The view from nowhere: is the reconciliation of subjective and objective standpoints incompletable, with both real and irreducible?

Thomas Nagel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The reconciliation of subjective and objective standpoints is incompletable. Both standpoints are real and irreducible: the world contains subjects of experience and the world also admits of objective description, and the philosophical project of dissolving one into the other fails.1 Three modes of false objectification recur as the philosophical vice the work diagnoses: reduction (reducing the subjective to its objective surrogate), elimination (eliminating the subjective entirely), and annexation (replacing the subjective with an objective stand-in).

All three are responses to the difficulty of maintaining both standpoints together; all three fail because they refuse what they should accept. The right attitude is to accept aims that can be achieved only fractionally and imperfectly, and to insist on the pursuit of truth even when the truth has less to say than one would wish. The work is "deliberately reactionary" against both idealism (which undervalues objectivity) and scientism (which overvalues it, treating the methods of natural science as the only legitimate route to understanding anything).234

Sources

  1. What I have to say about these questions is not unifíed enough to deserve that title; one of my claims will be that often the pursuit of a highly unifíed conception of life and the world leads to philosophical mistakes— to false reductións or to the refusal to recognize part of what is real.
    The View from Nowhere, p. 9
  2. A realist, anti- reductionist theory o f anything is bound to be faced with a problem of this form. The mind-body problem is one example and the problem of how to design ethics for individual human life is another. A third is the problem of the meaning of life, which arises because we are capable of > INTRODUCTION > 9 occupying a standpoint from which our most compelling personal con- cems appear insignificant.
    The View from Nowhere, p. 14
  3. There is always room for improvement in our objective understanding of things, naturally, but the proposal I am considering is not that the objective picture is incomplete, but rather that it is in essence only partial. This proposal is harder to accept than it may seem, for it implies that there is no single way things are in themselves.
    Mortal Questions, pp. 226–227
  4. The personal 9 In The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) I defended a version of this position. 10 This position is persuasively presented by Bernard Williams in 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
    Mortal Questions, pp. 219–220

Where the argument is made

  • The View from Nowhere (Oxford 1986), the entire book, especially Chapter 1 'Mind and Body' and Chapter 2 'Mind and Body II', the Introduction setting out the master framework
  • 'Subjective and Objective' (1979, in Mortal Questions Chapter 14)
  • 'The Limits of Objectivity' (Tanner Lectures 1980)
  • The Last Word (Oxford 1997) Chapter 1 on the structure of reason

How the argument was received

The View from Nowhere (1986) is one of the central texts of late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy and provides the master framework within which Nagel's particular contributions to philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy unfold. The framework is closer to Williams's "absolute conception" in Descartes (1978) than to either reductive scientism (Dennett, Churchland) or anti-realist idealism (Rorty); but Nagel's insistence on the reality of the subjective standpoint is sharper than Williams's regulative-ideal version. McDowell's Mind and World develops a different but related response to the subjective-objective problem in second-nature terms. A.W. Moore's Points of View extends the project. The framework remains a live position in philosophy of mind and metaphysics.