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NAGEL ON ABSURDITY
By

H. Skott Brill

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPY

Department of Philosophy

1 998

ABSTRACT
NAGEL ON ABSURDITY
By

H. Skott Brill

Thomas Nagel, in three works that span two decades, sets forth his views on
human absurdity. This dissertation critically examines these views and arrives at ﬁve
general conclusions.

The ﬁrst concerns Nagel's criticisms of what he takes to be the “standard
arguments for absurdity.” In all, Nagel discusses four such arguments and offers what
seem to be knock-down refutations of each. I argue, however, that upon reﬂection all of
these refutations turn out to be wanting and, consequently, the so-called standard
arguments for absurdity remain standing. .

The second conclusion the dissertation reaches concerns the matter of
interpretation. In the three works in which he discusses absurdity, Nagel suggests that
human absurdity consists in a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and reality. I
argue, however, that what Nagel takes the pretension and reality to be changes over time,
and even changes once within a single work. The result is that he ends up presenting a
total of four doctrines of absurdity. I argue that he does so, despite the fact that he
himself gives the impression that in all his writings on absurdity he presents but one
doctrine, and despite the fact that none of his critics suggests that he offers four doctrines

either.

The third conclusion the dissertation reaches has to do not with interpretation, but
with evaluation. In the chapters I set out Nagel's four doctrines of absurdity, I also
evaluate these doctrines. I argue that, though ingenious and alluring, each of the four
doctrines fails to show that human existence is absurd.

In view of these ﬁrst three conclusions, it may seem as though I do not think
much, if anything, of what Nagel has to say about absurdity. However, as it turns out, I
do believe Nagel has some things right. In particular, I think his notion of “conspicuous
discrepancy” helps clarify the general concept of absurdity. This is the fourth conclusion
the dissertation reaches. I explain that we may come to understand better the distinction
between ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘absurdity’ with Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy
in mind. Further, we may, with this notion in mind, come to understand better cases in
which propositions and sentences are absurd and cases in which they are not.

The ﬁfth and ﬁnal conclusion the dissertation arrives at is that while Nagel fails to
establish a particular conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and reality, if he had,
that probably would have been sufﬁcient to show that our lives are absurd. In other
words, this formal condition of existential absurdity does itself seem plausible. If so, we
might try to think of particular clashes between pretensions and realities that Nagel himself
has not considered in the effort to come up with a credible doctrine of absurdity which,

though not Nagel's, is Nagelian. I end the dissertation by suggesting one such doctrine.

To my mother

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest thanks to my dissertation advisor, Winston A. Wilkinson, without
whose strong words of encouragement, gentle prodding, and ﬁiendship this work would
remain incomplete. Heartfelt thanks also to my father and to my brothers, Rick, Steve,
Dan, and Chris, for all their love and support. And last, but not least, thanks to my dear
friend Nicole Mattis who has walked the valley with me every step of the way. Her great

and constant aﬂ‘ection has made this walk bearable.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1

“BAD ARGUMENTS” FOR ABSURDITY ................................................................... 9
Million Years Argument ..................................................................................... 1 1
Size and Time Arguments ................................................................................... 21
DeathArgument.......................... ....................................................................... 25
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 29

CHAPTER 2

THE FIRST DOCTRINE .............................................................................................. 31
The Doctrine at a Glance ................................................................................... 31
The Doctrine Up Closer and Defended .............................................................. 39
The Awareness Condition ................................................................................... 46
C onspicuousness ................................................................................................ 57

CHAPTER 3

THE SECOND DOCTRINE ......................................................................................... 65
Textual Evidence for Alternative Interpretations ................................................ 66
Evaluation of A lternative Interpretations ........................................................... 76
Which Doctrine? ................................................................................................ 80
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 83

CHAPTER 4

THE THIRD DOCTRINE ............................................................................................. 93
The Main Thesis ................................................................................................ 94
The Objective Perspective and Importance ........................................................ 96
The Third Doctrine .......................................................................................... 101
Evaluation of the Doctrine ............................................................................... 106

CHAPTER 5

THE FOURTH DOCTRINE ....................................................................................... 110
Traces of the Old Doctrines ..................................................................... 11 1
Values .............................................................................................................. 115
The New Discrepancy ...................................................................................... 120
Nagel's Defense of the Discrepancy ................................................................. 124

Evaluation of the Distinction and Doctrine ...................................................... 151

CHAPTER 6

THE VIEW FROM EREWHON ................................................................................. 161
Absurdity As Conspicuous Discrepancy ........................................................... 162
The Erewhon Argument .................................................................................... 174
Evaluation of the Erewhon Argument ............................................................... 180
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 186

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 188

vii

INTRODUCTION

You are a disembodied mind sent to observe the intelligent life on a planet in the
Alpha C entauri system. Hovering over the planet, you watch its inhabitants engage in
bizarre rituals. One such ritual involves the worship of a giant meteorite, which by its
looks crashed into the planet at the dawn of A lpha C entaurian civilization. You ﬁnd the
meteorite ritual, not to mention all the rest, rather silly; for it is a long, physically
demanding activity that the A lpha C entaurians seem to take quite seriously and repeat
time and again~—and it is all for the sake of a stupid rock! Floating high above, you say
to yourself that you are thankﬁtl you are not an A lpha C entaurian. However, no sooner
do you say this than you get an order to “synergize. " The powers that be tell you they
want a closer look; they really want to know what makes the A lpha Centaurian tick. They
also tell you to plan on an indeﬁnite stay. So before you know it, you ﬁnd yourself inside
the body of one of these weird creatures and a main participant in the middle of the
meteorite ritual.

Well, you try to make the best of your lot. You reason there is really nothing you
can do about it, so you might as well try to serve this primitive life-form who—~in one
sense, anyway—you now are. Thus in earnest you attempt to embrace the meteorite
ritual. You try to empathize with this mind that is taking the ritual very seriously, and
you try to connect with its body that is stepping here and there, swinging to and fro, and
emitting strange rhythmic sounds. And at ﬁrst you seem to succeed. You manage to
think the rock is sacred and the ritual justified and you actually come to feel nearly at

one with your host mind.

This conversion, however, is short-lived Before long the meteorite is just a
meteorite again, and the ritual looks as odd as ever. Try as you might, you can no longer
empathize with your host who continues to take the masquerade seriously, moving its
boay—and for now at least, your boay too—this way and that. Suddenly you feel as you
once did at age thirteen when at a family wedding your older relative literally pulled you
to the dance ﬂoor and made you polka against your will. Indeed, the Alpha C entaurian
is dragging you along now, and you wonder how long you are going to have to put up
with this ridiculous "dance. ” While cursing your fate, you, in a moment of giddiness,
reﬂect on how the existence of this hybrid being, part Alpha Centaurian-part you, who is
simultaneously caught up in the ritual and repulsed by it, must look to a disembodied

mind hovering above the planet as you were a short time ago. One word comes to you:

A BS URD.

Thomas Nagel, for one, would agree. That type of schizoid existence, he would
say, is absurd. However, he would also say that human existence resembles it, so much, in
fact, that human existence itself warrants the same label. No, Nagel does not believe we
drag through our earthly rituals unenthusiastic aliens who inhabit our bodies. (The science
ﬁction story is not a perfect analogy.) But he does think we drag through our ordinary
lives an unenthusiastic part of our own selves. Just as the Alpha Centaurian takes the
meteorite ritual very seriously, a part of us takes our mundane lives very seriously. At the
same time, just as you in the story cannot take the meteorite ritual seriously, a part of us
cannot take our mundane lives seriously. ' Consequently, we humans exist simultaneously
engaged in and detached from our personal concerns, goals and projects; and this striking
existential incongruity makes our lives absurd. In other words, part of us wants to polka
and the other part does not. The ﬁrst gets its way. We dance. But with one part(ner)

dragging the other around, the dance is absurd.

What on earth, we might wonder, is Nagel talking about here? While we may
think it plausible to say that some human lives are absurd, and absurd in virtue of an
inﬂiction of acute schizophrenia, clearly most of us do not suffer from this disease, nor, it
would seem, from anything like it. What, then, are these antagonistic parts of us that
Nagel alleges make our lives absurd? Are they in fact parts of us—all of us? If so, how
exactly are they supposed to make our lives absurd? And do they? Can Nagel really
support the bold claim that human existence is absurd?

This dissertation sets out to answer these questions, as well as a host of others that
arise from reading Nagel's works on human absurdity. In these works, which span two
decades, Nagel both produces arguments for absurdity (which in one way or another ﬁt
the general schema sketched above) and criticizes arguments for absurdity others have
offered. This dissertation critically examines both his own arguments and his refutations
of these other arguments, and hence is intended to be a comprehensive examination of this
inﬂuential American philosopher‘s thoughts on absurdity. On its face, the dissertation's
general conclusion will be negative. It will conclude that, while ingenious and alluring,
Nagel's arguments for absurdity, as well as his criticisms of others, do not succeed in their
present form. However, the dissertation will also attempt to show that Nagel has got
some things right, that one may be able to build a more plausible theory of absurdity with
these things in mind, and that, in any case, simply understanding his arguments and seeing
exactly how and where they go wrong teaches us much about the subject of absurdity.

Of course if it were the case that Nagel's works on absurdity have already been
sufﬁciently analyzed and evaluated, then motivation for this project would be wanting.
But I do not think they have. Quite the contrary, I believe these works, viewed both
individually and together, are as confusing as they are provocative and that neither Nagel
nor his critics have adequately sorted them out. Nowhere is this conﬁision greater than in

“The Absurd,” Nagel's ﬁrst work on absurdity, and in the ensuing commentaries.

Nagel writes as though he is offering one, and only one, argument for absurdity; and his
critics in their responses write as though he gives only one argument as well. However, a
closer reading of “The Absurd” reveals that Nagel unwittingly advances two arguments,
and two which are actually logically incompatible. If this is true, then I believe it should
be pointed out and explained, especially since the “The Absurd” appears in Nagel's
popular book Mortal Questions, as well as in recent anthologies, and that the
commentaries on “The Absurd” appear in popular journals, and one in an anthology itself.

Confusion over Nagel's case for human absurdity continues in another essay in
Mortal Questions, “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” the next essay in which he argues our
lives are absurd. In this work, Nagel gives the impression he is simply reiterating his
argument in the earlier work, for he never suggests anything to the contrary and spells out
the argument in much the same terms. And his critics would seem to agree. They are
silent about the argument in this later work, which suggests they, too, think the argument
is the same. Once again, however, I believe what Nagel and his critics convey is
misleading. I think a close reading of “Subjectivity and Objectivity” reveals that the
argument Nagel presents is crucially different from both arguments in “The Absurd” and
that, therefore, it amounts to a third doctrine of absurdity.

Nagel's third and ﬁnal discussion of absurdity lies in The View from Nowhere, and
the discussion there is conﬁising as well. As in “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” Nagel
writes as though his argument for human absurdity is the same as it has always been. He
sets out the argument using much of the same language he did in the previous two works
and does not give any indication his argument has changed. However, as I hope to show,
the argument in fact has changed, and changed considerably. The main argument in The
View from Nowhere is a brand new one, and represents a fourth doctrine of absurdity.
This time, though, one of Nagel's critics does notice the change. The critic correctly
points out that “Nagel considerably alters his early position.” But despite this insight, the

critic's analysis of the change is misleading in two respects. First, he acknowledges only

one other argument, when in fact there are three. And second, what he takes to be Nagel’s
main argument in The View from Nowhere turns out not to be.

Thus, I think there is plenty of work yet to be done in, ﬁrst of all, understanding
Nagel's case for human absurdity—which turns out actually to be four separate
doctrines—and, then, in evaluating it—which must therefore include four distinct
evaluations.

But that is not all. I believe there is also work to be done in understanding and
evaluating Nagel's refutations of other arguments for absurdity. In “The Absurd,” Nagel
brieﬂy explains four arguments which he calls “standard arguments for absurdity,” and he
just as brieﬂy dismisses them as “patently inadequate.” Interestingly, all that his
refutations have elicited is one critic’s passing remark that Nagel is quite right to conclude
that two of the arguments are bad, and for the reasons Nagel gives. This remark, along
with the absence of any others, suggests his critics believe his reﬁitations are on the mark.
However, I think that while at ﬁrst glance they certainly appear to be knock-down
reﬁitations, closer inspection reveals they all are ﬂawed and, consequently, all four of
these so called standard arguments for absurdity deserve a second look.

I realize these three major claims of mine—(1) that Nagel actually presents four
distinct doctrines of absurdity, (2) that none of them succeeds, and (3) that none of his
refutations of other arguments for absurdity succeeds either—are quite bold. But I think
they are defensible, and what I intend to do here is defend them. Once again, my hope is
that Nagel's views on absurdity will be better understood and that the public discussion of
absurdity, in general, will be advanced. To this end, I divide the dissertation into six
chapters.

In chapter 1, I focus exclusively 0n Nagel's reﬁitations of the four standard
arguments for absurdity, which for convenience I call the Million Years Argument, the
Size Argument, the Time Argument, and the Death Argument. I explain each of the

arguments and Nagel's refutations, and then I show exactly where and how his reﬁitations

go wrong. I conclude by suggesting that since the arguments withstand Nagel's criticisms,
they warrant further examination.

I turn in chapter 2 to one of the two arguments for absurdity Nagel presents in
“The Absurd,” which I refer to as Nagel's ﬁrst doctrine of absurdity. I ﬁrst explain the
general conditions which together Nagel believes are sufﬁcient to make our lives absurd
(conditions he seems to adhere to throughout his works), and afterward I show how the
ﬁrst doctrine does not meet all of these conditions and, consequently, does not establish
that our lives are absurd.

In chapter 3, I discuss an alternative interpretation of Nagel's argument in “The
Absurd” and draw ﬁ'om speciﬁc passages that support the interpretation. 1 suggest that
while the alternative interpretation is logically at odds with the ﬁrst doctrine (and so is a
distinct doctrine of absurdity), the two do resemble each other and can easily be conﬁised.
And I point out that since the second doctrine avoids the objection to the ﬁrst doctrine,
the motivation was there for Nagel to confuse them. Finally, I show that, despite its
advantage over the ﬁrst doctrine, the second doctrine does not succeed either.

