(a) How does Soren Kierkegaard define the notion of 'subjectivity'? Explain it with reference to three stages of existence as…

(a) Kierkegaard: subjectivity and the three stages

Subjectivity: in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (as Johannes Climacus), Kierkegaard says “truth is subjectivity”. Objective thinking, as in Hegel’s system, asks what is true and forgets the existing thinker. Subjective thinking asks how one relates to the truth. Truth in this sense is “an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness”. Subjectivity is thus inwardness, passion, decision and responsibility of the single individual, not arbitrary opinion or egoism. The self becomes itself by choosing, and existence moves through qualitatively different stages by leaps, not by logical mediation.

1. Aesthetic stage (Either/Or, volume I): life is lived in immediacy, for pleasure and the interesting, avoiding boredom (Don Juan, the seducer). There is no commitment, so the self is scattered across moments. It ends in despair, which can prompt a choice.
2. Ethical stage (Judge William, Either/Or, volume II): the individual chooses himself and accepts universal duties, marriage, work and social roles. The self gains continuity. But the ethical person discovers guilt and his inability to fulfil the law by his own strength, which again leads to despair.
3. Religious stage (Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death): by a leap of faith the individual relates absolutely to the Absolute and relatively to the relative. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac shows a teleological suspension of the ethical: the single individual stands higher than the universal. The knight of faith, unlike the knight of infinite resignation, gives up the finite and receives it back “by virtue of the absurd”. Religiousness B, faith in the paradox of the God-man, is the highest subjectivity.

Subjectivity is therefore realised fully only in the religious stage, where the self “rests transparently in the power that established it” and despair is overcome.

(b) Descartes: certainty of the self and of the world

Method: in the Meditations, Descartes doubts whatever can be doubted, the senses (they sometimes deceive), the waking world (the dream argument) and even mathematics (the evil demon). What survives is “I am, I exist”, true whenever I think it (Meditation II). The cogito is grasped by an intuition of the mind, not a syllogism. From it Descartes draws the rule that whatever he perceives clearly and distinctly is true.

Nature of the self: I am a thinking thing (res cogitans) that doubts, understands, affirms, wills and imagines. The wax argument shows that even bodies are known by the intellect, not the senses, so the mind is better known than the body.

Difference from knowledge of the world:

• Self-knowledge is immediate, certain and needs no external guarantee, even if the demon deceives me.
• Knowledge of the external world (res extensa) is mediated by ideas and depends on proving that God exists and is no deceiver (Meditations III and V). Only then are clear and distinct ideas of extension, and the reality of bodies (Meditation VI), guaranteed.
• So the self is known first and with certainty, the world only derivatively.

Criticism:

• Cartesian circle (Arnauld): clear and distinct perception proves God, and God guarantees clear and distinct perception.
• Lichtenberg and Russell: the cogito proves only “there is thinking”, not a substantial “I”.
• Mind-body dualism opens a gap that makes the external world hard to recover, leading to scepticism and to idealism.
• Later thinkers (Hume, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) deny that self-knowledge is prior to or independent of knowledge of a public world.

(c) Locke: refutation of innate ideas, nature and source of knowledge

Why refute: the doctrine of innate principles (Herbert of Cherbury, Cartesians) was used to place certain truths beyond examination. Locke wished to show that all knowledge can be traced to experience (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I).

How:

• No universal consent: children, “idiots” and many peoples do not know principles such as “whatever is, is” or moral rules.
• Even universal consent would not prove innateness if it can be explained in another way.
• An idea in the mind of which the mind is unaware is a contradiction.
• The view that they are known “when reason is used” makes all truths reached by reason innate, emptying the doctrine.
• Moral principles differ widely between societies.

Source of knowledge: the mind is at first “white paper, void of all characters” (tabula rasa). All ideas come from experience through sensation (ideas of external objects) and reflection (ideas of the mind’s own operations, such as perceiving, doubting, willing).

• Simple ideas are received passively, complex ideas (modes, substances, relations) are formed actively by combining, comparing and abstracting.
• Primary qualities (solidity, extension, figure, motion, number) resemble their causes, secondary qualities (colour, taste, sound) are only powers to produce sensations.

Nature of knowledge (Book IV): knowledge is “the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas”. It has three degrees: intuitive (most certain), demonstrative (by intermediate ideas, as in mathematics) and sensitive (of the existence of particular external things). Beyond these lies only probability and opinion. Knowledge is thus limited to our ideas, and real essences of substances remain unknown.