Abstract
In her 2013 Aquinas lecture and a previous article (Zagzebski in Oxford studies in philosophy of religion. Oxford University Press, New York, 231–247, 2008), Linda Zagzebski argues for a new divine trait, that of omnisubjectivity. In brief, omnisubjectivity is God’s ability to know what it is like for each of God’s creatures to be themselves. This knowledge is not merely propositional but ascribes to God knowledge of the sort that one typically associates with a first-person perspective on the self. Zagzebski’s considered opinion about what grounds omnisubjectivity appears to be that it is grounded in simulations of creaturely experiences that God imagines. My answer is that God experiences your experiences in experiencing you. Getting clearer on the basis of omnisubjectivity provides some novel results for thinking about what it would mean on the Christian story for Christ to become incarnate and in particular, for how it could be that an incarnate deity could learn something new even if that deity is omnisubjective.
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Notes
She also argues that God would not be omnipresent if God were not in all the psychic places and that the practice of prayer presumes that God has access to our subjective experience. Regarding omnipresence, I think this line would only have force if she was willing to endorse a pantheist or panentheistic position. One that we’ll see she rejects. It’s not clear that on her preferred ways of talking about the phenomenon, omnisubjectivity has much of anything to do with omnipresence. As regards prayer, it is not clear to me that there is an independent argument here. It seems to me to collapse either into the argument from omnipresence or the argument from omniscience depending on how one wants to interpret it.
If this is not a view that Zagzebski would want to be committed to, I think it is at least the most natural way of explicating her most common way of speaking about omnisubjectivity as we’ll see.
It is worth noting, though, that Zagzebski says that God knows what it is like to smell roses because “he permeates the consciousness” of beings who smell roses (41), which certainly sounds like God can co-occupy your psychic space.
If Zagzebski is right that God must be omnisubjective and that omnisubjectivity necessarily concerns the first-person perspective, one could actually mount a novel argument for pan(en)theism on these grounds.
Although differentiable, I am not claiming that emotional contagion cannot play a role in producing empathy as well, which seems plausible. I might, for instance, be moved on a first order level by emotional contagion and then choose to identify with that emotional response on a meta-level. It seems plausible that the result might be empathy.
It is worth noting here that it is not immediately clear what it would mean to predicate an imagination of God. There are conceptions of God, such as the classical one, that would seem an awkward fit for such language. Likewise, it is an interesting question on such a view whether one can square a divine mind that performs simulations with a robust form of divine simplicity. I thank Rico Vitz for pointing out these issues to me.
The term “empathy,” of course, gets used in different ways. I note briefly the resonance between how I am describing empathy here and how psychologist Daniel Batson describes “empathic concern”. He says that it is, “an other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need” (Batson 2011, 11). Moreover, he explicitly distinguishes what he thinks empathy concerns from acquiring the same emotion as another, from simulating another’s mental state, or imagining oneself in another’s situation.
Perhaps the other members of the trinity can come by this knowledge via the perceptual route when Jesus gains it in the first personal way, although, depending on one’s model of the Trinity, they might not need to access the experience via that route.
If one’s model of self-knowledge made introspection out to be perceptual, then Christ’s experience of being incarnated would technically be perceptual. That technicality does not affect the basic point that the experience of being a human being who is also God incarnate requires God to have first-person access to it.
I realize Catholics might have qualms here because Mary is supposed to be sinless. Even for a Catholic, though, I am given to understand that the sinlessness of Mary and the perfection of Jesus are not equivalent.
Technically, that’s yet another new experience, but it would distract to take it up separately here.
References
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Zagzebski L (2013) Omnisubjectivity: a defense of a divine attribute. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee
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Green, A. Omnisubjectivity and Incarnation. Topoi 36, 693–701 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9391-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9391-2