I turn to the essay “Subjectivity and Objectivity” in chapter 4. Citing speciﬁc text,
I begin by showing how the argument for absurdity here must be signiﬁcantly different
ﬁom the two in “The Absurd,” despite the resemblance and Nagel's not stating that it is
different. Moreover, I explain why Nagel might have been motivated to alter his case for
absurdity, which has to do with the fact that the third doctrine seems to avoid the main
objection to the second doctrine (just as the second doctrine avoids the main objection to
the ﬁrst doctrine). Lastly, I argue that while it may escape the objection to the second
doctrine, it does not escape another one and hence, like the two preceding doctrines, fails
to establish that our lives are absurd.

In chapter 5, I examine Nagel's argument for absurdity in The View from Nowhere.
I ﬁrst attempt to reconcile the argument with one of the three doctrines in the earlier

works. After failing, I am forced to conclude that, all appearances to the contrary, the

argument in this book is novel, and hence amounts to a fourth doctrine of absurdity. I
then set out to explain this new doctrine. I ﬁrst describe a particular argument, which one
of Nagel's critics seems to think the book supports, but go on to argue that while there
may be textual evidence for it, it is not Nagel's main argument. I then explain this main
argument, which takes substantially more time to unfold than the others since it is much
more subtle, involving an intricate theory of value that Nagel explains and defends over
the course of several chapters. I conclude the chapter by evaluating the argument. I
defend the position that, despite its being more compelling than the previous three
doctrines, this fourth doctrine of absurdity is not compelling enough to persuade.

In chapter 6, the concluding chapter, I discuss what we have learned about human
absurdity as the result of studying Nagel's works on the subject. Beyond the two general
conclusions drawn directly from the previous ﬁve chapters—that the four arguments for
absurdity which Nagel criticizes are still viable arguments and should be looked into
further, and that Nagel himself has not shown our lives are absurd—I suggest, ﬁrst of all,
that having studied his works we learn more about the concept of absurdity. In particular,
we learn (1) a touchstone for determining whether things other than our lives, such as
propositions and sentences, are absurd; and (2) how absurdity is related to the concept of
meaninglessness. I suggest, moreover, that we learn the general conditions which Nagel
proposes are together sufﬁcient to make our lives absurd are indeed sufﬁcient (even
though he does not establish that all of them are met). And I suggest that we might go on
and try to think of other ways in which our lives meet these conditions. In closing, I
outline one such way. Thus I end the dissertation suggesting how we might use some of
Nagel's insights to construct a new doctrine of absurdity, a Nagelian doctrine, more
plausible than his own.

Before turning to the ﬁrst chapter, I perhaps should make one last remark, lest
some readers think both Nagel and I do not take advantage of some polemic moves they

believe are readily available to us. The remark is that Nagel is a (nonreductive) physicalist

and that I assume this metaphysical view in critically examining his arguments. Therefore,
all of the views and arguments discussed in this work, both Nagel's and mine, should be
understood in the context of a conception of a universe in which immaterial minds, a God,
and an afterlife do not exist, that is, in which we humans are wholly biological creatures
who, like all other creatures, eventually die and deteriorate.

Are our lives, so conceived, absurd? Here is what Thomas Nagel thinks, and what

I think in response.

CHAPTER 1

“BAD ARGUMENTS” FOR ABSURDITY

Thinkers from antiquity to the present have claimed that most of a person's deeds
will be forgotten soon after they occur, and that all of a person's deeds will be forgotten
eventually. More generally, they have claimed that the effects of one's deeds, if not very
short lived, are sure to diminish with time and at some point vanish without a trace. The
author of Ecclesiastes, in the fourth or third century BC, states: “The men of old are not
remembered, and those who follow will not be remembered by those who follow them. . . .
The wise man is remembered no longer than the fool, for, as the passing days multiply, all
will be forgotten.” In the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy, after having reﬂected on these
ancient words, reafﬁrms them: “My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner
or later, and I myself will be no more.” Bertrand Russell, in 1903, makes the same basic
claim, and indicates as well why the effects of our actions are sure to vanish: “All the
noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the
solar system, and the whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” And seven decades later Richard Taylor,

perhaps even more eloquently than Russell, writes:

We toil aﬁer goals, most of them—indeed every single one of them—of transitory
signiﬁcance and, having gained one of them, we immediately set forth for the next, as
if that one had never been, with this next one being essentially more of the same. . . .
And if we think that, unlike Sisyphus, these labors do have a point, that they culminate
in something lasting and, independently of our own deep interests in them, very
worthwhile, then we simply have not considered the thing closely enough. . . . Our
achievements, even though they are often beautiﬁrl, are mostly bubbles; and those that
do last, like the sand-swept pyramids, soon become mere curiosities while around
them the rest of mankind continues its perpetual toting of rocks, only to see them roll

9

10

down. Nations are built upon the bones of their founders and pioneers, but only to
decay and crumble before long, their rubble then becoming the foundation for others
directed to exactly the same fate. The picture of Sisyphus is the picture of existence of
the individual man, great or unknown, of nations, of the race of men, and of the very
life of the world.”1

On its face, the claim that we all shall be forgotten and that all of the effects of our
actions will dissipate, most of them very quickly, is both plausible and unsettling. We look
at the names on our family trees and all but those at the tips of the branches are to us
nothing more than that: names. Our great grandparents mean very little if anything to us,
and those before them nothing at all. Similarly, we shall hardly mean a thing to our great
grandchildren, and nothing to their contemporaries and everyone else after that time,
including our own descendants. If this is indeed what will come of us, then why on earth
do we go on leading busy, hectic, goal-oriented lives? This kind of life seems silly if we
and our deeds will be forgotten. In the words of Tolstoy, our lives seem like “some kind
of stupid and evil practical joke.” They seem absurd.

In the ﬁrst section of his essay “The Absurd,” Thomas Nagel suggests that many
people not only accept the claim that all of a person's deeds will be forgotten, but also
infer from it, as the great Russian novelist apparently did at a point in his life, that their
lives are absurd. Nagel then proceeds to show just why, despite its common appeal, the
inference is a bad one. In fact, before he sets out his own argument for the absurdity of
human existence, Nagel brieﬂy explains and criticizes a total of four so called “standard
arguments for absurdity.” He judges all of them “patently inadequate” and insists “they

could not really explain why life is absurd.”2 In this chapter I want to critically discuss

 

IEccles. 1: ll, 2: 16 NEB. Leo Tolstoy, Confession, trans. and intro. David Patterson (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1983), 30. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man's Worship” in Why [Am
Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), quoted in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 56. Richard Taylor, “The Meaning of Life,” in Good and
Evil (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1970), quoted in Klemke, 146.

2Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (October 1971): 716. Reprinted in
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11. Also reprinted in
ED. Klemke, ed., The Meaning of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 151; and Jonathan

11

Nagel's objections to the argument for absurdity sketched above, and his objections to the
other three arguments as well. I shall try to show that none of the objections succeeds and

that all four arguments therefore warrant further examination.

Million Years Argument
I shall begin with the argument sketched above, which for convenience I shall refer

to as the Million Years Argument. Here is how Nagel presents it:

1. Nothing we do now will matter in a million years.
2. Therefore, our lives are absurd.3

Before turning to Nagel's criticisms of the argument, I want to make a few
comments about his particular formulation of it. To begin, his formulation taken at face
value states only that people who exist now lead absurd lives. It is clear, however, that
the subject ‘we’ in the formulation refers to all human beings, past, present, and future. If
it did not, but referred only to those of us who are alive in this latter part of the twentieth
century, the argument would not be an argument for the absurdity of human existence as
such, which of course denotes all human beings. Similarly, the ﬁrst time reference ‘now’
does not refer only to the latter part of the twentieth century, but to any given point in
time. Thus Nagel's formulation of the argument just as easily could have read, and

perhaps more exactly should have read:

1. Nothing a person does at a particular point in time will matter a million years
from that time.
2. Therefore, human existence is absurd.

Just the same, the second time reference ‘a million years’ is not special either. One
could replace a million years with, say, 13,567,024 years, or even a mere three hundred

thousand, and the force of the argument may well remain the same. What seems to be

 

Westphal and Carl Levenson, eds, Life and Death (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 86.
Hereafter all page numbers refer to Mortal Questions.

3Ibid., 11.

12

important is that the interval between one's present actions and the future time is such that
the effects of these actions are blotted out before that future time, or at least are
insigniﬁcant at and forever after that time. In fact, the argument's defenders could do
away with a reference to a speciﬁc time altogether and simply state that a person's actions
will at some time become insigniﬁcant, or as the popular phrase goes “eventually amount
to nothing,” insofar as their effects will at some point cease to make a difference.

Finally, the argument as Nagel presents it appears to be an enthymeme. That is, it
seems he has left at least one premiss implicit, for it is quite a logical leap to go from the
proposition that nothing we do now will matter in a million years to the proposition that
our lives are absurd. Perhaps none of our actions will matter in a million years. So what?
Why would this fact, if it is one, make our lives absurd? It stands to reason that if the
Million Years Argument is really an argument which many people advance in one form or
another, then at least one other premiss must be a part of it, one which narrows the wide
gap between the conclusion and the one premise Nagel states. What might that
connecting premiss be?

Nagel does not immediately address this question. The reason might have to do
with his thinking the logic of the ﬁrst premiss already gives him enough ammunition to
stop the argument dead in its tracks. In what seems to amount to a preemptive strike on

the Million Years Argument, Nagel writes:

But if that [nothing we do now will matter in a million years] is true, then by the
same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In
particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will
matter. [And anything that does not matter to us now certainly cannot make our
lives absurd]4

If this refutation is not tongue-twisting, it is at least a little difﬁcult to keep straight, so

putting it in standard form might be helpful:

 

4Ibid., 1 l.

13

1. If nothing we do now will matter in a million years, then (by the same token)
nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.

2. If nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now, then it does not
matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter.

3. Nothing we do now will matter in a million years.

4. Therefore, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now
will matter. (And anything that does not matter to us now certainly cannot
make our lives absurd).

The basic idea of the reﬁrtation seems to be this. Since all our actions, and in particular
those we deem important, will not have any signiﬁcant effect on the world in a million
years, we would be senseless to concern ourselves with anything that will be the case at
that distant time. Among the things that will be the case in a million years is the fact that
our actions now (around the twentieth century) do not matter. Therefore, we do not have
any reason to concern ourselves with this fact now. And any fact that is of no concern of
ours cannot make our lives absurd.

While I ﬁnd Nagel's refutation ingenious, I think it is ﬂawed. The ﬁrst premiss
appears to be false. Consider the fact that many things which will be the case in a million
years are the case now, were the case ten thousand years ago, and will be the case thirteen
days ﬁom today. Indeed, many things that will be the case a million years from now have
always been, and will always be, the case. Clear and uncontroversial examples are
conceptual and mathematical truths. In a million years, it will be the case that all bachelors
are unmarried adult males and that 2 + 2 = 4. But these propositions are true at all times,
past, present, and future. Their truth value supervenes on all time periods.

Consider next the one thing that will be the case in a million years which Nagel
believes ultimately undermines the Million Years Argument: the fact that none of our
actions (around the twentieth century) matters. According to Nagel, since nothing now
will matter then, nothing then could matter now, including the fact that none of our
actions now matters then. However, Nagel fails to see that if it is indeed true that in a
million years none of our actions will matter, then this truth, like conceptual and

mathematical tnrths, obtains now too. It is true today, as it will be true a million years

14

from today, that nothing we do now matters then. But if the proposition that nothing we
do now matters then is true both today and in a million years, then the antecedent of the
ﬁrst premiss of the reﬁrtation (nothing we do now will matter in a million years) only
implies that the one instance of the proposition a million years from now could not matter
to us; it does not show that the instance of the proposition today does not matter to us, let
alone could not matter to us. That is to say, it is still an open question whether the present
instance of the proposition matters to us. Some people, perhaps many, apparently believe
that this instance of the proposition does matter now—and its doing so is precisely what
makes their lives, all of our lives, absurd.‘ In sum, the consequent of the ﬁrst premiss of
the refutation (nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now) is not implied
by the antecedent (nothing we do now will matter in a million years), and hence the
reﬁrtation as it stands is not sound.5

Immediately after his ﬁrst refutation of the Million Years Argument, Nagel offers a

second refutation, which, as we shall see, turns out to be better than the ﬁrst. He argues:

Even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that
keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not
enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from
now?

Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the
crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering,
period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years
is to beg the question against its mattering, period; for in that sense one cannot
know that it will not matter in a million years whether (for example) someone now
is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not matter, period.6

To understand this refutation properly, we need ﬁrst to recognize and keep in mind

three key concepts: our actions that matter now, our actions that matter in a million years,

 

5It is surprising Nagel overlooked this objection in view of his earlier defense of tenselcss truths
in the ﬁrst book he wrote. See Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of A ltruism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), 58—76.

6Nagel, “The Absurd,” ll.

15

and our actions that matter, period. The term ‘matter’ appears in all three concepts, and
since Nagel does not specify otherwise, we can only assume he means the same thing in
each case, which seems to be ‘importance.’ Thus when he speaks of our actions mattering
now, he means they are important now; when he speaks of them mattering in a million
years, he means they are important then; and when he speaks of them mattering, period, he
means they are important, period.7 As for the term ‘matter(ing), period,’ Nagel probably
has in mind ‘objectively important,’ that is, important without regard to time, place, or
what anyone thinks. I

Now then, earlier I asked about possible suppressed premisses that allow the
Million Years Argument to move logically from the one explicit premiss (nothing we do
now will matter in a million years) to the conclusion (our lives are absurd). In the second
reﬁrtation, Nagel in effect adds premisses to the argument. He seems to think, as is
reﬂected in the above passage, that the argument's proponents assume three things: ( 1)
that our actions' being objectively important (i.e., mattering, period) is necessary and
sufﬁcient to keep our lives from being absurd; (2) that our actions' being important now
(i.e., mattering now) but not in a million years is not sufficient for their being objectively
important (and hence would not keep our lives from being absurd); and (3) that our
actions' being important in a million years (i.e., mattering in a million years) is at least
necessary for their being objectively important (and hence may keep our lives from being

absurd). Given Nagel is correct, the Million Years Argument becomes:

1. If our lives are not absurd, then our actions are objectively important.

2. If our actions are objectively important, then they will be important in a million
years.

Our actions will not be important in a million years.

