Nagel’s Meaning

Robert Bass

According to Thomas Nagel, the fact that gives rise to questions about the meaning of life is bound up with the possibility of occupying a detached perspective upon the world and upon ourselves, viewing them “from nowhere.” It is only because we are capable of taking up or adopting this viewpoint or perspective that we are capable of seeing our lives as contingent, as things which did not have to be or did not have to be as they are, and therefore, that we are able to wonder about whether there is any important sense in which our lives matter or have meaning.

Yet there is a point of view from which none of [the ordinary concerns of our lives] seems to matter. When you look at your struggles as if from a great height, in abstraction from the engagement you have with this life because it is yours – perhaps even in abstraction from your identification with the human race – you may feel a certain sympathy for the poor beggar, a pale pleasure in his triumphs and a mild concern for his disappointments. And of course given that this person exists, there is little that he can do but keep going till he dies, and try to accomplish something by the standards internal to his form of life. But it wouldn't matter all that much if he failed, and it would matter perhaps even less if he didn't exist at all. (Nagel, pp. 215-216)

In order to understand this, I think three of Nagel's notions, all exemplified in the above passage, stand in need of fuller explication.

First, for each person, we can speak of the subjective, or perhaps better, the engaged self. This is the perspective on oneself that one has in being involved or engaged in one's own life and activities, carrying out (or failing to carry out) one's own plans and projects, caring about some things but not others, and so on. It is, no doubt, the perspective that most of us occupy toward our own lives most of the time.

Second, we can speak of the publicly identifiable self. (This is what Nagel, for his own case, calls "TN".) The publicly identifiable self is what was born on a certain date, will die on some future date, lives at a certain address, possesses various physical and psychological features, can be recognized by others, has undergone experiences, and can, in general, be named as the grammatical subject of true (or false) assertions about the person in question.

Third, we can speak of the objective self. This is a detached or “distanced” perspective one can take up upon oneself, viewing it, so to speak, from the outside. The publicly identifiable self can be viewed as the agent of its actions, the subject of its experiences and undergoings – but as just one among others no more or less central or important than itself. The objective self, in some sense, arises from a particular publicly identifiable self – had that publicly identifiable self not existed, the corresponding objective self would not exist either – however, the connection of the objective self to the publicly identifiable self seems tenuous and contingent. The objective self in fact gets most (all?) of its knowledge of how the world is from experiences undergone by and by the employment of cognitive (and other) capacities exercised by the publicly identifiable self, but this, from the perspective of the objective self, is inessential: If the same information (or the same combination of information and misinformation) had been available to it in some other way, the same perspective could have been formed. The connection of the objective self to some particular publicly identifiable self is not necessary to the objective self's perspective. Or so it seems.

Speaking, as I have been and as Nagel does, of three “selves” runs the risk of some confusion. It may suggest some Platonic or Freudian doctrine of “parts of the soul.” But I don't think this is really necessary to understand and appreciate the position. In a strict sense, the only self that we need refer to is the publicly identifiable self. What I have been calling the subjective or engaged self and the objective or detached self are both perspectives that one can take up upon the single publicly identifiable self, perspectives upon its activities and undergoings. Given the publicly identifiable self, the subjective perspective seems natural and is certainly biographically prior. A publicly identifiable person, first, is engaged with his own life; later – and this may be the beginning of the construction of the objective perspective – he realizes that he is engaged. The objective perspective is constructed in steps and by degrees as the person learns to think of his life as a life, and of its events, activities, and so on, just as the events, activities, etc. of a publicly identifiable self which can be (truly) described without reference to any first-personal identification (on the part of the occupant of the objective perspective) with that life or those events. (Any first-personal identification, such as [for Nagel] “I am TN,” can itself be described from the objective perspective as another event in the biography of TN.)

