The Twentieth Century to Today · 1937 –
内格尔
'What is it like to be a bat?', the view from nowhere, the gulf between subjective and objective: in the clearest prose he guards the questions reductionism cannot cover, consciousness, value and the meaning of life.
An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.
Source: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974)
Nagel was born in Belgrade to German-Jewish refugees who brought him to the United States in 1939. He studied philosophy at Cornell under Wittgensteinian influence, then at Oxford under Austin and Grice, and took his doctorate at Harvard in 1963 under Rawls. He taught at Berkeley and Princeton and from 1980 at New York University, as professor of philosophy and of law, until retiring in 2016.
The Possibility of Altruism (1970) argued that altruism needs no external motive: it is built into the capacity to regard oneself as one person among others, just as prudence is built into regarding the present self as one moment of a life. 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974) is the most cited paper in contemporary philosophy of mind: there is something it is like to be a conscious creature, a subjective character graspable only from its own point of view, which no physicalist, third-person description can capture. He did not assert dualism, only that we have as yet no concepts for understanding how subjective experience could be a physical process.
The View from Nowhere (1986) generalised the problem into his central theme: human beings can step back from their particular standpoint and take an ever more objective view 'from nowhere', but that capacity can never wholly detach itself from the self, and in consciousness, knowledge, freedom, ethics and the meaning of life the tension between subjective and objective cannot be dissolved; philosophy's task is not to dissolve it but to live honestly with it. He defended moral realism and objective reasons against relativism and excessive naturalism.
His writing is known for clarity and brevity; Mortal Questions and What Does It All Mean? are widely used introductions, and Equality and Partiality and The Myth of Ownership (with Liam Murphy) treat political philosophy and the justice of taxation. Mind and Cosmos (2012), subtitled 'why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false', caused an uproar: he argued that the emergence of consciousness, reason and value cannot be explained by evolutionary theory as it stands and calls for a natural teleology; scientists called it anti-science, and he replied that he was an atheist merely dissatisfied with the available answers. He continues to write.
The mark of consciousness is that there is something it is like to be it. That subjective character can be grasped only from inside, and every objective physical description leaves it out. This is the heart of the mind–body problem.
We can step back from our own standpoint toward ever more objective views, but never leave ourselves entirely. The tension of subjective and objective runs through every part of philosophy.
Recognising another's pain as a reason and recognising one's own future pain as a reason spring from the same rational structure. Altruism is not sentiment but the logical consequence of seeing oneself as one among others.
Our moral assessments of people depend heavily on factors beyond their control: outcomes, circumstances, character, origins. This clashes with the intuition that we are responsible only for what we control, and the problem remains unsolved.
Life is absurd because we take it with utter seriousness while being able to step back and see that the seriousness has no ultimate ground. The right response is not despair but irony.
His subjective–objective problem is the contemporary version of Kant's: how a being that can view from nowhere yet must live from somewhere can hold itself together.
His Harvard dissertation was supervised by Rawls, and The Possibility of Altruism carried on Rawls's Kantian project: deriving concern for others from the structure of practical reason.
He defended Descartes' intuition: the subjective character of consciousness is what every objective description leaves out, and even if dualism is wrong it grasps a real problem.