4. Therefore, our lives are absurd.

S“

 

7One might propose that by ‘nratter’ Nagel consistently means ‘has an impact.’ However, that is
doubtful, for it is hard to make any sense of the expression ‘our actions have an impact, period.’

16

As it turns out, Nagel in the second refutation exploits the new second premiss (or
the third assumption stated above the argument). He believes this premiss is false and
consequently the argument is unsound. First, he assumes with (supposedly) the
proponents of the Million Years Argument that our actions' being important now is not
sufﬁcient for their being objectively important, that something else is required to make
them objectively important. Then he asks rhetorically how our actions' being important in
a million years could be that something. Let actionsl be those actions of ours that are
important now but will not be important in a million years. Let actionsz be our actions
that are important now and will be important in a million years. Why would actionsz be
objectively important, but not actions]? How could our actions' being important in a
million years save them from being objectively unimportant, if their being important only
now is not enough to save them ﬁom being objectively unimportant? Why, in other
words, does their being important down the road make the crucial difference? Nagel
seems to ﬁnish off the Million Years Argument when in the second paragraph of the
reﬁrtation he brings to our attention the fact that if our actions were to be important in a
million years, that would already presuppose they are objectively important. The truth of
this claim is clear, he would say, when we consider that if our actions were not objectively
important, then they could not be important at any time, not now, not in a million years.
Therefore, our actions' being important in a million years certainly is not a necessary
condition of their being objectively important.

Defenders of the Million Years Argument might respond by insisting that Nagel
distorts their argument insofar as he deﬁnes the term ‘matter’ as ‘importance’ wherever it
is used. They may insist that the term in fact only means ‘importance’ in the locution
‘matter, period.’ In the locutions ‘matter now’ and ‘matter in a million years,’ it means
‘has an impact’ or ‘makes a difference.’ Thus to say of our actions that they matter,
period, is to say that they are objectively important. But to say of them that they matter

now is to say that they have an impact now (or make a difference now), and to say they

17

will matter in a million years is to say that they will have an impact then (or make a
dtﬂerence then).8 The real dialectic of the Million Years Argument, then, is that since
none of our actions will have a bearing on what happens in a million years, such actions do

not objectively matter, and hence our lives are absurd. In standard form:

1. If our lives are not absurd, then our actions are objectively important.

2. If our actions are objectively important, then they will have an impact in a
million years.

3. Our actions will not have an impact in a million years.

4. Therefore, our lives are absurd.

In Nagel's formulation of the argument (in particular, the second premiss), (a) our
actions' being objectively important depends on (b) our actions‘ being important in a
million years. Nagel in effect points out that this dependency relation is backwards: ‘(a)’
does not depend on ‘(b)’; rather ‘(b)’ depends on ‘(a).’ If ‘(a)’ were to depend on ‘(b),’
then it would be logically possible that our actions will be important in a million years,
even though they are not objectively important—which is absurd. The Million Years
Argument fails, Nagel concludes, due to this conﬁrsion regarding dependency. However,
what the objection to this refutation points out is that Nagel is wrong to think the
argument hinges on the premiss that ‘(a)’_ depends on ‘(b).’ Instead, it hinges on the
premiss that ‘(a)’ depends on (c) our actions having an impact in a million years. And
there is nothing backwards about this dependency relation. There is nothing absurd about
the logical possibility that our actions will causally inﬂuence what will happen in a million
years, even though they are not objectively important. This possibility makes perfect

sense.

 

8I think there is a common sense in which the two expressions ‘has an impact’ and ‘makes a
diﬂ’erence’ are synonymous, which is why I include both of them here. However, hereafter I shall only use
‘has an impact’ because I think ‘makes a difference’ can mean ‘importance’ too. as I believe it does in the
following question, which does not appear to be vacuous: Does it make a difference whether Diemer
writes a book when her doing so will have no impact on the world? As for the expression ‘has an impact.’
I take it to mean roughly ‘is causally efl'rcacious.’ So to say that my actions will have an impact in a
million years, is to say roughly that they will causally inﬂuence what happens at that time.

18

Still, Nagel may question whether our actions' having an impact long after they
take place, such as in a million years, is really a necessary condition of their being
objectively important, or their mattering, period. That is, he might accept the
reformulation of the Million Years Argument that its defenders may insist upon, and yet
ask the same rhetorical questions that in part made up his original reﬁrtation: “Even if
what we did now were going to matter [have an impact] in a million years, how could that
keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering [having an impact] now
is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered [had an impact] a
million years from now?” To this Nagel might add: that a number of Bosnian Muslims are
tortured by Serbian soldiers today may not causally effect what occurs in a million years,
or even a hundred years, but it still might be objectively important.

I think this response to the objection does place the onus on the defenders of the
Million Years Argument to explain exactly why our actions' having an impact long after
we are dead is what is necessary to make these actions objectively important, and hence
perhaps to keep our lives ﬁom being absurd. In fact, I think the argument's defenders
really have their work cut out for them if they are committed to arguing, for example, that
the Serbian acts of torture mentioned above are unimportant unless they will make a
lasting impact on the world. It looks as if, then, Nagel's refutation succeeds after all.

However, we need to ask whether the proponents of the Million Years Argument
are in fact committed to arguing that ‘all actions are objectively important only if the
actions will make a lasting impact on the world’? It seems the argument's defenders might
agree that actions of certain kinds are objectively important whether or not their effects on
the world endure, but insist that actions of other kinds are objectively important only if
their effects do endure. The formulation of the argument reﬂecting this suggestion would

be:

I9

1. If our lives are not absurd, then certain actions of ours are objectively
important.

2. If certain actions of ours are objectively important, then they will have an
impact on what happens in a million years.

3. Certain actions of ours will not have an impact on what happens in a million
years.

4. Therefore, our lives are absurd.9

I can imagine the proponents of the Million Years Argument defending the new
second premiss by arguing in the following manner. ‘0 If the objective importance of
actions of certain kinds had nothing to do with making an enduring impact on the world,
then the question of whether the accomplishment of a task will make such an impact
would be irrelevant in judging whether one should take up the task in the ﬁrst place.
However, we usually regard such a question relevant, and often one that will determine
whether we take up the task. For example, this spring Sam, the manager of a high-rise
apartment complex, does not enlist his workers to wash the windows of the complex, even
though he instructed them to do this every previous spring since he has worked there. He
does not have them wash the windows this year because the city has recently condemned
the building, and all tenants must be out of their apartments by July. Sam reasons: “It

wouldn't make much difference if we went ahead and washed the windows now, since the

 

9Interestingly, Nagel sixteen years later, in What Does It All Mean, presents a version of the
Million Years Argument that reﬂects the principal change made in this reformulation and that made in
the previous one. Referring to the argument, he writes: “The idea seems to be that we are in some kind of
rat race, struggling to achieve our goals and make something of our lives, but that this makes sense only if
these achievements will be permanent. But they won't be. Even if you produce a great work of literature
which continues to be read thousands of years from now, eventually the solar system will cool or the
universe will wind down or collapse, and all trace of your efforts will vanish. In any case. we can't hope
for even a fraction of this sort of immortality.” Here Nagel speaks speciﬁcally of our “goals” and
“achievements,” and uses as an example a “work of literature.” He does not speak of all our actions and
does not seem to mean all of them. Moreover, he suggests that a necessary condition of these goals or
achievements making sense is that they have at least a “fraction . . . of immortality,” which is, I think.
quite similar to ‘having a lasting impact.’ Thomas Nagel. What Does It All Mean (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987). 96.

10The ﬁrst premiss is a new, and bolder, one too, and hence in need of support. While I believe it
is a defensible premiss, 1 shall not sketch here what I think a defense would look like.

20

renters would only beneﬁt from the clean windows for a few weeks.” Sam thinks washing
the windows now is unimportant because doing so will not have a lasting effect.

As it turns out, Sam has a sister named Sally who is a novelist and who has
recently been abducted by men from a radical religious sect who have been offended by
her books. Sally, with the nearly completed manuscript of her next book in hand, is being
held in a basement room, and she has been told by her abductors that in two weeks, on a
religiously symbolic day for them, they will have to kill her and destroy the manuscript,
but that she can go right ahead and ﬁnish it, seeing that no one will ever read it. Sally is
convinced the religious fanatics are insane and that they will kill her, and when left alone
for the ﬁrst time, she contemplates whether she should ﬁnish the book. She reasons: “My
completing this book would not be important because as soon as I do so the book will be
destroyed; the ﬁnished manuscript will not have a chance to make any lasting impact on
the world, so there is no sense in putting pen to paper.”

Why do painters and other artists devote themselves to their work? Why do
ﬁlmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, essayists, politicians, teachers, and scientists devote
themselves to their work? To survive, to get instant gratiﬁcation, to be famous—yes, all
of these answers are generally true. However, in many cases there lies another, more
ﬁmdamental motivation: to make a lasting impact on the world. It seems to be a matter of
fact that people, rightly or wrongly, associate the importance of their lives with having a
lasting effect on the world. Many people would claim that Aristotle and Jesus and
Darwin and Einstein were all great men, that their lives were really important. What is the
basis of such a claim? The answer appears to be the fact that each of these men has made
a big difference.

I think the two contrived examples involving Sam and Sally, the statement
concerning what motivates many people to do the work they do, and the rationale for the
claim about the famous men do not establish that the objective importance of actions of

certain kinds is determined by whether they will have a lasting impact on the world.

21

Nevertheless, I do believe they suggest that we, as a matter of fact, often determine
whether actions are objectively important by asking if they will have such an impact. If so,
then it is not obvious (contrary to what Nagel believes as indicated by his rhetorical
questions in the refutation) that the objective importance of all actions is not determined
by whether they will have an impact on the world for a long time. It may turn out in the
end that the Million Years Argument does not establish that human life is absurd, but what

Nagel writes in “The Absurd” is not enough to undermine it.

Size and Time Arguments
The second and third arguments for absurdity that Nagel criticizes involve size and
time respectively. In my estimation, both arguments withstand his objections, at least as

far as these objections go. Here are the two arguments along with the objections:

What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or
time: we are tiny specks in the inﬁnite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere
instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead
any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life
absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd
if it lasts seventy years be inﬁnitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our
lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we

ﬁlled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was
smaller)?‘1

 

llNagel, “The Absurd,” 11—12. Years later in “Birth, Death. and the Meaning of Life,” Nagel
writes: “But taken far enough, . . . [the objective view] will undermine . . . [subjective everyday] aims: to
see myself objectively as a small, contingent, and exceedingly temporary organic bubble in the universal
soup produces an attitude approaching indifference.” It would appear Nagel here is contradicting his view
in “The Absurd”; however, in the next paragraph in “Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life.” he states:
“Some of the attitudes that lead to these conﬂicts [between the subjective and objective views] may be
mistaken. . . .” While Nagel does not specify the particular mistaken attitudes, I think we can assume that
he means attitudes concerning our snrall size and short life span and hence that his positions in the two
essays are the same. Steven Luper-Foy, one of Nagel's critics, agrees. Also, Luper-Foy believes Nagel's
objections to the two arguments for absurdity are right on the mark. Luper-Foy expresses the objections in
this way: “Yet our size and longevity cannot really make us absurd. For if we thought of ourselves as
small absurd creatures, wouldn't a great increase in our size simply lead us to think of ourselves as
gigantic absurd creatures?” While Luper-Foy's rhetorical question only concerns our size. we can
charitably insert for him a similar rhetorical question having to do with longevity. which no doubt he has
in mind: “For if we thought of ourselves as short-living absurd creatures, wouldn't a great increase in our
life span simply lead us to think of ourselves as long-living absurd creatures?” Thomas Nagel. “Birth.
Death, and the Meaning of Life,” in The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press. 1986).

22

To refute the Size Argument, Nagel constructs a simple reductio ad absurdum
argument. He assumes the truth of the Size Argument's major claim (our present size
makes our lives absurd) and infers from it the obviously false claim that if we were bigger
our lives would no longer be absurd, or at least would be less so. (It is obviously false
that our lives would lose their absurdity, if we suddenly grew ﬁve, ten, forty, one
thousand, or any number of feet.) Of course if the major claim of the Size Argument
implies a proposition that is obviously false, the major claim itself must be false.
Therefore, Nagel concludes, if our lives are in some way ﬁrndamentally absurd, the reason
cannot be that none of us is over eight feet tall.

While I shall stop short of arguing that the claim ‘if we were bigger our lives
would no longer be absurd’ is true, I do want to argue that the claim is not obviously false,
and that hence Nagel's simple reductio as it stands is wanting. ‘2 In making my case, I
would like, ﬁrst, to point out why the claim at issue may appear obviously false. Two
principal reasons come to mind, which concern forms of inference we may naturally and
unwittingly use to reach our verdict.

The ﬁrst form of inference involves a kind of mathematical reasoning. Multiplying
zero by any number, no matter how high, of course gets us nothing more than zero.
Similarly, multiplying zero signiﬁcance to our lives, at between two and eight feet, by any
number of feet still gets us zero signiﬁcance. In mathematical notation: 0 (signiﬁcance at
5'8") x 8,000 (feet tall) = 0 (signiﬁcance). We conclude by this mathematical reasoning
that if in fact our lives have no signiﬁcance (and hence are absurd), then our present size
cannot be what makes the crucial difference.

The second form of inference we might use to reach the reductio verdict involves

generalizing from an instance or a few instances. We imagine ourselves two or three or

 

210. Steven Luper-Foy, “The Absurdity of Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (March
1992): 86.

12For the basic point of the following objection. I am indebted to Win Wilkinson.

23

four feet taller than we are and infer that since it is ridiculous to think our lives would lose
their absurdity if we stood a few feet taller (granting they are absurd now), the general
claim that ‘if we were bigger our lives would no longer be absurd’ must be false. Once
again we conclude that our present size cannot be what makes our lives absurd if in fact
they are absurd.

