Thomas Nagel

Nagel in 2008

Thomas Nagel (born 4 July 1937) is an American philosopher. He is University Professor of Philosophy and Law, Emeritus, at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.

Quotes

  • In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
    • The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130-131.
  • I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious.
    • "Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337.
  • Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
    • "Concealment and Exposure" (1998).


"What is it like to be a bat?" in Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165–180. First published in The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450.
  • Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
    • p. 166.
  • Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.
    • p. 167.
  • [E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.
    • p. 167.
  • Bats […] present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
    • p. 168.
  • [T]he essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. […] But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.
    • p. 168.
  • Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar 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. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.
    • p. 169.
  • Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like.
    • p. 169.
  • The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view.
    • p. 172, note 8.
  • In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an endpoint, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.

    But in the case of experience, on the other hand, the connexion with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

    • p. 173.

Mortal Questions (1979)

Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press, 1979
  • That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.
    • "Death", p. 2. This passage not present in the 1970 version [Nous, IV, no. 1], but present in the 1979 version.
  • I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death.
    • "Death" (1970), p. 3 footnote.
  • All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.
    • "Death" (1970), p. 7.
  • Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.
    • "The Absurd" (1971), p. 15.
  • If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse — a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
    • "The Absurd" (1971), p. 20.
  • [A]bsurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. … [I]t is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight — the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.

    If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? … [I]t results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter of agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

    • "The Absurd" (1971), p. 23.
  • All stages of sexual perception are varieties of identification of a person with his body. What is perceived is one's own or another's subjection to or immersion in his body. […] In sexual desire and its expression the blending of involuntary response with deliberate control is extremely important. […] In sexual desire the involuntary responses are combined with submission to spontaneous impulses: not only one's pulse and secretions but one's actions are taken over by the body; ideally, deliberate control is needed only to guide the expression of those impulses. […] But the most characteristic feature of a specifically sexual immersion in the body is its ability to fit into the complex of mutual perception. … [S]exual desire leads to spontaneous interactions with other persons, whose bodies are asserting their sovereignty in the same way, producing involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses in them. These reactions are perceived, and the perception of them is perceived, and that perception is in turn perceived; at each step the domination of the person by his body is reinforced, and the sexual partner becomes more possessible by physical contact, penetration [for the male], and envelopment [for the female].
    • "Sexual Perversion" (1969), pp. 47–48
    • Nagel is here discussing not sexual perversion but "good" (see following quote) unperverse sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual (p. 51). He observes (p. 47) that subjection to the body in sex was recognized by earlier thinkers such as St Paul (Romans, vii, 23), St Augustine (Confessions, bk viii, pt v), and Sartre (Being and Nothingness, pt 3, ch 3, sect ii).
  • [With regard to] the rather common general distinction between good and bad sex […], bad sex is generally better than none at all. This should not be controversial: it seems to hold for other important matters, like food, music, literature, and society. In the end, one must choose from among the available alternatives, whether their availability depends on the environment or on one's own constitution. And the alternatives have to be fairly grim before it becomes rational to opt for nothing.
    • "Sexual Perversion" (1969), p. 52.
  • I believe that the general form of moral reasoning is to put yourself in other people's shoes. This leads to an impersonal concern for them corresponding to the impersonal concern for yourself that is needed to avoid a radical incongruity between your attitudes from the personal and impersonal standpoints, i.e. from inside and outside your life. Some considerable disparity remains, because your personal concern remains in relation to yourself and your life: they are not to be replaced or absorbed by the impersonal ones that correspond to them. (One is also typically concerned in a personal way for the interests of certain others to whom one is close.) But we derive moral reasons by forming in addition a parallel impersonal concern corresponding to the interests of all other individuals. It will be as strong or as weak, as comprehensive or as restricted, as the impersonal concern we are constrained by the pressures of congruency to feel about ourselves. In a sense, the requirement is that you love your neighbor as yourself; but only as much as you love yourself when you look at yourself from outside, with fair detachment.
    • "Equality", (1977), p. 126.
  • I do not believe that the source of value is unitary — displaying apparent multiplicity only in its application to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings.
    • "The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), pp. 131–132.
  • Human beings are subject to moral and other motivational claims of very different kinds. This is because they are complex creatures who can view the world from many perspectives — individual, relational, impersonal, ideal, etc. — and each perspective presents a different set of claims. Conflict can exist within one of these sets, and it may be hard to resolve. But when conflict occurs between them, the problem is still more difficult. Conflicts between personal and impersonal claims are ubiquitous. They cannot, in my view, be resolved by subsuming either of the points of view under the other, or both under a third. Nor can we simply abandon any of them. There is no reason why we should. The capacity to view the world simultaneously from the point of view of one's relations to others, from the point of view of one's life extended through time, from the point of view of everyone at once, and finally from the detached viewpoint often described as the view sub specie aeternitatis is one of the marks of humanity. This complex capacity is an obstacle to simplification.
    • "The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), p. 134.
  • There will never be [a general and complete theory of right and wrong], in my view, since the role of judgment in resolving conflicts and applying disparate claims and considerations to real life is indispensable. Two dangers can be avoided if this idea of noncomprehensive systematization is kept in mind. One is the danger of romantic defeatism, which abandons rational theory because it inevitably leaves many problems unsolved. The other is the danger of exclusionary overrationalization, which bars as irrelevant or empty all considerations that cannot be brought within the scope of a general system admitting explicitly defensible conclusions. This yields skewed results by counting only measurable or otherwise precisely describable factors, even when others are in fact relevant. The alternative is to recognize that the legitimate grounds of decision are extremely various and understood to different degrees. This has both theoretical and practical implications.
    • "The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), p. 137.
  • The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. 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.
    • "Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 196.

The View From Nowhere (1986)

The View from Nowhere. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN: 0195056442
  • 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.
    • , p. 16.
  • We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed. … What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action.
    • pp. 128-129.
  • Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.
    • p. 135.

What Does It All Mean? (1987)

Quotes about Nagel

  • The kind of worry I am talking about here—the worry about what’s left of the individual—moved Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere, to reverse his own earlier defense of the publicity of reason, and to argue that some kinds of reasons are private or agent-relative after all. An agent has a special relationship to his own projects and own loved ones, and Nagel argued that, because of that relationship, the agent’s desires to engage in those projects and to promote the happiness of his loved ones are sources of reasons for him but not necessarily for anybody else.
    • Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution (2009), Chap. 10 : How to be a Person
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