--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >
> I do not for a moment belief that there is one Truth, > objective or not. Or one reality. I believe the exact > opposite, in fact. > > You are *choosing* to believe that that's what I'm > saying. What I'm really saying was in the use of > Santa Claus as a parallel for God. The fact that > children believe in him and love him does not make > him exist; Santa's existence can *never* be proven > by any objective standards. Santa's existence can > never even be proven *subjectively* to someone who > doesn't already believe in him. Same with God. > > This is *not* saying that there is some objective > reality in which Santa/God either exists or does not. > It's just saying that *as a preference*, I take my > subjective experiences and then measure them against > *also available* objective standards, and then try > to come to a conclusion as to what I believe based > on *both* subjective and objective measurements. > > The conclusion I come to does NOT equate to "reality" > or "truth." It is only what I have chosen to believe. > > Do you get it now? Not quite. The last sentence somehow suggests that you still there is an 'Objective Reality' independend of yourself. But that is according to kierkegaard, and I follow him in this a virtually non-existing abstractum. I found this whic sums it up: http://tinyurl.com/32sx3d 'So, Kierkegaard posits that subjectivity is truth (and truth is subjectivity). He argues that any attempt at objectivity amounts to an abstraction of existence. In other words, objectivity is an illusion as, for example, I have no way of knowing that the way an apple tastes to me is anything like the way it tastes to you. We could come to an undestanding using language that might approximate our experiences as similar, but ultimately, we are tasting the apple differently. Further, trying to objectively refer to history (Christian or evolutionary it seems to me) to explain existence is an abstract, speculative, and pointless venture. In Kierkegaard's own words; "The positiveness of historical knowledge is illusory, since it is approximation-knowledge; the speculative result is delusion. For all this positive knowledge fails to express the situation of the knowing subject in existence. It concerns rather a fictitious objective subject, and to confuse oneself with such a subject is to be duped. Every subject is an existing subject, which should receive an essential expression in all his knowledge. Particularly, it must be expressed through the prevention of an illusory finality, whether in perceptual certainty, or in historical knowledge, or in illusory speculative results. In historical knowledge, the subject learns a great deal about the world, but nothing about himself. He moves constantly in a sphere of approximation-knowledge, in his supposed positivity deluding himself with the semblance of certainty; but certainty can only be had in the infinite, where he cannot as an existing subject remain, but only repeatedly arrive. Nothing historical can become infinitely certain for me except the fact that of my own existence (which again cannot become infinitely certain for any other individual, who has infinite certainty of only his own existence), and this is not something historical." The only answer then (according to Kierkegaard) is the subjective (inward) experience of the individual, and that individual's relationship with "the eternal" within the "finite" to frame it in religious terms. In this way, existence is dialectical in that it requires infinite faith and infinite doubt simultaneously. Without these things, existence is an abstraction. Whether one subscribes to a religious viewpoint or an atheistic one, this viewpoint is no viewpoint if it claims to lay claim to an objective truth. Truth is strictly subjective, and Kierkegaard would say religious in so much as it involves one's subjective relationship with the infinite within the finite.'