Regarding the ﬁrst form of inference, I want to suggest that using mathematical
reasoning against the Size Argument is arbitrary, and hence inappropriate. It seems the
Size Argument is comprised of two major claims: (1) our lives would be signiﬁcant were
we greater in size; and (2) if our lives were signiﬁcant, they would not be fundamentally
absurd. Now we certainly guarantee the falsity of claim ‘(1)’ by multiplying our present
zero signiﬁcance at, say, six feet by any number of feet greater than that. However, there
is no independent justiﬁcation for using multiplication. Doing so is in fact as arbitrary as
using addition instead, which conversely may appear to support the truth of claim ‘(1)’: 0
(signiﬁcance at 5'8") + 8,000 (feet tall) = 8,000 (signiﬁcance). In sum, while we may be
tempted to use a mathematical ﬁmction in association with the Size Argument insofar as
the argument itself has to do with numbers, using such a ﬁrnction, either to make or to
break the argument, is fallacious.

Equally erroneous is the second form of inference. In this inference (whereby we
infer ﬁom the claim that ‘ growing a few feet would not add a lick of signiﬁcance to our
lives’ the more general claim that ‘growing any number of feet would not make our lives
any less insigniﬁcant’), we generalize too hastily. If our inference is to be at all cogent, we
need to consider instances that are dissimilar—or at the very least one instance that is ’
radically dissimilar—to the homogeneous ones on which we have focused our attention.

What, then, do we observe when we go ahead and consider dissimilar instances?
With this question, we have, I think, arrived at the cmx of the merit of Nagel's reductio
against the Size Argument. Is it still patently false that our lives would be less insigniﬁcant

were we to grow as tall as, say, the Eiﬁ’el Tower? Without relying on either of the two

24

fallacious inferences above, we might still be tempted, I suppose, to answer in the
afﬁnnative. “Nine hundred eighty-four feet tall—so what? If my life is absurd now, it
would be just the same at that height.” But would it really? Consider again one of the
major claims of the Million Years Argument: that a sufficient condition of a person's life
being signiﬁcant is this person’s making a lasting impact on the world. Now if this claim is
true, then it is not at all obviously false that our lives would be less insigniﬁcant were we
to grow as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Imagine what you could do towering at 984 feet, what
impact you could have on the world! And let us not stop at a modest 984 feet in our
imagination. Let us take up Nagel's suggestion in the last sentence of the passage quoted
above and have you “ﬁll the universe.” At this size moving mountains would be for you
mere child's play. It goes without saying that you, spanner of the universe, could make
quite a lasting impact on the world.

Of course I have not just made a case for the Size Argument. To do that, I would
need to support the two controversial claims on which the argument I have made depends:
(l) a sufﬁcient condition of a person's life being signiﬁcant is this person's making a lasting
impact on the world; and (2) a person's life being signiﬁcant prevents it from being
fundamentally absurd. However, my intent was not to establish the soundness of the Size
Argument; it was only to make a case against Nagel's offhand dismissal of it. If our lives
are not ﬁrndamentally absurd so long as they are signiﬁcant, and if our lives are signiﬁcant
so long as we make an enduring impression on the world, then our relatively small size
may indeed be what makes our lives absurd, or at least contributes to their being absurd.
Before he is justiﬁed in dismissing the Size Argument, Nagel needs to show that one of
these two claims is probably false.

The other argument, which I shall refer to as the Time Argument, similarly does
not go down as easily as Nagel thinks it does. Nagel again employs a reductio ad
absurdum argument: he uses the Time Argument's conclusion (our ﬁnite life span makes

our lives absurd) as a premiss and deduces the conclusion that if we were immortal, that

25

would eliminate, or at least mitigate, the absurdity in our lives. Again, Nagel takes the
conclusion to be obviously false, asking rhetorically: “Would not a life that is absurd if it
lasts seventy years be inﬁnitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?” It is tempting to go
along with Nagel and answer “yes,” just as it is easy to think that a manic depressive's
depression would become everlasting if he became immortal. However, if we stop to
think about the manic depressive, we might see that if his awareness of his ﬁnitude is what
causes his lifelong despair, then it does not follow that his depression would be everlasting
if he became everlasting. Immortal, and cognizant of this fact, his depression might well
end then and there. Similarly, if it is our mortality that makes our lives absurd (or at least
signiﬁcantly contributes to their absurdity), then Nagel is quite incorrect in stating that our
lives would be “inﬁnitely absurd if [we] lasted through eternity.” Before his refutation will
succeed, he needs to establish that our ﬁnitude does not make our ﬁnite lives absurd,
contrary to what many people may believe. Consequently, the Time Argument remains

standing.

Death Argument
The fourth and ﬁnal “patently inadequate” argument Nagel discusses just so
happens to be an argument that explicitly attributes the absurdity of our lives to our
mortality. Thus if Nagel can refute this argument, and it is the best argument linking
absurdity to death, then his criticism of the Time Argument will be as good as gold. I shall
call the ﬁnal argument the Death Argument, and here it is, ﬁrst in Nagel's own words and

then in standard form:

Because we are going to die, all chains of justiﬁcation must leave off in mid-air:
one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment,
food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a
career—but to what ﬁnal end? All of it is an elaborate journey leading nowhere. ‘3

 

l3Nagel, “The Absurd,” 12.

26

1. If something precludes all the actions to which we commit ourselves day in and
day out from being worthwhile, or justiﬁed, then we can appropriately describe
our existence as going nowhere, and hence absurd.

2. Something—namely, our dying—does preclude all the actions to which we
commit ourselves day in and day out from being worthwhile.

3. Therefore, we can appropriately describe our existence as absurd.

Now to refute this argument, we need only come up with one action whose doing
is worthwhile, or “justiﬁed,” despite the inevitable onslaught of death. And this is
precisely one of the two moves Nagel makes against the argument. In fact, he presents
more than one worthwhile action: notwithstanding our mortality, it is worthwhile to take
aspirin when we have a headache, to go see an appealing art exhibit, to prevent a little boy
or girl from putting his or her hand on a hot stove. The reasons it takes to justify these
actions do not conﬂict with the fact of our mortality. We take aspirin to relieve a
headache; we attend the art exhibit because it gives us pleasure; we grab the child's arm
before it touches the burner because we care about the well-being of children. These
reasons simply reﬂect the kind of creature we are, and they themselves are sufficient to
justify the actions. Contrary to what the defenders of the Death Argument believe, no
further reasons are needed to justify these reasons, and hence to justify the actions. In
Nagel's words: “Chains of justiﬁcation come repeatedly to an and within life.”'4

I ﬁnd this reﬁrtation of the Death Argument plausible—but only as Nagel's own
interpretation of the argument goes, which I think represents a version of the argument
that is signiﬁcantly weaker than another he might have presented. When in the passage
above Nagel attributes to the proponents of the argument the claim that “all chains of
justiﬁcation must leave off in mid-air” (my italics), that is tantamount to characterizing
these people as committed to the view that none of our actions is intrinsically worthwhile.

For if some of our actions were intrinsically worthwhile, then by deﬁnition they would

 

14Ibid.. 12. The claim that justiﬁcations legitimately come to an end within life seems to
contradict a claim Nagel later makes in “The Absurd,” one on which his own doctrine of absurdity hinges.
In fact, one of Nagel's critics uses the claim that justiﬁcations legitimately come to an end within life
against Nagel's doctrine of absurdity. I shall take up this issue in chapter 3.

27

demand no justiﬁcation outside themselves, and the premiss that death precludes all
actions from being worthwhile (the second premiss of the argument above) clearly would
be false. However, it seems the proponents of the Death Argument can agree with Nagel
that some of our actions are intrinsically worthwhile and still run their argument. They
would argue that death leaves enough of our actions that are not intrinsically worthwhile
unjustiﬁed so as to render our lives absurd.

What might these actions be? Interestingly, Nagel mentions some good candidates
in presenting his version of the Death Argument: “studying and working to pay for
clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to
support a family and pursue a career.” Indeed, we spend much of our childhood,
adolescence, and early adulthood in school working to prepare ourselves for more work,
for at least a forty-hour work week that will characterize much of the rest of our lives.
(And never mind the drudgery: the continual grocery shopping and the dishes and the
laundry and the yard work.) Now what does all this work give us? It perhaps enables us
to enjoy some intrinsically worthwhile activities. However, with the exception of a small
minority of us, most of the money we trade for our labor we use merely to sustain
ourselves from day to day. With this money we buy things that are not intrinsically
worthwhile, such as food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and health care. After forty or
so years at our jobs we might be able to stop working and enjoy ourselves; but, alas, at
this time our minds and bodies begin to degenerate, and we shall only enjoy a relatively
short period of time before death denies us any more reward for our years and years of
nearly ceaseless toil. Yes, we may at ﬁrst think most of our actions that are not
intrinsically worthwhile are worth doing. “Hard work often pays off,” we say. However,
if we do not limit our perspective to the short term but instead look further, we see that
death plucks the fruits of our labor off the tree of life before they are ripe. In viewing the

typical mortal human life and life span, we cannot help but judge that hard work does not

28

pay off, or so say the defenders of this version of the Death Argument. And they conclude
that this cold fact makes human existence absurd.

While this second version of the Death Argument is certainly open to criticism, I
think it is far more plausible than Nagel's version of the argument, if only because it is
more modest than his version. Since, then, he does not address the stronger of the two, he
has not in my estimation refuted the Death Argument.

Nagel does add another reﬁitation to his case against the Death Argument, but its
strength, like the ﬁrst, extends only as far as his weak version of the argument. He writes:
“Through its misrepresentation of the process of justiﬁcation, the argument makes a
vacuous demand. It insists that the reasons available within life are incomplete, but
suggests thereby that all reasons that come to an end are incomplete. This makes it
impossible to supply any reasons at all.”15 That is to say, if the Death Argument's
proponents claim, as they seem to, that a “ﬁnite chain of reasons cannot justify anything,”
they would seem also to claim that activities can be justiﬁed by something outside
themselves. Otherwise, why would they ﬁnd death crucial? However, if they claim that
an activity can be justiﬁed by something outside itself, and demand that it must be, then
the claim is false and the demand “vacuous.” For if everything that is justiﬁed must be
justiﬁed by something outside itself, then an inﬁnite regress of justiﬁcations results, and an
inﬁnite regress of justiﬁcations justiﬁes nothing. In short, the defenders of the Death
Argument imply a condition of justiﬁcation that actually rules out the possibility of
justiﬁcation altogether, rendering that condition, and the argument itself, incoherent.l6

But why, we might ask Nagel, does their insisting that “the reasons available
within life are incomplete” suggest that they think “all reasons that come to an end are

incomplete”? We need not attribute to the proponents of the Death Argument the claim

 

”'Ibid., 13.

l6Ibitl., 12—13.

29

that a ﬁnite chain of reasons cannot justiﬁt anything (a claim that would strongly suggest
they believe an inﬁnite chain would justify, given the fact that they think death is
important). We need only attribute to them the claim that the particular finite chains of
justification within a human life cannot justify anything, or the even more modest claim
that reﬂects the second version of the argument I gave above: that the particular finite
chains of justification within a human life are not enough to justify that life. Neither of
these two claims suggests the proponents of the Death Argument think that an inﬁnite
chain would justify; and if they do not think that, their argument avoids the incoherence

that Nagel attributes to it.

Conclusion

I have tried to show that Nagel's refutations of the so called standard arguments
for human absurdity do not succeed as they stand. The first refutation of the Million
Years Argument fails because Nagel does not recognize that there are timeless facts. And
although successful in burden shifting, the second refutation of the Million Years
Argument does not undermine it. The reﬁrtation of the Size Argument completely ignores
two plausible claims that, if true, would make the argument formidable, that a life is
signiﬁcant if it makes a lasting impact on the world and that a signiﬁcant life escapes being
a fundamentally absurd one. Consequently, Nagel's curt dismissal of the argument is
unwarranted. As for the refutation of the Time Argument, it fails because it depends on a
major claim Nagel does not support: that our dying cannot make our lives absurd. Finally,
the refutation of the Death Argument gives Nagel a chance to support the major claim
behind the refutation of the Time Argument (and hence perhaps make that reﬁitation
plausible), but he squanders the opportunity by presenting a weak version of the Death
Argument.

Does, then, the eventual inconsequentiality of our actions make our lives absurd?

Does our relatively puny size? Our short life span? Our mortality? Does one of these

30

things at least contribute to the absurdity of our lives? While I do not think my case
against Nagel's reﬁrtations of the Million Years Argument, the Size Argument, the Time
Argument, and the Death Argument gives us reason to believe the answer to any of the
questions is “yes,” I do think it gives us reason to believe the questions are good
ones—much better, anyway, than Nagel makes them out to be. If so, the four arguments

for absurdity warrant ﬁirther investigation.

CHAPTER 2

THE FIRST DOCTRINE

Nagel, as we have seen, believes the Million Years Argument, the Size Argument,
the Time Argument, and the Death Argument all fail to establish that human existence is
absurd. However, after having shown why these arguments do not succeed, he goes on to
state in “The Absurd” that they do “attempt to express something that is diﬂicult to state,
but ﬁrndamentally correct.” The alleged facts of human existence on which the bad
arguments turn, Nagel tells us, stand out as the result of stepping back and viewing our
lives far removed from them. From a detached and distant viewpoint, we human beings
look puny, our life spans very short, and our deeds insigniﬁcant—indeed human existence
as a whole looks puny, short, and insigniﬁcant. Now while the absurdity of human
existence cannot be inferred from any one of these particular observations, it can in part be
inferred ﬁ’om another observation from this viewpoint. Nagel concludes that though
incorrectly articulated, the absurdity the defenders of the bad arguments feel is both real
and justiﬁed.1 He then sets out what he takes to be the proper expression of this feeling,
the correct doctrine of absurdity. The purpose of this chapter is to unfold, and then

evaluate, this doctrine.

The Doctrine at a Glance
In making his case for the absurdity of our lives, Nagel begins by establishing what

in general terms would have to be true for human existence to be absurd. To this end, he

 

lNagel, “The Absurd,” 13, 21.

