Thomas Nagel - Work

Work

Nagel began to publish philosophy at the age of twenty two; his career now spans fifty years of publication. It can, however, all be understood as structured around a central distinction between subjective and objective points of view of a subject matter. Nagel thinks that each person, owing to his or her capacity to reason, instinctively seeks a unified world view. However, if this aspiration leads him or her to believe that there is only one way to understand our intellectual commitments, whether about the external world, knowledge, or what our practical and moral reasons ought to be, this leads him or her into error. For contingent, limited and finite creatures, no such unified world view is possible. That is because ways of understanding are not always better when they are more objective.

Like the British philosopher Bernard Williams, Nagel believes that the rise of modern science has permanently changed how people think of the world and our place in it. A modern scientific understanding is one way of thinking about the world and our place in it that is more objective than the common sense view it replaces. It is more objective because it is less dependent on our peculiarities as the kinds of thinkers that people are. Our modern scientific understanding involves the mathematicized understanding of the world represented by modern physics. Understanding this bleached out view of the world draws on our capacities as purely rational thinkers and does not involve the specific nature of our perceptual sensibility. The way in which modern science and philosophy has drawn a distinction between the mathematically and structurally describable "primary qualities" of objects such as shape and solidity and those properties dependent on our sensory apparatus, "secondary qualities" such as taste and color, is a prime example that Nagel returns to repeatedly in his work.

Contrary to this seeming skepticism about the objective claims of science Nagel thinks that it is importantly true that science describes the world that exists independently of us. But this central case should not lead people to believe that understanding a subject matter is better simply if it is more objective. Importantly, the objective viewpoint is fundamentally unable to help people fully understand ourselves. Taking the proper methods of an objective scientific understanding and applying it to the mind leaves out something essential. It cannot describe what it is to be a thinker who conceives of the world from a particular perspective.

Some phenomena are not best grasped from a more objective perspective. The standpoint of the thinker does not present itself to him: he is that standpoint. One learns and uses mental concepts by being directly acquainted with one's own mind. But any attempt to think more objectively about mentality would abstract away from this fact. It would, of its nature, leave out what it is to be a thinker. And that, Nagel believes, would be a falsely objectifying view. Being a thinker is to have a subjective perspective on the world; if one abstracts away from this perspective one leaves out what he sought to explain.

Nagel thinks that philosophers over-impressed by the paradigm of the kind of objective understanding represented by modern science tend to produce theories of the mind that are falsely objectifying in precisely this kind of way. They are right to be impressed - modern science really is objective - but are wrong to take modern science to be the only paradigm of objectivity. The kind of understanding that science represents does not transfer to everything that people would like to understand. Mapping out, for different areas of inquiry, whether they are better understood in a more or less objective way is the central aim of Nagel's philosophy.

As a philosophical rationalist, Nagel believes that a proper understanding of the place of mental properties in nature will involve a revolution in our understanding of both the physical and the mental, and that this is a reasonable prospect that people can anticipate in the near future. A plausible science of the mind will give an account of the stuff that underpins mental and physical properties in such a way that people will simply be able to see that it necessitates both of these aspects. At present, it seems to people that the mental and the physical are irreducibly distinct but that is not a metaphysical insight, or an acknowledgment of an irreducible explanatory gap, but simply where people are at their present stage of understanding.

Nagel's rationalism and tendency to present our human nature as a composite, structured around our capacity to reason, explains why he thinks therapeutic or deflationary accounts of philosophy are simply complacent and radical skepticism is, strictly speaking, irrefutable. The therapeutic or deflationary philosopher, influenced by the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, reconciles people to the dependence of our worldview on our "form of life". Nagel accuses Wittgenstein and American philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson of philosophical idealism. In both cases they ask people to take up an interpretative perspective to making sense of other speakers in the context of a shared, objective world. This, for Nagel, elevates contingent conditions of our make-up into criteria for that which is real. The result 'cuts the world down to size' and makes what there is dependent on what there can be interpreted to be. Nagel claims this is no better than more orthodox forms of idealism in which reality is claimed to be made up of mental items or claimed to be constitutively dependent on a form supplied by the mind.