The View From Nowhere Reprint Edition

Excellent book. Thought provoking. Challenges the common secular views.

Excellent condition

Tough read but worthwhile.

begin by understanding you are insignificant, that time is an illusion, that space is connected to that illusion and then launch yourself like a pea in a straw at lunchtime in a junior high school cafeteria.

However it uses a bit overly technical language for a book that is truly about spirituality. I often found it disconcerting when reading about something simple for 3 pages.

The long and successful march of scientific and technical knowledge has introduced us to manifold viewpoints, many of which are quite alien to the comfortable or traditional views we grow to accept as the inner views of our lives. These larger views transcend science in their significance as they impinge on our inner views and ways of thinking and operating in the world. The result is an asymptotic view, a view from nowhere, that has gradually manifested itself in our cultural consciousness. Prof. Nagel explores these inner and outer contradicting viewpoints, and especially within the context that these views are at least partially forced on us. Simply adopting a highly personal inner view, or subjective view of life, or a highly detached impersonal view, or objective view, may seem to be extraordinarily appealing, but this appeal, according to Prof. Nagel, is illusory. He thinks that we are caught in an ineluctable struggle within the context of these opposing views, with a result that life seems, at least in part, absurd. This book is a brilliant, deep attempt to struggle with this conflict, by considering a multiplicity of arguments that arise once one accepts the conflict, and the curious necessity of having to accommodate, within one's individuality, the view from nowhere. I find that he develops numerous somewhat complex ideas, and the result is that it has whetted my appetite to read more of his work. He seems to be developing ideas that have an important bearing on contemporary life.

Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. He has written many other books, such as Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,Mortal Questions,Equality and Partiality,The Possibility of Altruism,The Last Word,What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1986 book, “This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, that person and his viewpoint included… The difficulty of reconciling the two standpoints … is the most fundamental issue about morality, knowledge, freedom, the self, and the relation of mind to the physical world.” (Pg. 3)

He states, “The reductionist program that dominates current work in the philosophy of mind is completely misguided, because it is based on the groundless assumption that a particular conception of objective reality is exclusive of what there is. Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time. The true principles underlying the mind will be discovered, if at all, only by a more direct approach.” (Pg. 16)

He observes, “anything we come to believe must remain suspended in a great cavern of skeptical darkness. Once the door is open, it can’t be shut again. We can only try to make our conception of our place in the world more complete---essentially developing the objective standpoint… The best we can do is to construct a picture that might be correct. Skepticism is really a way of recognizing our situation, though it will not prevent us from continuing to pursue something like knowledge, for our natural realism makes it impossible for us to be content with a purely subjective view.” (Pg. 74)

He asserts, “Some may be tempted to offer or at least to imagine an evolutionary explanation, as is customary these days for everything under the sun. Evolutionary hand waving is an example of the tendency to take a theory which has been successful in one domain and apply it to anything else you can’t understand---not even to apply it, but vaguely to imagine such an application. It is also an example of the pervasive and reductive naturalism of our culture. ‘Survival value’ is now invoked to account for everything from ethics to language.” (Pg. 78)

He continues, “The question is… whether an enormous excess mental capacity, not explainable by natural selection, was responsible for the generation and spread of the sequence of intellectual instruments that has emerged over the last thirty thousand years… The only reason so many people do believe [Darwinism] is that advanced intellectual capacities clearly exist, and this is the only available candidate for a Darwinian explanation of their existence. So it all rests on the assumption that every noteworthy characteristic of human beings … must have a Darwinian explanation. But what is the reason to believe that?... What, I will be asked, is my alternative? Creationism? The answer is that I don’t have one, and I don’t need one to reject all existing proposals as improbable… One doesn’t have to believe anything, and to believe nothing is not to believe something.” (Pg. 80-81)

He proposes, “Where does the burden of proof lie with respect to the possibility of objective values? Does their possibility have to be demonstrated before we can begin to think more specifically about which values are revealed or obliterated by the objective standpoint? Or is such an inquiry legitimate so long as objective values haven’t been shown to be impossible? I think the burden of proof has been often misplaced in this debate, and that a defeasible presumption that values need not be illusory is entirely reasonable until it is shown not to be.” (Pg. 143)

He contends, “This brings us to a final point. There can be no ethics without politics. A theory of how individuals should act requires a theory… of the institutions under which they should live: institutions which substantially determine their starting points, the choices they can make, the consequences of what they do, and their relations to one another. Since the standpoint of political theory if necessarily objective and detached, it offers among temptations to simplify, which it is important to resist. A society must in some sense be organized in accordance with a single set of principles, even though people are very different.” (Pg. 188)

He acknowledges, “To take an example close to home: the bill for two in a moderately expensive New York restaurant equals the annual per capita income of Bangladesh. Every time I eat out, not because I have to but just because I feel like it, the money could do noticeably more good if contributed to famine relief. The same could be said of many purchases of clothing, wine, theater tickets, vacations, gifts, books, records, furniture, stemware, etc. It all adds up. It adds up to both a form of life and to quite a lot of money. If one is near the upper end of a very unequal world economic distribution, the difference in cost between the life to which one is probably accustomed and a much grubbier but perfectly tolerable existence is enough to feed several dozen starving families, year in, year out. Doubts about the best way to combat famine and other evils are beside the point. It is clear enough that a strongly impersonal morality, with any significant requirements of partiality, can pose a serious threat to the kind of personal life that many of us take to be desirable.” (Pg. 190)

This is another one of Nagel’s most thought-provoking and challenging books, and will be “must reading” for anyone studying Nagel, as well as interesting reading for any students of contemporary approaches to ethics.