I find this an attractive and insightful account of the sources of our concern with having a meaningful life and of the possibility that we can find our lives lacking in meaning. For it appears that whatever we suggest as giving meaning to our lives can itself be called into question from the objective perspective. We can describe it as a feature of the publicly identifiable self or as a relation in which the publicly identifiable self stands to something else and ask about that ‘source of meaning’ why it matters, what is important or worthwhile about it, why things are that way rather than some other. Such questions can be especially pressing when we realize that, from the objective perspective, there seems to be no reason that one had to exist at all. That which is completely inescapable from the subjective perspective, one’s own existence as subject of one’s experience and agent of one’s actions, seems to be something that might not have existed at all – and if it hadn’t existed, if, say, a particular sperm had not fertilized a particular ovum, then its presence would never have been missed by anyone.

However, there is a problem here. On one hand, the objective perspective is supposed by Nagel to be universally accessible to reflective human beings. Moreover, it needs to be universally accessible in order to account for the widespread human concern for meaning or lack of meaning in our lives. On the other hand, it is a constructed perspective and constructed, of course, from materials at hand, which will include cultural factors, world-views, and so on that the publicly identifiable self simply finds rather than creates in the society into which it is born. But since the objective perspective is constructed, though it may detach itself by degrees from the particularities of the situation of the person whose perspective it is, it will always be conditioned (or at least cannot be known not to be conditioned) by its starting point.

Now, it seems plain that Nagel’s account is most congenial to what may be called the scientific world view according to which there are no over-arching divine or natural purposes for the universe as a whole or for parts within it, and events are related causally by impersonal natural laws. (And the laws themselves seem to hold just as a matter of fact rather than necessarily.) In terms of the scientific world view, it is very natural to seek answers to why things are thus and not otherwise and not to find any response that does not provoke a further round of questioning. (If, say, the reason that things are thus and not otherwise is that certain conditions obtained at the time of the Big Bang, we can ask why those conditions obtained – and so on.)

But the scientific world view is one that is reasonably common among highly educated people in our time and culture. It is hardly something that is shared even by a majority of people in our time, much less by many or most people throughout human history. So, the question to be posed is whether Nagel is right in thinking that the objective perspective from which our lives appear contingent really is universally accessible to reflective persons or itself is dependent upon particular cultural and intellectual conditions. Could it be either that people lacking the scientific world view (or with some specific alternative to it) would not face problems of meaningfulness (would not see them as problems) or that, if they would, those problems must have other sources than are allowed for in Nagel's account?

I think the answer is that Nagel is almost right and that we can see that this is so by considering what kind of world-view would be needed, not to avoid facing the problem (simple thoughtlessness can do wonders if the objective is just to avoid facing a problem) but for the perspective from which the problem appears to be inaccessible. The key feature of the objective perspective that is involved in the generation of the problem of meaning is that, from it, our lives and everything that gives them texture and structure seems to be ineliminably contingent. Contingency on one level can only be represented as necessary to the extent that facts on that level are contingent upon other facts – which themselves appear contingent. We could avoid this if we thought that there was some basic level (relevant to whether our lives had meaning or not¹) the facts of which were not contingent. If we thought, for example, that it was necessarily true that there was a God who created and controls the universe, that God was necessarily good, and that what goodness is is itself necessary, then we might be unable to raise any questions about how the contingency of our lives might affect whether they are meaningful or not. Our lives would be contingent upon God's will and purposes, but God's will and purposes would be necessarily good, and the ways in which our lives fit into his purposes would seem sufficient to guarantee that they would be meaningful. Such a picture seems passably accurate as a characterization of some aspects of the world-view held by many within the Christian tradition.²

So, how can Nagel be “almost right” if a world-view held by large numbers of people in the past (and not a few at present) makes it impossible to pose his questions about the ineliminable contingency of our lives? The answer is that it does not make it impossible to pose the questions. A fact may be epistemically contingent – contingent as far as we can tell – even if in itself it obtains necessarily. From the fact that (let us suppose) the theistic world-view sketched above is necessarily true, it does not follow that we can see it to be necessarily true. And, as long as we do not see it to be necessarily true – which few believers have ever claimed to be able to do – we can still ask whether it is necessarily true and therefore can wonder about whether our lives do in fact have the meaning that they would have if it were necessarily true. From the premise, “Necessarily, if God (as conceived above) exists, then our lives have meaning,” there is no valid inference to “Necessarily, our lives have meaning.”

Reference

Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Comments? I'd love to hear.