defends a significant amendment to the notion of God’s omniscience (roughly, that “God knows everything”).

“Subjectivity,” Zagzebski writes in chapter 1, “is the experience of the world from inside a conscious mind” (12). She argues that since God is creator, God must know everything there is to know in creation. So, God knows every fact about your pain but also knows what the pain you are presently feeling is like. God feels your pain in God’s subjective life. This is included in the idea that God “knows everything” (23). Omnisubjectivity, then, is God subjectively feeling all subjective states of all creatures.

In chapter 3, Zagzebski considers four models for how God can be omnisubjective. The first model (66) is that God knows what you are feeling because God fully empathizes with you. The second way God might be omnisubjective is the “perceptual model” (70). On this account, God sees directly inside our minds. Zagzebski correctly notes that this way fails because perception is not experienced from a first-person vantage point. God does not feel as a person feels. The third possibility is “panentheism,” roughly “that the world exists within the Divine, although God is also more than the world” (73). On this view your pain is what God feels and to the same extent. Panentheism conflicts with classical theism, which maintains that the world is ontologically separate from God. So, for Zagzebski, this model offers a less-than-satisfactory explanation of how God accomplishes omnisubjectivity. The fourth model relies on a metaphor, according to which the world comes about through the divine light that encompasses it. Think of the divine light as God’s consciousness and my consciousness as encompassed by God’s consciousness.

None of the four models were convincing to this reader. However, it is not obvious why we mere creatures should have any idea of how God knows my inner self from my first-person perspective. After all, it remains a mystery to us exactly how God knows anything, including just plain truths. So, the inadequacy of the four models does not constitute a convincing objection to omnisubjectivity per se. Zagzebski’s basic argument stands: That God knows everything requires God having omnisubjectivity; just how God does that is God’s business.

Zagzebski often depends exclusively on Thomas Aquinas, including to understand our language about God. This dependence on Aquinas narrows the purview of the book because there are other respectable accounts of how our language applies to God. We should wonder how omnisubjectivity makes out on those alternative perspectives. There is, for example, the tradition of negative theology, which claims that God has none of our positive attributes, and we can only truly say what God is not. On this view, our language of God is metaphorical, and can form our attitudes of worship, but no more. And there are functionalist accounts as well. These are left out of the book.

So, much remains to be done before we have a full understanding of the theology of omnisubjectivity. That does not detract, however, from the historical significance of placing divine subjectivity at the forefront of God’s knowledge of the world, as is done here by a master practitioner of analytic philosophy of religion.

Jerome Gellman is professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

Jerome Yehuda Gellman

Date Of Review:

August 29, 2024