31

32

ﬁrst draws our attention away from our lives as such and turns it to particular situations
within our lives that we are apt to call absurd: “someone gives a complicated speech in
support of a motion that has already been passed; a notorious criminal is made president of
a major philanthropic foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded
announcement; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.” According to Nagel,
these situations are absurd precisely because they involve a “conspicuous discrepancy
between pretension or aspiration and reality.”2 Nagel unfortunately does not elaborate
here, but I think we can make a good guess as to what he has in mind. To begin, we
should recognize that the term ‘pretension’ has two connotations, one expressed by
‘pretentiousness’ and the other ‘allegation.’ To be pretentious is to make a claim, either
implicitly or explicitly, “to some distinction, importance, dignity, or excellence.” To allege
is simply “to assert without proof.”3 Now given the nature of the examples, Nagel by
pretension probably means pretentiousness. The speechgiver, the board members of the
philanthropic foundation, the lover, and the knight all believe and act as if they are
participants of what are commonly regarded as situations of some distinction, importance,
dignity, or excellence. More simply, we might say, each person believes and acts as if he
or she is a participant in what is commonly regarded as a sensible and serious type of
situation. This is the pretension. However, some aspect of each situation prevents it from
being a true instance of that sensible and serious type of situation: the motion has already
been passed; the president-elect is a notorious criminal; the voice on the other end of the
line is a recording; the knight loses his trousers. This is the reality. Consequently, each

situation involves a discrepancy between pretension and reality.4

 

21bid., I3.
3Webster's New World Dictionary, 3d college ed.

4This explanation of the quotation seems to reﬂect the following statement Nagel makes later in
the essay: “In ordinary life, to be sure, we do not judge a situation absurd unless we have in mind some
standards of seriousness. signiﬁcance, or harmony with which the [situation we judge] absurd can be
contrasted” (Nagel, “The Absurd,” 18).

33

It is important to bear in mind that Nagel sees these situations as involving not just
any discrepancy between pretension and reality, but a conspicuous one, and that only
situations which involve a conspicuous discrepancy are absurd.5 He again does not
elaborate, but perhaps he would say that a discrepancy between pretension and reality is
conspicuous whenever the aspect of a simulating situation that precludes it from being a
token of the type of sensible and serious situation it simulates is so deviant that it makes
the simulating situation a complete mockery of the serious and sensible type of situation,
and so makes the simulating situation ridiculous. The speechgiver gives a passionate
speech in support of a motion that has already been passed. That is absurd. Why?
Because the situation is ridiculous. And it is ridiculous because it makes a complete
mockery of an otherwise sensible and serious situation.

Nagel next turns to certain lives that are absurd. While he does not give any
examples, he seems to be thinking here of the severely delusional or insane: a four-foot
three-inch Tibetan woman who strives her whole life to play in the NBA; an American
man who spends his life persuading other United States citizens to declare independence
from Britain; the legendary Don Quixote. On Nagel's view, certain lives that are absurd
are such for the same basic reason absurd situations are absurd: these lives involve a
conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality. He might say that
just as absurd situations are mockeries of sensible and serious situations, these lives
pretend to be as sensible and serious as our own when in fact they are ridiculous.

Of course some absurd situations’within lives, along with a small number of lives
themselves which stand out as being absurd, do not make human existence as such absurd.
Consequently, we need to distinguish the sense in which situations and some lives are

absurd (what Nagel refers to as “conventional” absurdity) from another sense in which all

 

5Terrns that Nagel considers synonyms of ‘conspicuous discrepancy’ and that he uses in his texts
are ‘clash,’ ‘collision,’ and ‘contrast.’ On occasion, I shall use them too.

34

our lives are absurd (what he calls “philosophical” absurdity). Lives are absurd
conventionally when, according to Nagel, “it is usually possible to imagine some change
[other than suicide] that would remove the absurdity.” We could perhaps send the
Tibetan woman and American man to psychotherapists and get them to abandon their life-
long pursuits and take up reasonable ones as we have; and, to be sure, the speechgiver's
absurd situation will end soon enough on its own, if not even sooner with the help of his
colleagues. In contrast, when lives are absurd in the philosophical sense the absurdity is
“universal” and “inescapable, short of escape from life itself.”6 Thus an appropriate
example of a life that is absurd in this sense is any human life. It is this sense of absurdity,
not the conventional sense, that Nagel reminds us he means when he argues that our lives
are absurd.

However, Nagel does not discuss the conventional sense of absurdity only to
contrast it with the philosophical sense and thereby clarify his object of inquiry. His initial
aim in making his case, as I mentioned at the start, is to determine what in general would
have to obtain for human existence to be absurd. By considering simple instances of
conventional absurdity, he believes he arrives at what in general would make human
existence absurd: a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.7
Now having to his satisfaction established this condition (as well as clariﬁed his object of

inquiry), Nagel is ready to state the central claim of his doctrine of absurdity:

If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity, . . . it must arise from the perception
of something universal—some respect in which pretension and reality inevitably
clash for us all. This condition is supplied . . . by the collision between the

 

6Ibid., 13.

7Although he does not think it is signiﬁcant, Nagel does suggest one difference between the two
senses of absurdity. With conventional absurdity there is a sensible and serious context with which to
contrast the pretension, whereas with philosophical absurdity no such context “can be discovered” (Ibid..
18). I happen to think this difference is important and shall discuss it in detail later in the chapter.

35

seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding
everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.8

The pretension is that we all take many things seriously, especially our own lives (that is,
aspects of ourselves that deﬁne us: our deeds, personality, relationships, social standing,
ethnicity, nationality, political and religious afﬁliation, and the like). The reality is that the
seriousness of these things is arbitrary, or open to doubt. Such a discrepancy is
conspicuous. Therefore, our lives are absurd. While this basic dialectic is pretty clear
given the preceding discussion of conventional absurdity, much of its content needs to be
ﬂeshed out. I want to begin this task by making three general points about the doctrine,
after which I shall explain it, and them, in more detail.

First, what Nagel here contends makes our lives absurd is not a clash between
ourselves and the world. Our lives are not absurd because, say, we cannot help wanting
and seeking a rational universe (pretension and aspiration within) when the universe is in
fact dumb and disorderly (reality without), as Camus would have us believe.9 No, “the
absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the
world, but from a collision within ourselves.”l0 In particular, it derives from the clash
between our propensity to take things seriously and our being aware of the fact that the
seriousness of these things is arbitrary, or open to doubt—both of which are within us.

Second, the fact that absurdity arises from a discrepancy within us implies two
things. The ﬁrst is that not only are our present lives absurd, but our lives in any other

world would be absurd. If absurdity arises from a collision within us, no change outside

 

8Ibid., 13.

9“I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is
all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for
clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”
Albert Camus. “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien
(New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 21. Camus devotes the entire essay to an articulation of the absurd
and the proper response to it.

loNagel, “The Absurd,” 17.

36

us would make a difference. Even in a person-ﬁiendly Christian heaven our lives would
be absurd. The second thing implied by the fact that absurdity arises from a discrepancy
within us—speciﬁcally, from the clash between a certain propensity and a certain
awareness—is that our lives would not be absurd if we did not have either the propensity
or the awareness. As it turns out, ants and mice and other nonhuman animals enjoy
immunity from absurdity. While they might appropriately be described as having a
propensity to take things seriously,ll they surely do not have the capacity to be aware that
the seriousness of these things is arbitrary, or open to doubt. Hence their lives are not
absurd.12

Third, the central claim quoted above unfortunately lends itself to two
interpretations. These interpretations hinge on whether (1) we know only that we have no
reason to believe there is anything to be serious about (a skeptical view) or (2) we know
that there is nothing to be serious about (a bolder, nonskeptical view). While it may seem
from the above passage that the ﬁrst interpretation is the correct one, statements Nagel
goes on to make in the essay appear to support the second interpretation. These
statements focus on the arbitrariness of taking seriously the things we do and suggest that
such arbitrariness means these things unquestionably are not appropriate objects of
seriousness, rather than just being questionably serious. The apparent discrepancy here
calls for a thorough examination, for the two interpretations represent nothing less than
two distinct doctrines of absurdity. While in the remainder of this chapter I shall assume

the skeptical view is the correct one, I shall concentrate on the nonskeptical view in the

 

llJeffrey Gordon suggests that, despite appearances to the contrary. they do not really have this
propensity: “These creatures have, in reality, no view of their lives and are thus in fact incapable of
passionate devotion to them.” Jeffrey Gordon, “Nagel or Camus on the Absurd?” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 65 (1984): 19.

12Nagel, “The Absurd,” 21, 23.

37

next chapter and afterward remark on whether we are justiﬁed in attributing to Nagel one
of the two interpretations. ’

Now, as has been indicated, our propensity to take things seriously constitutes the
pretension of the conspicuous discrepancy. While Nagel never actually calls the
pretension a propensity, the term seems to reﬂect most accurately what he has in mind. It
encompasses both our regularly believing that certain things should be taken seriously and
our regularly acting on this belief. Moreover, the text makes clear that Nagel thinks that
believing certain things should be taken seriously implies believing these things really do
matter, or are objectively important. We can, then, alternatively describe the pretension as
involving the belief that things matter. Finally, Nagel associates the pretension with what
he calls “the internal perspective,” one of two general perspectives from which we view
ourselves and the world. The internal perspective is our generally unreﬂective, everyday
viewpoint, and from it we believe things matter and act on this belief.

Discrepant with this pretension is a certain reality: the fact that we have no reason
to take things seriously, or “no reason to believe that anything matters” and no reason to
act on the belief.13 As a reality, as a fact, the proposition that we have no reason to take
things seriously is, of course, true; and we recognize its truth after reasoning from the
“external perspective,” the other perspective from which we view ourselves and the world.
In contrast to the internal perspective, the external perspective is reﬂective and detached;
and, epistemically speaking, it is the “superior” one, at least in determining whether
anything is in fact important.” Therefore, just as pretension is associated with the internal
perspective, reality is associated with the external perspective. In fact, Nagel at times

describes the collision which constitutes our absurdity as one between the two viewpoints

 

13Ibid., 23.

l‘IIbitL 22.

38

themselves: “These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life
absurd.”ls
Now as this quotation suggests, we would be incorrect to think that the collision

between pretension and reality makes our lives absurd. The reason is that the collision
constituting our absurdity supposedly lies within us, and the reality—the fact that we have
no reason to believe anything matters—is clearly not something within us. What, then, is
the collision that makes our lives absurd, if not that between our propensity to take things
seriously and the fact that we have no reason to do so? The answer is the collision
between the pretension and the awareness of the reality, a collision which is wholly within
us. While this awareness may appear to be extraneous to Nagel's general condition of
absurdity (a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and reality), it actually is not.
Our being aware of the reality is just what, on his view, makes the discrepancy between
pretension and reality conspicuous. We are aware that we in fact have no reason to
believe things matter, yet at the same time we believe, and act on the belief, that they do.
It is this clash, and not the other, that strikes us as ridiculous and hence makes our lives
absurd. ‘6

Of course our lives would not be absurd if we could avoid the collision. However,
that is not possible. Insofar as we are reﬂective, rational beings and the proposition that
we have no reason to believe anything matters is the product of sound reasoning, the
awareness of this proposition is unavoidable. And insofar as we are constitutionally
incapable of ceasing to act on the belief that things matter—a fact that manifests itself in
how seriously we all take our lives—the pretension is unavoidable as well. It is, then,

because of this inescapable conspicuous discrepancy within us that we are forced to

 

”Ibid., 14.

16Later in the chapter I shall discuss at length this “awareness condition,” including Quentin
Smith's view that it is not a part of the doctrine.

39

conclude that we are truly absurd in the philosophical sense. As Nagel sums up our
predicament: “Humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and
the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes ﬁom
watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand. Without developing the illusion that they are
able to escape from their highly speciﬁc and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub
specie aeternitatis—and the view is at once sobering and comical.””

Several questions arise at this point. What exactly does Nagel mean by the internal
and external perspectives? Why is value skepticism the conclusion of the external
perspective, and is this conclusion really warranted? Is it true that we all take our lives
seriously, and if so, are we really incapable of changing our ways? And just why would
the conspicuous discrepancy, and hence absurdity, remain in any other world? Nagel
addresses these questions, and his answers both clarify his doctrine of absurdity and
constitute his defense of it. We should, then, look at these answers before considering the

plausibility of the doctrine.

The Doctrine Up Closer and Defended

Nagel characterizes the external perspective as the viewpoint “without
presuppositions,” implying that he sees the internal perspective as the viewpoint with
presuppositions.” To say we see the world, including ourselves, with presuppositions, is
perhaps to say we hold positive beliefs (that is, beliefs that do not express skepticism)
about it whose truth we take for granted. In contrast, to say we view the world without
presuppositions is to say we do not possess any such beliefs about it. Consider three
people: Lymon, Amelia, and Marvin. Lymon lives his life unreﬂectively, never questioning

the beliefs his parents inculcated in him. Amelia does reﬂect on her beliefs and, in view of

 

l7Ibid., 15.

“mid, 20—21.

40

new observations and insights, renounces some of them ﬁom time to time and replaces
them with others, although she has never questioned the veracity of all her beliefs. Marvin
is much like Amelia, except he does not take any of his beliefs for granted; he has critically
reﬂected on them all. Now both Lymon and Amelia represent the internal perspective,
Lymon purely so insofar as he has never critically evaluated any of his beliefs. The two of
them pre-reﬂectively make judgments about the world based on positive beliefs about it
which they have never questioned, that is, based on presuppositions. Marvin, on the other
hand, does not assume any of his beliefs is true. If he makes any judgment about the
world, it is based on justiﬁed beliefs. His radical reﬂective perspective without
presuppositions, calling all positive beliefs into question, is none other than the external
perspective. Metaphors Nagel uses to describe this viewpoint are “sub specie
aeternitatis” and “nebula's-eye view.”'9

Given that these two perspectives make some sense, why do we conclude, and
why are we justiﬁed in concluding, from the external perspective that we have no reason
to believe anything matters? The reason, according to Nagel, is this: “We step back to
ﬁnd that the whole system of justiﬁcation and criticism which controls our choices and
supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question,
that we should not know how to defend without circularity. . . . If they [our usual
standards of what is important] are called into question we can justify them only by
reference to themselves, uselessly.”20

From the internal perspective we judge that certain things do not matter relative to
other things. Relative to my getting a college degree, not getting a trout after a day of
ﬁshing does not matter. This is not to say I think leaving the stream with an empty creel

does not matter. Sometimes I am upset walking back to the truck with nothing in my

 

‘9Ibid., 15,21, 23.

