QuestionsCan we be certain of anything?Subjectivity is truth
Can we be certain of anything?What escapes words

Subjectivity is truth

Søren Kierkegaard 1813 · 1855Truth is subjectivity: one must take the leap of faith.
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What it claims

For an existing being, essential truth lies in the subject's passionate relation: "subjectivity is truth".

Why

Objective inquiry never ends, but the decision about my life is urgent: essential truth lies in my passionate relation to it.

In short

"Subjectivity is truth" is an argument by Søren Kierkegaard (Postscript, II, 2, ch. 2 (Johannes Climacus)) on the question "Can we be certain of anything?" (answer: what escapes words). Its claim: For an existing being, essential truth lies in the subject's passionate relation: "subjectivity is truth". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Postscript, II, 2, ch. 2 (Johannes Climacus)
Valid with an implicit premise

Johannes Climacus, a pseudonym of Kierkegaard who says he is not a Christian himself, signs the Postscript (1846); Kierkegaard asked that these words be attributed to him. Climacus is not talking about mathematics or ordinary facts, but about truths that involve a whole life: God, immortality, how to live. For these, he says, what matters is not only what one believes but how one believes it: "Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively, on how it is said."

P1For an existing being, objective inquiry into these questions (proofs, history, scholarship) never settles them: it is only an endless approximation.
P2Yet these questions demand a decision now: the inquirer might die tomorrow.
P3 · implicit premiseA truth that must guide my life now, but would be reachable only at the end of an endless objective inquiry, would not be a truth for an existing being.
P4Truth lies either on the side of the object (what one believes) or on the side of the subject's relation to it (how one believes it). An existing being cannot be in both places at once, as Hegel's "mediation" would have it.
Therefore, for an existing being, essential truth lies in the subject's passionate relation: "subjectivity is truth".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where objective inquiry does not settle the matter, a decision is needed now, and yet truth lies on the side of the object: one must then decide without possessing it.
Valid with P3, which Climacus does not state but assumes: a truth one could never reach in time does not count for someone who has to live. Without P3, one can accept P1, P2 and P4 and still say: truth lies on the side of the object, too bad if we cannot reach it. That is exactly what his critics reply.
Analogy. Two people pray. One, in a church, has the correct ideas about God but prays mechanically. The other, in a distant land, prays with all his soul before an idol. Climacus asks: where is there more truth? For him, the second prays in truth, even before an idol.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

O
Objection anticipated by Johannes Climacus: madness attacks the conclusion

If truth lies in the subject's passion, the madman passionate about his fixed idea would be in the truth. Truth could no longer be told apart from madness.

Kierkegaard replies
Kierkegaard Reply of Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard's pseudonym)
The passion of the infinite is never madness. The madman clings passionately to a small, fixed, finite thing, a fixed idea. What makes madness is therefore not subjectivity, but the small finite thing it clings to.
The debate goes on (our summary) His critics note that this reply brings back a criterion drawn from the object (the infinite, not a finite thing): so the "what" also counts a little.
A
A common objection: relativism attacks the conclusion

If only the "how" counts, any belief held with enough passion becomes true. His own example shows it: the passionate idolater would be more in the truth than the absent-minded Christian. It is "to each his own truth".

Kierkegaard replies
Kierkegaard Reply of Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard's pseudonym)
Further on in the same book he specifies: being a Christian is defined not by the "what" of Christianity but by the believer's "how"; and this how fits only one thing, the absolute paradox. So the how is not just any how.
The debate goes on (our summary) For a relativist as for a rationalist, this reply brings back a specific content (God made man) that the "how" alone cannot select. Climacus admits it: whether Christianity is right is "another question".
Paul Edwards, "Kierkegaard and the 'Truth' of Christianity" 1971 · attacks premise 4

The choice "object or relation" is a false dilemma. The word "truth" changes meaning along the way: a belief is true if what it says is the case; "being in the truth" through passion means being sincere. Sincerity does not make a belief true, and one can have both at once.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1971, after the author's death (1855).
The debate goes on (our summary) His defenders reply that Climacus does not deny the truth of propositions (mathematics stays true, merely "indifferent"): he is talking about another question, how one exists in what one believes.