Something Alexander said on his post about Divine Simplicity gave me a rather good idea. Rather than risk further derailing that topic by posting it there I'm opening a new topic for.

To give a bit of background information: there are arguably a sub-set of propositions, those involving the indexical 'I' and other first person terms, that cannot be reduced to those involving third-person equivalents without change in meaning. These propositions and the type of knowledge they supposedly pertain to are labelled de se. This is bound up with the idea that each individual subject has a unique first-person access to his or her own cognitive process, the famous thesis of 'Private Access', however one wants to define that.

This type of knowledge raises questions when it comes to Divine Omnipotence. If de se knowledge is privileged to the subject (think Husserl's Transcendental Ego here) then can God be said to know de se propositions? Many philosophers have answered in the negative: Patrick Grimm, in his famous set of animadversions raised against Plantinga, argues that God cannot and thus that Omnipotence and by extent God as a Maximally Great Being are impossible. Others, such as Gary Rosenkrantz in his Haecceity: An Ontological Essay and W. Wartick here, have accepted that God cannot but that since de se knowledge is essentially unknowable by another party to ask it of God would be a pseudo-task equivalent to the creation of a Round-Square.

Linda Zagzebski however argues that God can share in our de se knowledge, and claims this as the basis for a new Divine Attribute she calls 'Omnisubjectivty', which she further elaborates and defends in her Aquinas Lecture [url=https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAAahUKEwiJmO7NyYnJAhUFWBQKHSDWBJ8&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.baylor.edu%2Fcontent%2Fservices%2Fdocument.php%2F39971.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFiW-Wg3CvvPAr-p_TTzcyEpphy5Q&sig2=Scqz6ubTNEoXJUaJcBWlbw&bvm=bv.107406026,d.d24]Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine Attribute[/url]. Here is not the place to settle whether she's right or not. However if she is I think with have a way of solving one of the greatest conflicts and tensions between Ontology and Mysticism.
 
I would argue that if God can know ourselves de se then could not he give us the power to know Himself de se too? If so this satisfies the deep non-dual intuition which underpins many of the great mystical traditions as represented by Ibn Arabi, Abi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, and some of the Kabalists on which our highest destiny is to become totally one with God, whilst preserving ontological individuality. From the stand point of Ontology and Ontotheology this intuition is a non-starter - at best it would be incompatible with Divine Simplicity and at worst it would entail some form of panentheism.  If one thinks of it in terms of de se knowledge however it begins to make a lot more sense. To have privileged access to the Divine Mind is to have all of God’s self-hood as one’s own - the identification however is not ontological, the individual is not absorbed into the Divine Substance as with Spinoza, nor is it solipsistic, our transcendental ego is not identified with God as arguably happens with the Hindu notion of Atman.
 
Thoughts anyone?

Last edited by DanielCC (11/11/2015 7:17 pm)