2°1bid.. 15. 17.

41

creel—especially if a ﬁshing buddy has something in his. However, when I later reﬂect on
my attitude and behavior, I am embarrassed that I let an activity such as ﬁshing affect me
in the way that it did; that is, I am embarrassed that I took it “so seriously.” This
judgment stems from comparing my ﬁshing performance to perhaps some other
performances of mine that at this level of reﬂection I think really do matter, such as
earning a college degree. The reasons I had for taking ﬁshing seriously seem to me bad
ones from this wider context.

Well, I learn from this bit of philosophical reﬂection. Before long I may similarly
call into question my reasons for thinking earning a college degree is important, and
ultimately my reasons for believing anything I think is important. At this point I shall not
compare what, after the deepest reﬂection, I consider really important with “what is really
important.”2' No, I do not ﬁnd any such objective value. All I can conclude is that I do
not have any reason to believe anything really matters. In other words, I cannot step
outside my system of beliefs, look outside it, and discover what, if anything, really matters;
however, I can step outside my belief system, look back upon it, and afﬁrm—with
epistemic warrant—that the supposed good reasons to which I appeal from the internal
perspective to support my beliefs about what matters are considered good by me only
because I—a particular creature put together in a particular way—consider them good. I
can also affirm, and, again, am justiﬁed in doing so, that I am condemned to circular
reasoning in defending what ultimately matters and that such reasoning is perfectly
worthless.

Nagel believes this skeptical conclusion about mattering “resembles” skepticism

about the external world, which he also thinks is irreﬁitable.22 The external perspective,

 

erbid, 17.

22Nagel states in a footnote: “1 am aware that skepticism about the external world is widely
thought to have been refuted, but I have remained convinced of its irrefutability since being exposed at
Berkeley to Thompson Clarke's largely unpublished ideas on the subject” (Ibid.. 19). Clark may have
voiced these ideas in an essay ( to which Nagel refers in “Moral Luck”) published one year after “The

42

he thinks, produces both the knowledge claim that we do not have any good reason to
believe anything about the world around us and the knowledge claim that we do not have
any good reason to believe anything about value, and it produces both skepticisms in much

the same way. He writes:

Both epistemological skepticism and a sense of the absurd can be reached via
initial doubts posed within systems of evidence and justiﬁcation that we accept,
and can be stated without violence to our ordinary concepts. We can ask not only
why we should believe there is a ﬂoor under us, but also why we should believe
the evidence of our senses at all—and at some point the framable questions will
have outlasted the answers. Similarly, we can ask not only why we should take
aspirin, but why we should take trouble over our own comfort at all. The fact that
we shall take the aspirin without waiting for an answer to this last question does
not show that it is an unreal question. We shall also continue to believe there is a
ﬂoor under us without waiting for an answer to the other question. In both cases
it is this unsupported natural conﬁdence that generates skeptical doubts; so it
cannot be used to settle them.23

Now, what about the third question: do we really have a propensity to take things
seriously, and if so, why could we not simply abandon it if we were convinced it was
unwarranted? (If we could abandon it, the conspicuous discrepancy would be escapable,
and consequently human existence would not be absurd.) In answering this question,
Nagel encourages us to recognize the extent to which the average person takes his or her
life and other things seriously: “Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his
appearance, his health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-
knowledge, the quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and ﬁiends, how well he does
his job, whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life
is a ﬁrll-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.”24 We

might, too, recall my ﬁshing behavior I mentioned above—and I should add to the story

 

Absurd.” Thompson Clarke, “The Legacy of Skepticism,” Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972): 754—69.
Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck” in Mortal Questions, 24—38.

23Nagel, “The Absurd,” 19.

24Ibid., 15.

43

that while I am eventually embarrassed at being ill-tempered over not catching any trout, I
might well be crabby the next time I leave the stream empty-handed.

While Nagel's point that most of us do take our lives and other things seriously
may seem plausible enough, to establish the universal claim that human existence is
absurd, he needs to show that “we cannot live human lives without energy and attention,
nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than
others.”25 We might doubt that he can establish this bold claim, especially in view of
serious devotees of some Buddhist and Hindu sects whose main aim, put negatively, is
complete detachment from worldly concerns (or what would seem to amount to the
annihilation of the internal perspective) and who more or less appear to succeed in this
endeavor. However, the term ‘serious devotees’ might betray a pretense that even these
people cannot escape, for, as Nagel suggests: “Insofar as this self-etiolation is the result of
effort, will-power, asceticism, and so forth, it requires that one take oneself seriously as an
individual—that one be willing to take considerable trouble to avoid being creaturely and
absurd. Thus one may undermine the aim of unworldliness by pursuing it too
vigorously.”26 Having said this, Nagel does concede it is possible that some persons live
less absurdly than the rest of us, and perhaps Buddhist or Hindu devotees are the
paradigm cases. Notwithstanding, he believes the universal claim that human existence is
absurd holds.

Finally, exactly why would the collision between the internal and external
perspectives (and hence absurdity) remain in any other world with us in it? Nagel's answer
to this question seems to be simply that we recognize that the best defense we could give

in support of our lives mattering in any given world would be a defense whose merit, in

 

251bid., l4. Emphasis mine.

2‘llbidq 22. This statement brings to mind Nietzsche's claim that Schopenhauer's asceticism was
not a counter-example to the will to power but, just the opposite. a manifestation of it.

44

the end, would only amount to our being satisﬁed with the defense. He has us consider

“the kingdom, power and glory of God,” and he says:

It is as legitimate to ﬁnd ultimate justiﬁcation there as to ﬁnd it earlier, among the
details of individual life. But this does not alter the fact that justiﬁcations come to
an end when we are content to have them end—when we do not ﬁnd it necessary
to look any further. If we can step back from the purposes of individual life and
doubt their point, we can step back also from the . . . kingdom, power, and glory
of God, and put all these things into question in the same way. What seems to us
to confer meaning, justiﬁcation, signiﬁcance, does so in virtue of the fact that we
need no more reasons after a certain point. . . .

. . . There does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us)
about which unsettlable doubts could not arise.27

Nagel's basic idea appears to be that just as we can doubt the importance and
seriousness of our earthly lives, we could as easily call into question the importance and
seriousness of our lives in any possible other life, including any afterlife. Consider the
possibility that Christianity is true. Imagine Jesus returns to the earth in the year 2000.
Although we, or at least some of us, may have grounds to worry about our standing in the
eyes of the Lord, we nevertheless put these worries aside and begin to rejoice at the
prospect of a glorious afterlife. We happily say to ourselves and to each other, “I'll be
with the people I love, forever—and no more pain and suffering!” However, when we get
around to reﬂecting on this revelation, we recognize that we rejoice just because of the
way we have been put together; had we been constituted differently, we may have met

Jesus's second coming, and all that it means, with despair or laughter or indifference. With

 

2'7Ibid., 16—17. Some of Nagel's critics believe that his argument here contradicts his objection to
one of the four so called “bad arguments” for human absurdity he discusses earlier in the essay. the
argument 1 labeled the Death Argument in chapter I. Ironically. one of these commentators, Jeffrey
Gordon, gives an objection to Nagel's doctrine of absurdity that appears to be essentially Nagel's objection
to the Death Argument. (I discuss Gordon's objection below.) Ironic also is the similarity between this
passage and ones in Nagel's most recent book. The Last ll’ord. such as: “Since all justiﬁcations come to an
end with what the people who accept them ﬁnd acceptable and not in need of further justiﬁcation, no
conclusion. it is thought. can claim validity beyond the community whose acceptance validates it.” The
irony is that in The Last Word Nagel sets out to undermine the argument expressed in this quotation, the
very argument on which his doctrine of absurdity in “The Absurd” seems to depend. Thonras Nagel, The
Last Word, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4—5.

45

this truth we come to realize the possibility that the importance and seriousness with
which we regard Christianity is only skin deep, that is, not objectively warranted. While
we may try to convince ourselves, and ask Jesus and God to convince us, of the
importance and seriousness of Christianity, we shall understand that what counts as
convincing may be contingent on the particular way we are made up. In other words, all
possible justiﬁcations would be from within our own particular system of beliefs, and so
they could not be used independently to justify our high regard for Christianity. Our
doubts would be, as Nagel says, “unsettlable.”28

This concludes my presentation of one interpretation of Nagel's doctrine. In sum,
we humans are creatures who naturally view ourselves and the world both from the inside
and from the outside. From the inside our lives and other things appear important, and
consequently we take them seriously. However, from the outside we see that we have no
reason to believe anything is important, and hence no reason to take anything seriously. In
leading serious lives without any good reason, we resemble the intense, ceaseless struggle
of an ant trying to get to the top of a sand heap, whose endeavor strikes us as somewhat
silly. Yet unlike the ant, we are aware that our ant-like behavior lacks justiﬁcation, and in
the face of this awareness we carry on in the same serious way. This difference makes our
lives more than somewhat silly; it makes them downright ridiculous. It makes them
absurd. And our lives would be absurd in any other world we inhabited, for the external

view of ourselves and the world would always be at hand. In any world this view would

 

28We might question why our doubts would be unsettlable when it seems we could ask God, an
omniscient being, about these doubts. Perhaps, then, when Nagel writes that “there does not appear to be
any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise.” he means
‘conceivablc world (containing us and not containing an omniscient being).’ If not. then this part of his
doctrine seems implausible. It does, that is, unless the basic interpretation of Nagel's doctrine that is
being presented in this chapter is off the mark. 1 have mentioned that in the next chapter I shall present
an alternative interpretation of the doctrine. Perhaps that interpretation will make more sense of Nagel's
unqualiﬁed claim that “there does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which
unsettlable doubt could not arise.” We shall see.

46

generate the same doubt as to the objectivity of value, as well as the realization that this

doubt cannot be stiﬂed noncircularly.

The Awareness Condition
Now what about the plausibility of Nagel's doctrine of absurdity? It seems that
possible objections fall into one of two categories. One category contains objections to
Nagel's general conditions of absurdity; the other contains objections that do not contest

his general conditions but question whether those conditions are met. I shall start by

 

considering an objection that falls in the ﬁrst category and then turn to one belonging to
the second.

Richard Taylor, in an essay on the meaning of life, discusses the life-cycle of the
glow worm as a potential paradigm of meaningless existence. This blind creature lives on
the walls and ceilings of dark caverns in New Zealand, and its life consists of attracting
insects by its glowing tail, entangling them in a thin, gooey ﬁlament it discharges, and
eating them. After months of this single activity it metamorphoses into a winged adult and
within a few days mates, lays eggs, and dies, often from being eaten by a larval glow
worm. Taylor writes: “This has been going on for millions and millions of years, and to no
end other than that the same meaningless cycle may continue for another millions of
years.”29

We might well think the glow worm's life is a paradigm not only of meaningless
existence but also of absurd existence. However, Nagel appears to maintain that a
necessary condition of absurdity is self-consciousness, and if that is correct the glow
worm's life cannot be absurd. Is an awareness condition truly a part of Nagel's doctrine?

If so, when exactly is the condition met; and is Nagel, or anyone who would include some

 

29Taylor, 145.

47

kind of awareness condition, correct—must a creature really be self-conscious and aware
of certain aspects of its life for its life to be absurd?

Not all of Nagel's critics agree that he maintains that an awareness of a certain kind
is necessary for our lives to be absurd. Quentin Smith, for example, criticizes Jonathan
Westphal and Christopher Cherry's ﬁrst counter-example to Nagel's doctrine, which
involves a man devoted to music whose lifestyle does not permit him to take up the
external perspective. Westphal and Cherry contend that such a life is for the man “not to
entertain the thought, or not to be able to entertain it, that music might ultimately be
insigniﬁcant. . . . It is for him to be absorbed in music. His absorption destroys the
skeptical or external perspective, and renders it ﬂimsy, or meaningless, or absurd.” Smith
points out that the counter-example shows that the man is “psychologically immune from
the external perspective, in the sense that he does not adopt or is not psychologically
capable of adopting this perspective.” However, Smith argues that “such psychological
immunity is irrelevant to Nagel's theory, which implies only that no person is logically
immune from the external perspective.”30

Does any textual evidence support Smith's interpretatiOn of the doctrine? In his
discussion of conventional absurdity, Nagel does appear to suggest that absurdity can exist
prior to any kind of awareness. He states that “we are not always willing or able to
extricate ourselves from a position whose absurdity has become clear to us.”31 By
‘absurdity becoming clear’ he apparently means ‘becoming aware of absurdity’; and if that
is true, his view seems to be that awareness does not in part make a situation absurd, but

only makes an already absurd situation clear to someone that it is absurd, which is to say

 

30Jonathan Westth and Christopher Cherry, “Is Life Absurd?” in Life and Death, 99. The
essay ﬁrst appeared in Philosophy 65 (1990): 199—203. Quentin Smith, “Concerning the Absurdity of
Life,” Philosophy 66 (1991), 119—20.

31Nagel, “The Absurd,” l3.

48

that an awareness condition is not a part of the doctrine. Smith would appear to be
correct.

However, statements Nagel makes later in the essay clearly contradict this view.
He states, for example, that “a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation
(even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises)”32 In addition, he

argues:

[A mouse] is not absurd, because he lacks the capacities for self-consciousness and
self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse. If that did
happen, his life would become absurd, since self-awareness would not make him
cease to be a mouse and would not enable him to rise above his mousely strivings.
Bringing his new-found self-consciousness with him, he would have to return to

his meager yet frantic life, ﬁlll of doubts that he was unable to answer, but also full
of purposes that he was unable to abandon.33

In yet another place, Nagel states that our absurdity lies “not in the fact that . . . an
external view [from which all the contingency and speciﬁcity of our aims and pursuits
become clear] can be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without
ceasing to be the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded?“ His point
here seems to be that some other creature recognizing the fact which the external
perspective reveals—or that plain fact alone, absent any perceiver—would not be
sufficient to make our lives absurd. It is crucial the fact gets recognized, and it is we who
recognize it. Finally, Nagel at one point entertains possible ways in which we might avoid
absurdity. One such way, he suggests, would be to avoid the external perspective and the
“relevant self-consciousness” produced by it. In accepting such avoidance as a legitimate

way to escape absurdity, he again clearly seems to espouse self-consciousness as a

 

32Ibid., 23. Emphasis mine.
33Ibid., 21.

