The traditional theological definition of omniscience usually concerns the objective: a totalizing inventory of every fact, past, present, and future. But in Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity, philosopher Linda Zagzebski proposes a more intimate dimension to divine knowledge. She argues that for a deity to be truly all-knowing, it must possess "omnisubjectivity" — the ability to perfectly grasp the conscious states of every sentient being from their own internal perspective. The concept reframes a central question in philosophy of religion: what does it mean for God to know everything?
The move is from the propositional to the experiential. It is one thing for a creator to know that a creature is in pain or experiencing joy; it is quite another to know that state as it is lived, complete with all the "creaturely constraints" and psychological nuances that define individual existence. Zagzebski's framework suggests a deity that does not merely observe the world from a distance but occupies it through a multi-layered consciousness, mirroring every subjective "I."
From Knowledge-That to Knowledge-As
The distinction Zagzebski draws has deep roots in analytic philosophy of mind. Since at least Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," philosophers have recognized that some forms of knowledge resist propositional capture. Nagel argued that no amount of objective information about bat echolocation could convey what it is like to experience sonar from the inside. Frank Jackson's knowledge argument — the thought experiment involving a color scientist who has never seen red — pressed a similar point: there appears to be a residue of experience that escapes even a complete physical description of the world.
Zagzebski applies this insight to theology. If subjective experience constitutes a genuine category of knowledge, then a being defined as omniscient must have access to it. A God who knows every proposition but lacks the felt quality of a creature's pain would, on this account, fall short of total knowledge. Omnisubjectivity is the patch for that gap: divine consciousness must include, rather than merely represent, the phenomenal states of every sentient creature.
This places Zagzebski's project at the intersection of two philosophical traditions that rarely speak to each other directly. Philosophy of mind has spent decades debating whether subjective experience can be reduced to physical processes. Philosophy of religion has spent centuries debating the coherence of divine attributes. By linking the two, the argument forces each tradition to reckon with constraints imposed by the other.
The Problem of Boundaries
The implications of omnisubjectivity extend well beyond epistemology. If God inhabits the subjective states of every conscious being, the boundary between divine and creaturely minds becomes porous in ways that raise difficult questions about identity and individuality. Classical theism has generally maintained a sharp ontological distinction between creator and creation. Omnisubjectivity, taken seriously, complicates that line. A God who experiences a creature's suffering as the creature experiences it must, in some functional sense, share the creature's perspective — including its limitations, confusions, and partial understanding.
This tension echoes longstanding debates in theology over divine impassibility — the doctrine that God cannot be affected by external states. If omnisubjectivity requires God to feel creaturely pain from the inside, impassibility in its strongest form becomes difficult to maintain. The concept also bears comparison to process theology, which has long argued for a God who is genuinely affected by the world, though Zagzebski's framework arrives at a similar destination through a different philosophical route — phenomenology and epistemology rather than metaphysics of becoming.
There is also the question of moral weight. If divine knowledge includes the felt dimension of suffering, the problem of evil acquires an additional layer of complexity. A God who permits suffering while experiencing it from the inside occupies a different moral position than one who merely catalogues it from above. Whether that position is more defensible or less is not obvious — and Zagzebski's framework does not resolve the tension so much as sharpen it.
The architecture of omnisubjectivity, then, sits at a point where epistemology, philosophy of mind, and theology pull in different directions. It offers a richer account of what divine knowledge might entail, but at the cost of destabilizing assumptions that have long served as load-bearing walls in classical theism. Whether the structure holds under that pressure — or whether it demands a wholesale redesign of the theological edifice — remains the open question the work leaves with its readers.
With reporting from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Source · Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
