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The View From Nowhere

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This is a major work in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. It's essentially a summary of a career of thought concerning the central issues in philosophy, and it is built around Nagel's big idea: that the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity can help us to understand the nature and source of the central problems of philosophy. It's an interesting and fruitful idea--though perhaps not as interesting and fruitful as he thinks--and it leads Nagel to lots of interesting ideas about how to understand, appreciate, and maybe even solve the central problems of philosophy.

The main subject of the book is the relation between subjective and objective views of our minds, our selves, our thought, our actions, our moral views, etc. The subjective view is our limited point of view: it's the point of view we have when immersed in our own perspective on the world. We reach more objective points of view by subtracting the parochial elements from our perspective. In attempting to arrive at a more objective point of view, we step back from ourselves and place ourselves, along with our subjective points of view, in a broader conception of the world. This involves trying to see the world as it would appear to a being with a "view from nowhere."

But problems arise when we realize that it's difficult to integrate subjective and objective perspectives. There is a tension between subjectivity and objectivity, and this tension appears in all areas of philosophy. As a matter of fact, it's the source of most of the fundamental problems that plague philosophers. When we take up a more objective viewpoint, the central elements of our subjective viewpoints are inexplicable. When we arrive a more objective conception of the world by, say, doing more science, we find it hard to understand how we can have minds, how our ways of forming beliefs allow us to know the objective world, how we can make sense of objective reasons for action, etc. But these apparently inexplicable things are among the crucial components of our subjective conception of the world and ourselves. And we encounter a similar problem in the other direction. When we are immersed in our subjective viewpoints, we find it hard to place ourselves and our viewpoint within an objective account of the world. That is, we find it hard to see how our ways of knowing could be backed up in a way that makes them more than simply our ways of knowing, and we find it hard to see how our ways of acting could be backed up in a way that makes them more than simply our ways of acting.

Nagel treats most of the traditional "solutions" to the problems of philosophy as based on two general tactics for dealing with the tension between objectivity and subjectivity. According to Nagel, neither tactic is fully satisfactory. The first tactic is to understand everything as objective, and the construe the subjective as mere appearance. In contemporary thought, this tactic is manifest in overreaching forms of naturalism and scientism. Nagel agrees that the sciences do provide us with an objective conception of the world, and with an objective conception of the world that is likely to be largely accurate. But he doesn't think this means the sciences do or can provide us with an account of all the facts about the world, for they leave out our own subjective point of view. This leaves us with a residual unease: overarching naturalism provides us with an account of how things are that seems to leave something important out. We do have conscious experiences, there is a way things seem to us, we do seem to act freely, we do seem to be under moral obligations, etc.

The second tactic is to search for an answer by going to the opposite extreme: that is, by collapsing everything into the subjective point of view. This is to claim that there is no way to draw back from our perspective in order to arrive at an objective perspective on the world and on our place within it. And this view can result in even more extreme views according to which there is no objective world out there to discover, and according to which we can't even make sense of the very idea that there could be such a world. In other words, to accept such a view is to acquiesce in some sort of skepticism, relativism, subjectivism, etc. Again, though, such a solution leaves us with a residual sense of unease: there is more to our ways of thinking and acting than that, isn't there? There is the further question of whether we're really right about what we think, and whether we're really right to do what we do.

Is there any way to avoid these problems? Yes, we need a view of the world that is complex enough to accommodate both perspectives on the world; we need a view of the world that doesn't deny the reality of either the subjective or the objective. But this isn't really an answer; it's just a statement of what any answer is going to need to look like. Nagel doesn't claim to be able to offer a detailed solution to these problems. The final conclusion is that the success of attempts to solve the problems of philosophy straight will require our having something we don't have yet--namely an understanding of these two perspectives and their relations to one another. Can we have it? Here Nagel is cagey. At some points he offers some speculative suggestions about how this might go, at others he seems to doubt that it can be done.