34Ibid., 15.

49

necessary condition of absurdity.” It turns out, then, that the weight of evidence is
against Smith. Despite the one apparent counter-statement, the most plausible
interpretation would seem to be that Nagel believes a certain self-awareness is a necessary
condition of absurdity.36

Let us be clear, however, about the actual awareness to which Nagel refers. It
would be incorrect to take, as it seems Steven Luper-Foy does, the relevant awareness to

be that of the discrepancy between pretension and reality. Luper-Foy writes:

Earlier Nagel told us that creatures capable of skepticism can see that there is no
reason to be serious, yet they cannot help but be, so that there is a discrepancy
between pretension and reality. Now Nagel wants to add that the existence of this
discrepancy is not enough to make us absurd. We are absurd only if we see the
discrepancy. But why on earth not call the discrepancy itself absurdity? Why
would what we see sub specie aeternitatis strike us as absurd unless what we were
seeing was our absurdity?37

Luper-Foy fails to recognize that what in fact we crucially “see” sub specie
aeternitatis is, as he himself writes in the ﬁrst sentence of the passage, “that there is no
reason to be serious”—that is, the reality of the discrepancy between pretension and
reality, not, as he claims in the passage, the discrepancy itself. Consequently, Luper-Foy

fails to recognize as well that our seeing this reality is what makes the discrepancy

 

35Incidentally, Nagel believes we cannot consciously avoid the external perspective, “for to do
that we would have to be aware of the viewpoint we were refusing to adopt.” However, we could avoid it.
he says, by not acquiring it in the ﬁrst place or by forgetting it (Ibid.. 21).

36Jeffrey Gordon, Steven Luper-Foy, and I.J.H. Williams all agree (although. as I explain below.
it is not clear that the latter two fully understand Nagel's awareness condition). Gordon states: “If human
beings never actually employed their capacity for viewing their lives in their arbitrariness, then there
would be no absurdity. . . . Nagel thus commits himself to the paradoxical view that the life of the person
who never perceives the arbitrariness of our human condition is not absurd” (Gordon. 19). Luper-Foy
writes in a footnote: “The existence of this discrepancy [between pretension and reality] is not enough to
make us absurd. We are absurd only if we see the discrepancy" (Luper-Foy, 99). And Williams remarks
on Nagel's passage about the mouse: “The life of a mouse is not absurd. This is because a mouse lacks
‘the capacities for self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a
mouse.’ Because a person is self-conscious he is able to see that he is only a man and therefore that his
life is absurd” (I.J.H. Williams, “Scepticism and The Absurd,” Philosophical Investigations 9 [1986]:
312-313).

37Ibid., 99, footnote 30.

50

conspicuous, not, as he thinks, our seeing the discrepancy. Now after gaining this
essential insight from the external perspective, we might from the same perspective also
observe the conspicuous discrepancy between it and a pretension of ours—and, if we are
good Nagelians, acknowledge that we lead absurd lives. This second awareness, however,
is not necessary to make our lives absurd. Incidentally, the nonessential second awareness
is what Nagel refers to when he states that “we are not always willing or able to extricate
ourselves from a position whose absurdity has become clear to us.” Thus this statement,
which above I offered as a counter-example to Nagel's countenancing an awareness
condition, turns out not to be a counter-example at all. That a situation we are in is
absurd before we are aware it is absurd is perfectly consistent with Nagel's awareness
condition.

In sum, the awareness to which Nagel refers is that of a reality, not of absurdity,
and such an awareness turns the discrepancy between this reality and a pretension of ours
into a conspicuous one, and hence makes our lives absurd. The awareness makes the
discrepancy conspicuous, in part, because it produces a certain justiﬁed belief (that we
have no reason to believe anything matters) that contradicts another belief of ours (that
things matter), the latter of which we continue to hold and act on despite the former.

Thus the awareness is crucial because without it that contradiction would not obtain, as it
does not in the case of the ant or mouse.

Is, then, Nagel's awareness condition, or any similar condition for that matter, truly
a necessary condition of absurdity? Nagel does little more than assert his awareness
condition, so we can only anticipate what he might have argued on its behalf, and then
evaluate that. In this effort, we might return to his examples of conventional absurdity
whose simplicity he used to establish the general condition of absurdity. We may
remember that the ﬁrst example involves a speechgiver who gives a long, passionate
speech in support of a motion that has already been passed. Even though Nagel never

says, we can assume (given Nagel's awareness condition) that the speechgiver is aware he

51

has absolutely no reason to believe the motion has not passed. Now the question arises:
would not there be a signiﬁcant difference between, on the one hand, this speechgiver's
situation and, on the other, another speechgiver's situation that is the same except for the
fact that this speechgiver is not aware she has absolutely no reason to believe the motion
has not passed? We might imagine, in the ﬁrst case, the speechgiver in the back chambers
acknowledging to himself that for all he knows a vote has been taken on the motion and
then, despite that acknowledgment, opening the door to the legislative hall, parading to
the podium, and passionately giving his speech. “How absurd!” we would probably
exclaim. Then we might imagine, in the second case, the speechgiver in the back
chambers ready to give her speech, but not in the least aware that she has no reason to
believe the motion has not been passed. (She might think, wrongly, that she has reason to
believe it has not passed, or she might not have given the matter of its status any thought.)
Again, would we be as quick to declare “How absurd!” about her situation? It seems that
glaring ridiculousness, that utter nonsense, of the ﬁrst situation does not characterize the
second situation—and it seems the reason has to do with what the ﬁrst speechgiver is
aware of and what the second speechgiver is not. Similarly, regarding philosophical
absurdity, the glaring ridiculousness that stems from (1) knowing we have absolutely no
reason to believe anything matters while at the same time (2) believing and acting as if
things do matter, would seem to be absent if instead of condition ‘(l)’ obtaining we did
not recognize that we have absolutely no reason to believe anything matters. Therefore, it
appears that awareness of there being no reason to believe anything matters is a necessary
condition of absurdity.

I ﬁnd some of the reasoning in this argument persuasive. I agree that the two
speechgiving situations are not equally? ridiculous and that the reason has to do with what
each speechgiver knows or does not know about his or her situation. Similarly, in
considering another example Nagel gives, I would agree that the situation of the lover

who declares his love over the phone to a recorder, quite aware he has no reason to

52

believe the voice on the other end of the line is really his beloved, is more absurd than, say,
the similar situation where the caller thinks (wrongly) that she has reason to believe the
voice is really her beloved.

However, in saying all of this, I only mean to say that awareness of the sort Nagel
has in mind can heighten the absurdity of certain situations which are already absurd, and
can perhaps make some situations absurd which otherwise would not be. I do not mean to
suggest that I believe awareness is a necessary condition of absurdity. I do not believe it
is.38 To my mind, the situations involving the second speechgiver and second caller are
ridiculous, so I think the thought experiments undermine, rather than support, the view
that awareness is a necessary condition of absurdity. Jeffrey Gordon, for one, would
agree, as he makes the same point using the example of the legendary naked emperor: “If
the naked emperor were aware of his nakedness, but felt compelled to appear thus in
public nonetheless, this would surely be absurd. But he is no less a ﬁgure of absurdity
when he persists in the belief that he is clothed.”39 Now, admittedly, my view that the
second speechgiver's and second caller’s situations are ridiculous is based on nothing much
more than intuition. In the case of the second speechgiver, I simply imagine a woman
giving a long, passionate speech in support of an already passed motion, unaware of the
fact that she has no reason to believe the motion has not been passed, and I ﬁnd the
situation ridiculous. That is all. However, I do not believe this basis of my judgment is

grounds for criticism. I cannot think of some better criterion that could be used to decide

 

38While Gordon, Luper-Foy, and Smith neither acknowledge nor deny my view that awareness
can make certain situations absurd which otherwise would not be or that awareness may heighten
absurdity, they do all maintain that awareness is not a necessary condition of absurdity. I have already
discussed Luper-Foy's argument above. As for Smith, he does not give an argument (see Smith, 119-20).
Gordon's discussion is by far the most substantial, although he couches it in an interpretation of Nagel's
basic doctrine that differs from the one I have been presenting (see Gordon, 18—20).

39Ibid., 19.

53

the matter. As for the plausibility of the judgment itself, that I suppose would depend on
whether my intuition is a common one. My hunch is that it is.

However, one might complain that my intuition, whether a common one or not, must
be off the mark, for it implies that a lawmaker sitting quietly in his chair
thinking—wrongly, as it turns out—that a motion has not already been passed is the
principal subject in an absurd situation. It implies that the situation is absurd because a
clash exists between pretension and reality: (1) his claim that it has not yet been passed
versus (2) the fact that it has. However, to say this lawmaker's situation is absurd is surely
incorrect. F alsely believing something does not in itself constitute absurdity. Something
more is needed, and that something is, as Nagel maintains, awareness of the fact.

The problem with this objection is that the objector has signiﬁcantly changed the
situation. If by pretension we mean a claim “to some distinction, importance, dignity, or
excellence” (as I have indicated I believe Nagel means by the term), then the new situation
the objector describes involves no pretension. Unlike the ﬁrst two speechgivers, who
display pretentiousness in giving their serious speeches, the lawmaker sitting quietly in the
chair wrongly thinking the motion has not passed is not making a claim, either implicitly or
explicitly, to some distinction, importance, dignity, or excellence—he is not “playing the
fool,” as we say. Consequently, in this new situation there is no discrepancy between
pretension and reality, and ipsofacto no absurdity. My intuition, then, does not imply that
this lawmaker's situation is absurd.

I think there is another good objection to Nagel's awareness condition, but it is a
different kind of objection. It does not show that the awareness condition is not a
necessary condition of absurdity, but rather shows that if it were, human existence would
not be absurd, which is to say that the condition is self-defeating for Nagel or anyone else
who would argue both that awareness is a requirement of absurdity and that our lives are
absurd. The objection is simply that if awareness of the kind Nagel has in mind is in fact a

necessary condition of absurdity, then the phenomenon of absurdity would be like that of a

54

backache: some people are victims of it all the time; some people are victims only from
time to time; and others elude it altogether. But of course this view of absurdity
contradicts the thesis that human existence as such is absurd. Thus Nagel and others like
him cannot at the same time maintain that awareness is a necessary condition of absurdity
and that human existence is absurd.

To escape the horns of this dilemma Nagel apparently would have to argue that the
backache analogy is really a disanalogy. He, at the very least, would have to maintain that
(1) most of us have become aware of the fact that we have no reason to believe anything
matters and (2) most of us are much of the time aware of the fact. However, I do not see
how he could successfully defend these two claims. Regarding the ﬁrst, I doubt my
ﬁiends who are not philosophers have seriously questioned the objective importance of
everything they consider important. I doubt, for instance, that these friends have seriously
questioned the importance of (to borrow one of Nagel's own examples) preventing a child
from putting his or her hand on a hot stove. And my best guess is that more people than
not have never questioned, in a wholesale manner, the seriousness of all the things they
take seriously—let alone gone one step further and concluded that they in fact have no
reason to take anything seriously. Now even if I were mistaken about the ﬁrst claim, the
second claim suggests that we are usually aware of the fact that we have no reason to
believe anything matters when we are at work, when we play and watch sports, when we
listen to music, when we have sex. That we are for the most part aware of the fact at
these times is, to my mind, patently false.

If Nagel's awareness condition is as self-destructive as I think this objection makes
it out to be, then perhaps I have not interpreted it correctly, despite that straightforward
statement in the essay which supports my interpretation (“The situation is not absurd until
the perception arises. . . .”). Maybe ‘being aware of the reality’ means only one have the
capacity to be aware of the reality. The passage about the mouse is consistent with this

interpretation: a mouse avoids absurdity “because he lacks the capacities for self-

55

consciousness and self-transcendence” (emphasis mine). Also, when Nagel states that our
absurdity lies “not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact
that we ourselves can take it” (emphasis mine), he seems to be suggesting that only
potential awareness, not actual awareness, is necessary for absurdity.

Despite these statements, the alternative interpretation of the awareness condition
seems to throw the baby out with the bath water.40 Central to Nagel's doctrine, we know,
is the view that “the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our
expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves.” This inner collision
involves a propensity to believe, and to act on the belief, that certain things matter and an
awareness that in fact we have no reason to believe anything matters. The alternative
interpretation would in effect eliminate the awareness, which would in turn prevent the
essential inner collision from occurring. No inner conspicuous discrepancy would actually
arise from our only potentially recognizing that we have no reason to believe anything
matters. And nowhere does Nagel state that a potential conspicuous discrepancy is
sufficient for absurdity. Moreover, if the alternative interpretation of the awareness
condition were what Nagel has in mind, then he would refuse to consider the question of
whether we humans can avoid being aware of the reality. But he considers just this

question in the following passage:

Given that the transcendental step is natural to us humans, can we avoid absurdity
by refusing to take that step and remaining entirely within our sublunar lives?
Well, we cannot refuse consciously, for to do that we would have to be aware of
the viewpoint we were reﬁising to adopt. The only way to avoid the relevant self-
consciousness would be either never to attain it or to forget it—neither of which
can be achieved by the will.“1

 

“Gordon, too. interprets Nagel's awareness condition not as a capacity to be aware, but actual
awareness, as is indicated by the passage 1 cited earlier: “If human beings never actually employed their
capacity for viewing their lives in their arbitrariness. then there would be no absurdity. . . . Nagel thus
commits himself to the paradoxical view that the life of the person who never perceives the arbitrariness
of our human condition is not absurd” (Gordon, 19).

4|Nagel, “The Absurd,” 21. Interestingly, Nagel here shies away from denying that awareness
can be avoided.

