Kierkegaard: Subjectivity is the Truth

Existentialism truly began in the nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish philosopher bothered by the problem of Enlightenment reason, which he saw as arrogant—the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool’s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic. The universe was cold and chaotic—man’s search for meaning could not begin with an attempt to look outward for that meaning. Kantian universalism was too hopeful, Comtian scientism far too self-assured.
 
Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system by which one chooses to live is a leap of faith—but in that leap, man finds his individual meaning. “Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.
 
To Kierkegaard, this meant making the leap of faith to believe in a God beyond man-made ethics—his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Kierkegaard focused on passion as opposed to reason—he deemed passion the most important driving force in life, and concluded, “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.” He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

 

Kant on Subjectivity

Kant established the modern rules for discussing how it is that someone knows the external world, and in doing so he initiated the breakdown of the old distinction between subject and object. When this breakdown crossed over into theology, it resulted in an overemphasis on God's immanence and a diminished emphasis on his transcendence. This change had profound implications for the meaning of Christian faith.
 
Prior to Kant, the reigning epistemological paradigm held that the mind was simply a mirror in which the external world was reflected, that an objective world imprinted its reality on minds that were passive, inert, and uninvolved in this transaction. Kant rejected this model. Instead of beginning with the objective world, he began with the subjective conditions for knowledge, with the shape and functioning of the mind. He argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. It sorts into categories the stream of information contributed by the five senses and then synthesizes the data in ways that do not necessarily correspond to what is externally existent. He maintained that space and time, for example, are categories of the mind rather than realities in the world. Whatever can be said in favor of this, it should immediately be recognized that a fateful move had been made. Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.
 
In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. Fish asserts that this approach does not amount to imposing meaning on the text, that it is simply a recognition of the fact that words have no independent meaning apart from specific contexts. Moreover, the contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader's internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 
 

Subjectivism Reigns in Societal Morality

Defining deviancy up has meant stigmatizing those who obey the dictates of traditional sexual morality as fools, ascetics, or latent homosexuals. It has also meant stigmatizing moralists as fascists and hypocrites—fascists, because we wish to impose our morality on others; hypocrites, because inevitably, some of us have not been completely pure.
 
We are not fascists—in fact, fascism’s Nietzschean ideals are antithetical to traditional morality. We are Republicans and Democrats. We have the right to vote for general societal morality as expressed by our duly elected lawmakers. Social liberals seek to impose their amorality, albeit far less democratically; they push their viewpoint through pop culture, the education system, the judiciary, and the media. As for hypocrisy, that too is a weak argument—it is always better to do the wrong thing but say the right thing than to both say and do the wrong thing.
 
Yet it is impossible for all but the most extreme liberals in our society to ignore the truth: that tolerance of every social behavior is now the norm. In the absence of community-promoted traditional standards, subjectivism reigns. Nothing is expected of anyone; everyone may make his own rules about what is best.
 
The “live and let live” societal model is a recipe for societal disaster. The myopic question posed by advocates of the new, “Tolerant,” morality is: “How does my immoral behavior hurt you?” But the overwhelming truth is that these are not individual acts, but inherently social acts with social consequences. And when society sanctions and encourages your immoral behavior, that does have an impact—it doesn’t just hurt me, but it hurts my future children as well.
 

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation:

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.

 

The Religious Economy (3)

 Discernment is a spiritual capacity. It is the insight that comes with Christian wisdom. It is the ability to see "through" life, to see it for what it really is. Some people are more naturally sagacious than others, some more critically astute than others, and God may enhance this sort of gift by his grace, but it is not this natural ability that I am referring to here. The heart of the ability to discern right from wrong in the actual circumstances of life is the rich flowering that God intends from the interactions of the truth of his Word, reflection on it, and the moral character that grows out of it. It is this culture of wisdom with which the Bible, in both Testaments, is much concerned and in which the evangelical world appears to have lost interest.
 
Indeed, wherever there is worldliness in the church today, it has made its inroads because of insufficient belief in the Transcendent and a surfeit of belief in the modern world. The problem of worldliness, of modernity happily ensconcing itself in the church, is a problem of misplaced belief. It is a problem of mistaken loyalties, of misjudgment about how relevance is really to be assessed and how success is to be defined. Christian faith made relevant to the "world," in this third and final sense, will be Christian faith no longer relevant to God, to his Christ, to his truth.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Religious Economy (2)

There was a time when American evangelicals prized and cultivated biblically chaste Christian thought and an incisive analysis of the culture from a perspective apart from it. But the past few decades have seen an erosion of the old distinctions, a gradual descent into the "self" movement, a psychologizing of faith, and an adaptation of Christian belief to a therapeutic culture.
 
Distracted by the blandishments of modern culture, we have lost our focus on transcendent biblical truth. We have been beguiled by the efficiency of our culture's technique, the sheer effectiveness of its strategies, and we have begun to play by these rules. We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church.
 
It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism. that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is as attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster. Today any evangelical who demurs from the cultural consensus will almost certainly be viewed as a rebel, perhaps even a subversive, and almost certainly as irrelevant and out of it. All of this may be deeply alarming, but it is not more alarming than the prospect of falling in with the world, of capitulating to a system of values and set of assumptions that kills the love for God required by the first and great commandment upon which all Christian faith must be based.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Religious Economy (1)

Finke and Stark maintain that four factors are essential to both economies: (1) organization (or church polity); (2) sales representatives (or clergy); (3) product (or religious doctrine and life); and (4) marketing techniques (or evangelism and church growth).; In other words, supply and demand explain the workings of both economies. They use this thesis to explain the changes that have occurred in the religious landscape, citing as an example the way in which American Protestantism was transformed after the Revolution.
 
It is not difficult to see how the marketeer's evangelicalism might begin to resemble the old liberalism, the gospel H. Richard Niebuhr once described as consisting in a God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross. Hawking the church as a product inevitably violates its nature as the gathering of the redeemed for service in God's kingdom and in his world. What is lost is biblical truth. It is not the truth about Christ, his work, or his presence in the church that is important in the modern selling of the church but something entirely different.
 
It is surely ironic that those who seek to promote the church have adopted strategies that deliberately obscure its essence. The church should be known as a place where God is worshiped, where the Word of God is heard and practiced, and where life is thought about and given its most searching and serious analysis. This, in fact, is what the traditional church has seen as its chief business, however badly it may have been doing this business. But none of this can be marketed, and so it is ignored. The interest turns to how well appointed and organized the church is, what programs it has to offer, how many outings the youth group has organized, how convenient it is to attend, how good the nursery is. The truly important matters are marginalized, and the marginal aspects of the life of the church are made central. Barna shows no interest in the New Testament criteria for those in leadership, such as soundness of character, knowledge of God, understanding of his Word, and an aptness to teach it; he focuses instead on traits valued in modern business, such as self-confidence and managerial skill.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.