Notwithstanding the lack of answers here, Nagel thinks that understanding the problems of philosophy as he does provides us with some important insights. It allows us to explain the nature and source of philosophical problems, and it allows us to understand these problems as closely related to one another. It also helps to explain why the usual "solutions" to them don't convince. Moreover, it allows us to see these problems as real problems, and as problems lacking obvious solutions. This also supports our intuitions concerning the hopelessness of attempts to dissolve the problems of philosophy or to construe them as mere pseudo-problems.

I usually try to review only books that have not yet been reviewed, but I had to weigh in on this one.

As you can tell from the other reviews, this is a book that tends to polarize readers. The book has this effect, I believe, because it takes a stand on some crucial and interrelated issues in philosophy: the relationship between the mental and the physical, what it is to be the "same person," and objectivity in ethics.

The American pragmatist William James once said that there are two kinds of philosophers: the heard-headed and the soft-hearted. On the above issues, the hard-headed philosophers tend to say that what is real is what is objective. The soft-hearted tend to say that, while objectivity has its place, any adequate view of the world must acknowledge the reality of one's own subjective viewpoint, and one's own personal commitments and projects. Nagel is in the soft-hearted camp, which means that he will draw the ire of the heard-headed thinkers. (Professional philosophers will recognize that I am greatly oversimplifying -- but remember that most readers are not professional philosophers.)

Hard-headed philosophers will also object to Nagel's style. He can be somewhat obscure at points. However, Nagel suggests that it is sometimes worth being unclear but closer to the truth, rather than being very clear, yet far from it. That said, he is hardly as obscure as, say, Kant or Sartre (to pick two examples at random). And I think someone bright who is willing to think hard, and who wants to listen in as a major philosopher argues with his colleagues over major issues in contemporary philosophy, would get a lot out of this book. (Indeed, I think such a reader would get more out this book than she would out of a "dumbed down" popular book on philosophy.)

One of the core issues of philosophy for Nagel is understanding the relationship between subjective and objective points of view. This book is a penetrating exposition of his thoughts on this subject. Following the trail of this theme through the mind-body problem, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics, Nagel shows us the tremendous rewards of striving for the objective, while recognizing that the subjective always remains with us and cannot be rationalized away. It is a provocative read for someone who is already concerned with this problem, but not for newcomers to philosophy.

Sorry for the double post here. (I'll try to get this one removed.)

Still, I can say a bit more about this book. This isn't a technical book, and I think it should be accessible to anyone interested in general philosophical issues. It's not an easy read--it's subtle and Nagel is sometimes a bit obscure--but it's not forbiddingly difficult and it doesn't presume that the reader is as knowledgeable about contemporary philosopohy as its author is. However, that's not to say that this is a book that fails to engage with the literature on these topics. It's clear that Nagel is familiar with the relevant contemporary work on these topics, and the book is accessible enough that it might server as a high-level introdution to the more technical literature in these areas. And it certainly provides you with a way to see the technical literature as concerned with fundamental human concerns.

Also, it's somewhat inspiring to see someone take on a grand project of this sort. Philosophy is becoming an increasingly specialized discipline, and it's nice to see someone trying to fit a lot of what is going on into a general picture of the origins and nature of genuine philosophical problems.

Please don't be confused by an earlier post (which, thankfully, no one seems to have taken seriously) stating that there is some confusion in Nagel's own ideas about the possibility of objective knowledge. Nagel is a smart man, and it is not surprising that the subtleties of his arguments may be lost on some. He says it doesn't look like we can ever gain objective knowledge, basically, because we simply _are_ all our personality traits etc. that all go into determining how we see the world. His arguments about free will are very good and strangely overlooked. This is quite simply one of the best books on philosophy I have ever read, despite the fact that I agree with almost none of it; well composed, well thought-out, and well argued.

This is one of the ten or so most important works of philosophy of the past twenty-five years. Nagel, more than anyone else, is responsible for the re-examination now going on within Anglo-American philosophy of scientific materialism and of the reductionism and scientism that has gone along with it. Across a wide variety of philosophical problems, the book examines the hold that scientific materialism has had on recent thinking, and it suggests a number of ways that we can loosen that hold. Some of the suggestions are dazzling; even more dazzling are some of the problems themselves, which are discussed nowhere else. Be wary of critics of the book who rate it low; not only do they display their bias against the book's positions but also their inability to appreciate insight in somebody with whom they disagree.

