Death & The Philosopher

Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.

- Raymond Tallis

I have recently been rereading Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986). In the more than thirty years since its publication, the standing of this relatively slim volume has grown steadily. To borrow a metaphor that George Santayana applied to Spinoza, “like a mountain obscured at first by its foothills, he rises as he recedes.” Yet it is dispiriting how many contemporary intellectual trends – materialist theories of the mind and evolutionary epistemology to name only the most fatuous – have continued to flourish despite Nagel’s demonstration of their inadequacy.

At the heart of The View from Nowhere is one of the key issues in philosophy, and, indeed, in our lives. It is that of reconciling our necessarily local, even parochial, subjective viewpoints with the objective standpoint whose most developed expression is science. How do we square – or even connect – the view from within, according to which we are of overwhelming importance, with the view from without, which sees us as insignificant in a vast universe? Nagel pursues his response to this existential challenge, that “reality is not just objective reality” (p.87), with consummate skill, imagination, and much self-questioning.