The importance of the individual perspective in philosophy
MORAL FEELINGS, MORAL REALITY, AND MORAL PROGRESS THOMAS NAGEL 72pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $24.95).
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND HUMAN LIFE THOMAS NAGEL 292pp. Oxford University Press. £19.99 (US $29.95).
THOMAS NAGEL IS RENOWNED for his work in both ethics (broadly construed to include political and legal philosophy) and philosophy of mind. Adding to his academic publications, which now span sixty-five years, he has recently brought out two books that collect shorter pieces of his writing. Analytic Philosophy and Human Life is comprised chiefly of his own reviews of others’ writing. Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress brings together two short pieces, one previously unpublished, in a light, handbag-friendly volume. (The index is one generously spaced page.)
The material in these volumes is diverse – it includes effective altruism, assisted dying, tax fairness, the Theresienstadt concentration camp and the possibility of metaphysics – but it is bound together by a thread that has run throughout Nagel’s philosophical corpus: taking seriously the conscious perspective of the individual and treating that viewpoint as an ineradicable and valuable part of reality, not as a distortion of it or something that could be done away with in favour of an objective, impersonal description of the world.
Like many people I first encountered Nagel through his short but influential paper “What is it like to be a bat?”. His answer to the titular question is that we can’t know. Nor, indeed, can we even begin to imagine what it would be like to have the conscious experience of a bat, because “in so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat”.
The point generalizes – all conscious creatures have a subjective viewpoint on the world, and to the extent that a scientific approach to the mind seeks to describe it from an objective point of view, it simply cannot capture that aspect of reality. In some domains, such as the natural sciences, a move towards greater objectivity gives us a better, more accurate grasp on the phenomenon in question, but in the case of conscious experience, which is intrinsically subjective, such a project takes us further away from the thing we seek to understand.
As with bats, so with friends, relatives, lovers: even if we somehow wired up our brains so that all the information and stimuli processed by your brain were also enjoyed by mine, I still wouldn’t know what it was like to be you. I’d just know what it was like to be me experiencing everything that was happening to you. We are each of us locked in to this unique conscious perspective we have on the wo