This book is an expansion of the ideas in Nagel's essay "Subjective and Objective" (available in the collection Mortal Questions). I find the essay to be the most important short work on philosophy I've ever read. It changed my thinking on the class of problems addressed, which include the concept of mind (specifically consciousness), ethics, and meaning of life, all of which I've been reading a lot about for 35 years. The essay has a neat summary of the main point: "There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected."

If you agree with that statement you'll probably love the essay. The book is another matter. It is bafflingly difficult, which is troubling given the clarity of the essay. I've tried twice to get through the book, the first time reading casually as I typically do, the second studying it to the extent of writing out a summary of each paragraph as I read. I still had to give up in disgust. Yet, I still want to finish reading this book!

I'll admit to being a philosophical lightweight. My favorite authors are generally models of clarity and easy reading: Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher, Walter Kaufmann's Faith of a Heretic, Thoreau's Walden, Nagel's Mortal Questions, Dennett's Consciousness Explained, later Wittgenstein, and so on. The View from Nowhere is more like Kant, Spinoza, Plotinus, the authors I tend to avoid where possible as being too abstract, too dry, too tough, or irrelevant to my life and thought.

So my advice would be to get Nagel's book of essays, read them, then proceed to this if you like what you've read. And above all, be prepared to work on it.

Alan Nicoll

This book is incredibly important as a corrective to much recent academic philosophy.

What some reviewers have dismissed as "shallow" or "New Age puffery" or "not rigorous" is Nagel's refusal to give up the importance of some basic stances we adopt towards our minds, our actions, and the world.

For example, Nagel believes that a philosopher concerned with establishing the fullest kind of objective understanding of reality possible needs to make sense of how (a) our scientific view of the world can be brought into harmony with (b)the way things look from inside our subjective consciousness or experience of the world. The strategy he is arguing against is the attempt to reduce (b)to the facts of (a) and then call it establishing objectivity. In other words, there is another level of explanation, other than scientific reduction, that philosophers need to be engaged in order to make a completely objective view of the world coherent--that is, a view that does not leave crucial things what it feels like to be human from the inside.

This is a difficult work, despite the fact that it is clearly written. Nagel attempts to answer some of the most difficult questions in philosophy. By his own admission, he fails to come to entirely satisfactory conclusions. This, it seems to me, is mostly because of his 'meta-conclusion' (which is perhaps implicit in his starting-point) that we are essentially and irreconcilably 'divided' beings: viz. we have a capacity to transcend ourselves (having an objective 'view from nowhere') while at the same time being our own unique, individual selves (having a subjective 'personal' view). Strangely, his inability to come to 'neat' answers that 'square everything away' does not detract from the work. Rather, it leads one to admire Nagel for his honest and candid attempt to grapple with his difficult questions.

"The View from Nowhere", Thomas Nagel's landmark work in both philosophy of mind and practical reason, provides an interesting and informative discussion of a wide range of topics. The first half of the work is devoted to elaborating Nagel's philosophy of mind, expressed in articles like the seminal "What is it like to be a bat?", while the second is confined to a discussion of practical reason derived from this view.

My reading of Nagel was mostly concerned with the second half of the work, and while it provides an interesting discussion of agent-relative vs. agent-neutral reasons - an account that is, in part, a retraction of Nagel's earlier view in "The Possibility of Altruism" - the discussion is lacking in precision. Nagel discusses our intuitions and his conception of an approach to establishing morality by taking a more objective standpoint - but he does not suggest a mechanism by which this occurs, nor does he explain why certain categories of reasons are not included - he only discusses our intuitions as to what these categories are and that they are, intuitively, purely subjective (the categories include personal ambitions, familial ties/special obligations, and deontology). It seems that, after abandoning his earlier work, Nagel is at a loss for how to adequately explain exactly how and why we make different types of moral judgments.

Still, this is an excellent primer and landmark work that contains an insightful intuitive discussion, if not a convincing systematic solution.