The Fallacy of Subjective Truth

by Brenton L. Delpp

There is no such thing as ‘my truth‘

Modern philosophy has increasingly inherited two opposing convictions concerning the human subject. The first elevates the subject into the source of truth itself. Authenticity replaces correspondence, experience replaces reality, and the modern refrain—“my truth”—gradually displaces the older question of truth altogether. The second position, reacting against this inflation, dissolves the subject into language, biology, economics, social conditioning, algorithms, or networks. The individual becomes little more than a temporary effect of impersonal systems. The subject disappears into structure just as surely as it had previously expanded into sovereignty.

Both positions contain a genuine insight. Both become false when elevated into absolutes.

The modern subject is indeed necessary for truth. Without a subject there can be no perception, testimony, judgment, promise, repentance, scientific investigation, or historical memory. Yet necessity must not be confused with centrality. The subject is not the origin of truth. It is the place where truth becomes answerable. This distinction, though subtle, illuminates not only the history of philosophy but the contemporary debates surrounding artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the future of civilization.

The ancient world rarely imagined the subject as the origin of truth. Reality possessed an intelligible order independent of human preference. Whether expressed through the Egyptian conception of Ma’at, the Greek notion of Logos, or the Stoic understanding of a rational cosmos, truth belonged first to the world itself. The task of philosophy was not self-expression but participation. Plato described knowledge as the soul’s turning toward what truly is rather than inventing its own reality.^1 Aristotle likewise understood truth as the conformity of thought to being rather than the projection of inward experience upon the world.^2 Human beings were participants in a larger order whose intelligibility preceded them.

Christianity introduced an extraordinary transformation, but one frequently misunderstood. It did not relocate truth into the individual. Rather, it relocated responsibility. The biblical prophets, Christ, and the apostolic tradition progressively interiorized conscience without abandoning reality itself. Augustine’s Confessions represents perhaps the decisive moment in this transformation. The soul becomes an object of profound inward examination, yet precisely because it stands before God rather than replacing Him.^3 Conscience does not create truth; it answers to it. The individual becomes indispensable because truth now requires confession, repentance, memory, and freedom. Yet throughout this development, truth continues to transcend the subject that encounters it.

The modern period gradually altered this relationship. Descartes’ methodological doubt sought certainty within consciousness itself.^4 Kant later argued that the conditions through which experience becomes possible arise from the structures of the knowing subject.^5 Romanticism deepened this movement by identifying authenticity with inward feeling, while later existentialism increasingly emphasized individual choice and personal meaning. By the late modern period, the question “What is true?” frequently gave way to the question “What is true for me?” The historical shift appears subtle in language but profound in consequence. Truth slowly became identified with experience itself.

Yet modernity also discovered something genuinely indispensable. Truth cannot appear without a subject. Mountains may exist independently of observers. Justice may possess objective reality. Mathematical truths remain true regardless of whether anyone recognizes them. Nevertheless, none of these realities become known without a consciousness capable of encountering them. Science requires investigators. History requires witnesses. Moral obligation requires persons capable of responding. Love requires subjects capable of giving themselves to another. Reality may exist independently of human beings, but truth as acknowledgment always presupposes someone capable of receiving it.

The mistake begins precisely where necessity becomes centrality.

Because truth requires a subject, modern thought increasingly concluded that the subject produces truth. The distinction is decisive. The eye is necessary for sight, but it does not create the mountain. The scientist is indispensable for discovery, but gravity does not originate in the scientist. The witness is essential for testimony, yet the historical event precedes the witness’s account. The subject mediates truth; it does not constitute truth. To confuse these claims is to mistake the condition of possibility for the source of reality itself.

Artificial intelligence unexpectedly exposes this confusion with remarkable clarity. Large language models now perform many activities once regarded as uniquely human. They write essays, summarize books, construct arguments, generate images, and increasingly appear capable of reflection. Some observers therefore conclude that subjectivity itself has always been an illusion, reducible to sufficiently complex patterns of information processing. Others immediately infer that AI has therefore become a subject in the fullest sense.

Both conclusions repeat the same mistake from opposite directions.

The deepest characteristic of the human subject has never been the production of language alone. Rather, it is answerability. A subject remembers promises, bears responsibility for actions, suffers injustice, experiences guilt, offers forgiveness, and remains accountable before other persons and the world itself. These are not merely computational functions but existential relations. Language participates in these relations, but it does not exhaust them. AI reveals how much of human language is patterned, inherited, and socially distributed. It does not therefore demonstrate that human beings are nothing more than sophisticated language models.

Indeed, AI exposes both the truth and the limitation of the modern subject. It reveals that no person originates language from nothing. Every speaker inherits grammar, culture, stories, symbols, and traditions. The fantasy of the completely autonomous subject collapses under this recognition. Yet AI simultaneously reveals what remains irreducible. Human speech is inseparable from embodiment, mortality, vulnerability, memory, attachment, and responsibility. One can promise only because one can betray. One can forgive only because one has suffered injury. One can testify only because one inhabits history. These are relations that exceed the mere production of coherent sentences.

Truth itself continually demonstrates that it exceeds every individual perspective. The scientist proposes a theory; nature answers through experiment. The historian advances an interpretation; documents answer through evidence. The judge renders a verdict; testimony answers through contradiction or confirmation. Even the lover discovers that promises are tested not by intentions alone but by time itself. Reality continually resists the subject’s desire to reduce it to preference. This resistance constitutes one of the deepest characteristics of truth.

The postmodern critique correctly dismantled the illusion of the sovereign subject. Human beings are indeed shaped by history, language, institutions, biology, and culture long before they become conscious of themselves. Yet the critique often generated a second illusion: that because the subject is not sovereign, it is therefore unnecessary. The contemporary fascination with AI increasingly tempts this conclusion. If language can be simulated, perhaps the subject was merely language all along.

This conclusion mistakes relation for reduction.

Only a subject can become responsible. Only a subject can experience injustice. Only a subject can seek reconciliation. Only a subject can ask whether something is true. The subject is therefore indispensable—not because it creates reality but because reality becomes publicly answerable through it.

Truth consequently belongs neither to the isolated subject nor to an impersonal object alone. It emerges within relation. Reality continually exceeds every description offered by consciousness, while consciousness continually responds to realities it neither invents nor fully masters. Truth therefore appears not as private possession but as public encounter. No individual owns it. No institution exhausts it. No machine computes it completely. Every subject participates in truth, yet none stands at its center.

Perhaps this is the deepest fallacy of subjective truth. Modernity correctly recognized that truth requires subjects capable of acknowledging reality. It mistakenly concluded that acknowledgment constitutes creation. The resulting inflation eventually produced its own opposite: the disappearance of the subject into systems, structures, and algorithms. Both extremes overlook the same relation. The subject neither generates truth nor vanishes from it. Rather, it stands at the place where reality becomes capable of acknowledgment, judgment, and responsibility.

The mature subject therefore does not proclaim, “This is my truth,” nor does it dissolve itself into impersonal forces. Instead, it remains answerable to what continually exceeds it. Truth is not imprisoned within consciousness, yet neither is consciousness irrelevant to truth. The subject is one indispensable participant within a reality infinitely larger than itself. It is necessary for truth precisely because it is not its center.

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Notes

1. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), Books VI–VII.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), IV.7, 1011b25–27.
3. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. Books VII–X.
4. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A51/B75–A83/B116.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§166–196.
7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), §§12–18.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. the chapters on action, plurality, and the web of human relationships.
9. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Collected Works, vol. 14 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
10. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.