56

One might still ask: what if Nagel had intended the alternative interpretation of the
awareness condition? A potential conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and reality
plagues our minds but not a mouse's, and that is why our lives are absurd and a mouse's is
not. Further, this criterion of absurdity squares nicely with the intuition that the second
speechgiver's situation is absurd despite she not being cognizant of the fact that she has no
reason to believe the motion has not passed. She has the potential to recognize the
fact—and that is what is crucial.

As interesting as this new doctrine of absurdity might be, I do not ﬁnd it any more
plausible than the one I have been attributing to Nagel. For suppose the second
speechgiver we have been imagining gets into a bad car accident while driving home from
the hall where she had just delivered her speech. She survives the accident but suffers
such severe brain damage that she no longer has the capacity to understand the simple idea
of a motion's having been passed. However, she does still understand the notion of giving
a speech in support of a motion, and in fact the ﬁrst thing she wants to do when she is up
and around is give that same lengthy, passionate speech she gave right before her
accident—and that is what she does. Now if we ﬁnd her ﬁrst speechgiving situation
absurd, do we not also ﬁnd her second one so? In the ﬁrst case she has the ability to
discover the motion already passed; in the second case she does not. Why is this
difference crucial? The second situation still mocks a sensible and serious situation; it is
still ridiculous. It is equally absurd, is it not?

If, then, awareness is not a necessary condition of absurdity, are we justiﬁed in
dismissing Nagel's doctrine? Gordon, for one, does not think so. He states that “at worst,
Nagel . . . [is] guilty of conﬁrsing the matter [of absurdity] by misplaced emphasis.”42
What he means by this is that Nagel does not need to stress, and hence should not have

stressed, the awareness of a supposed reality; if Nagel can establish that reality alone, this

 

”Gordon. 20.

 

57

might well constitute a discrepancy, and one that is conspicuous enough to make our lives
absurd. I think Gordon is correct here. To refute the doctrine, we need, it seems, to show
either (1) that Nagel has not established at least one side of the supposed discrepancy (the
reality or the pretension) or (2) that the discrepancy is not conspicuous. In contrast to the
objection to the awareness condition, which belongs to the category of objections that
criticize Nagel's general conditions of absurdity themselves, both of these objections fall
into the category of objections that purport to show his general conditions of absurdity are
not met. I shall in the remainder of this chapter advance the second objection. In the
second half of chapter 3, I shall present the ﬁrst objection in response to an alternative

interpretation of the doctrine in “The Absurd.”

C onspicuousness

I would like to begin with an objection Jeffrey Gordon raises. Even though I shall
end up criticizing it, I think it helps put my own objection into context. Also, while
Gordon does not consistently interpret Nagel's doctrine as I have above, his objection does
seem to be directed at this interpretation. He questions Nagel's claim that we have no
reason to believe anything matters. According to Gordon, while it is logically possible
that our ultimate concerns are really unimportant, we do have reason to believe they are
important. Apparently for Gordon this reason amounts to these concerns of ours being
practically beyond doubt. Could we genuinely doubt that “children ought to be protected
from ﬁre,” that “justice is preferable to tyranny”? Could we ever be truly skeptical of the
“importance of the lives of those we love as to require some higher validation of our
judgment,” of the “importance of friendship”? Gordon contends that “in a world such as
this one, we should say, peopled by beings such as we ourselves, certain concerns remain
unassailably valid, and this will be evident to any conceivable consciousness whose

judgment we can respect.” Thus at the very least the burden of proof concerning the truth

 

58

of value skepticism lies heavy on the shoulders of Nagel and fellow value skeptics, and as
long as this is so, taking our lives seriously is not ridiculous and hence not absurd.43

This objection may appear ironic, for it looks like an elaboration of Nagel's own
objection to one of the four “bad arguments” for absurdity he discusses earlier in the
essay, the one I labeled the Death Argument. There, we might recall, Nagel states:
“Chains of justiﬁcation come repeatedly to an end within life. . . . No ﬁrrther justiﬁcation is
needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibition of the
work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove.” Of
course if these actions of ours are intrinsically justiﬁed, if their objective value is self-
evident, if they are, as Nagel puts it, “self-justifying,” then the claim that we have no
reason to believe anything matters is false, and so is Nagel's own doctrine of absurdity.44
In the last section of chapter 3, I shall discuss this apparent inconsistency, which some of
Nagel's critics, including Gordon, ﬁnd vexing.

Nagel's apparent inconsistency aside, is Gordon's objection plausible? One
possible Nagelian response might be that it begs the question against the conclusion of
Nagel's argument for absurdity. Nagel might suggest Gordon's claim that certain concerns
of ours are indubitable is actually a product of the internal perspective and therefore is
perfectly worthless in deciding whether these concerns really do matter. Had Gordon not
forgotten the important distinction between the two perspectives, he would have
recognized that just as the external perspective generates skepticism concerning the
existence of the material world, so too does it produce value skepticism; and just as our
ﬁrm conviction coming from the internal perspective that a material world exists does not
shake the logic of epistemological skepticism, so too our strong intuition from the internal

perspective that certain concerns of ours matter fails to do any damage to the conclusion

 

43Ibid., 23—25.

44Nagel, “The Absurd.” 12.

 

59

reached from the external perspective that we ultimately have no reason to believe these
concerns really do matter.

I ﬁnd this possible Nagelian response plausible enough to put a certain burden of
proof on Gordon's shoulders. It seems to me Gordon needs to show that our unshakable
conﬁdence that certain concerns of ours really do matter does not merely stem from the
internal perspective but somehow epistemically transcends it so as to legitimately discredit
the value skepticism produced by the external perspective. If he does not establish that,
then he needs to attack Nagel's view of the dichotomous perspectives or at least Nagel's
contention that the external perspective is epistemically superior to the internal
perspective. If he does not attack these things, then he needs to argue that the external
perspective does not yield value skepticism. Perhaps he can make one of these moves, but
he does not. Thus I think his case against Nagel's doctrine is wanting.

Must, then, a refutation of Nagel's doctrine involve making one of these ambitious
moves? I do not think so. I believe there is an easier way to refute it. I think we can
grant Nagel value skepticism yet deny his conclusion that our lives are absurd. The
objection is that the discrepancy between pretension (believing and acting as if our lives
matter) and reality (having no reason to believe anything matters) is not conspicuous, and
hence Nagel has not shown that our lives are absurd.

To see this, consider once more Nagel's examples of absurd situations within life.
In all those cases, the propositions describing the realities do not express skepticism
toward the claims constituting the pretensions; rather, the propositions describing the
realities express outright rejection of those claims. The reality in the case of the
speechgiver is that the speech cannot inﬂuence the passage of the bill since the bill has
already been passed, and hence the situation is not (not ‘may not be’) the sensible and
serious one the speechgiver purports it to be. In the case of the board members of the
philanthropic foundation electing a president, the reality is that the person they elect

undemrines the foundation because he is a notorious criminal, and hence the situation is

60

not (not ‘may not be’) the sensible and serious one they purport it to be. The reality in the
case of the lover declaring his love over the phone is that the declaration is useless since
the voice on the other end of the line is a recorder, and hence the situation is not (not ‘may
not be’) the sensible and serious one he purports it to be. And in the case of the man
being knighted, the reality is that the man looks ignoble because his pants are down, and
hence the situation is not (not ‘may not be’) the sensible and serious one he purports it to
be.

The proposition describing the reality in the pretension-reality collision that
supposedly makes our lives absurd, however, expresses only skepticism, not rejection,
regarding the claim constituting the pretension. We claim that our lives and other things
are important, and the reality is (only) that we do not have any reason to believe anything
is important, not that nothing is important. While Nagel acknowledges this disanalogy, he

asserts that it is insigniﬁcant as far as the conspicuousness of a discrepancy is concerned:

In ordinary life, to be sure, we do not judge a situation absurd unless we have in
mind some standards of seriousness, signiﬁcance, or harmony with which the
absurd can be contrasted. This contrast is not implied by the philosophical
judgment of absurdity, and that might be thought to make the concept unsuitable
for the expression of such judgments. This is not so, however, for the
philosophical judgment depends on another contrast which makes it a natural
extension from more ordinary cases. It departs ﬁ'om them only in contrasting the
pretensions of life with a larger context in which no standards can be discovered,
rather than with a context from Which alternative, overriding standards may be
applied.”

1 submit, however, that the disanalogy between philosophical absurdity and conventional
absurdity is crucial. While the kind of reality that signiﬁes skepticism about facts of the
world when contrasted with a pretension that signiﬁes nonskepticism about these facts

constitutes a discrepancy, it does not constitute a conspicuous one.

 

“Ibid., rs.

 

61

Perhaps a good way to see the truth of this claim is to alter one of those cases of
conventional absurdity so that it reﬂects the kind of reality involved in philosophical
absurdity and then to judge whether the situation is absurd. For example, we might
imagine that instead of knowing the motion has already passed, the speechgiver and we do
not know its status. Moreover, for some reason or other no evidence is available to any of
us that would support the truth of the matter, not available to the speechgiver or to us the
observers and judges of absurdity. If this were the case, then the operative reality of the
speechgiving situation would be: there is no reason to believe that the motion has not
passed (on a par, epistemically, with the reality that there is no reason to believe anything
matters). Now the legislator goes ahead and gives his speech, and the question arises: is
this situation absurd? Of course the answer to which Nagel is committed is that
regardless of the motion 's actual status, the situation is absurd. The speechgiver believes
and acts as if the motion has not passed and the reality of the situation is that he has no
reason to believe it has not passed. Such a discrepancy between pretension and reality,
Nagel would say, is conspicuous. But is it really?

If ridiculousness is, as I have suggested, a touchstone of conspicuousness, then the
discrepancy between pretension and reality in this case is not conspicuous. The reason is
this. The speechgiver evidently cares a great deal about the motion's passage, and it is
possible the motion has not already passed. Given these two facts, delivering the speech
makes sense; and if it makes sense, the situation is not absurd. In fact, I believe we would
have more reason to call ridiculous the alternative situation of the speechgiver having
refrained from delivering the speech (although I think we would stop well short of calling
it ridiculous), for giving the speech makes more sense than not giving it. Again, the
speechgiver is passionate about the motion's passage, and it may not have already passed.

I hasten to underscore that I am not asserting that the situation is not absurd. The
correct answer to the question of whether the situation is absurd is that it may be absurd

or it may not be. Whether it is absurd depends on the fact of the matter about the motion.

62

If the motion has already been passed, then the situation is absurd; if the motion has not,
then the situation is not absurd. It may appear as though I am being inconsistent here.
Above I denied that the speechgiving situation involved a conspicuous discrepancy
between pretension and reality; but now I seem to be allowing the possibility of just such a
discrepancy, since I am saying the situation might be absurd. However, I do not think
these two positions are inconsistent. When above I denied the conspicuousness of the
discrepancy, that discrepancy involved one particular pretension-reality pair. In now
suggesting that the discrepancy may be conspicuous, I have in mind another, distinct
pretension-reality pair. The pretensions in each pair are the same, but the realities are
different. In the ﬁrst pair, the reality is that there is no reason to believe the motion has
not passed. In the second pair, the reality is that the motion has already passed. Of course
the reality in the second pair is only a possible reality—by hypothesis we do not, and
physically cannot, know (given our predicament) whether the motion has already been
passed—which is why (1) we cannot use it to establish that the speechgiver's situation is
absurd, while (2) we can use it to show that the situation may be absurd. Therefore,
appearances to the contrary, the claim that the discrepancy in the speechgiver's situation is
not conspicuous (with respect to the ﬁrst pretension-reality pair) but may be conspicuous
(with respect to the second pair) is consistent.

I think the analysis of this situation within life, albeit a fanciful situation, shows just
why Nagel has not established that our life situation is absurd, or would be in any world
with us in it. If Nagel's value skepticism is correct, we are like the speechgiver who, while
not having any reason to believe the motion has not passed, does not have any reason to
believe it has passed, and ﬁrrther has no way to collect any evidence on the matter. We do
not have any reason to believe anything matters or any reason to believe nothing
does—and for all we know no way to build a case either way. Because of this
epistemological predicament, acting on the belief that certain things do matter makes

sense, hence is not ridiculous, and so cannot be used to establish that our lives are absurd.

63

In other words, insofar as the logic of the external perspective on the ﬂip-side is that we
do not have any reason to believe that nothing matters, any kind of practical directive we
might receive from the external perspective would not be to the effect that we must detach
ourselves from our everyday concerns. That directive would only come from an external
perspective that was nonskeptical about whether anything matters, one that asserted that
nothing matters. Therefore, the discrepancy between pretension and reality (skeptical
about mattering) is not conspicuous, which is to say that although our lives might be
absurd, we cannot assert that they are.

Nagel might respond to this objection by pointing out that we do not believe our
projects and lives matter to the same degree that, say, we might believe candidate Kealy
will win a very tight election. Our belief that things matter is not a lukewarm belief.
Rather, we believe our projects and lives and other things matter with conﬁdence, a
conﬁdence that is unwarranted given the value skepticism of the external perspective.
Nagel might say that if we were not so conﬁdent in this belief, perhaps the human
condition would not be an absurd one; but we are conﬁdent, and our conﬁdence betrays

itself in the intense way we conduct our lives. Again, as he points out:

[Human beings] spend enormous quantities of energy, risk, and calculation on the
details. Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his
health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-knowledge, the
quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and ﬁiends, how well he does his job,
whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life
is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

While I basically agree with this characterization of human beings, I do not agree
with the view that “intense concern” about our actions and lives in general presupposes we
are confident that our actions and lives matter. That is to say, I think it is consistent that
we take our projects, and lives in general, seriously while believing only tepidly that they
really matter, and I believe people do in fact act and think this way. Many religious

people, for example, lead very serious religious lives, while being at the same time very

64

skeptical about the truth of their convictions. Philosophers William James and Soren
Kierkegaard quickly come to mind. Such lives ﬁnd expression in the phrase ‘a life based
on a leap of faith?“

I would concede to Nagel, if in fact the above objection reﬂects his view, that
there are a number of people who are quite conﬁdent that their lives matter and who take
themselves very seriously; and if value skepticism is justiﬁed, then there may indeed be
something ridiculous about them—especially if they are aware that value skepticism is
justiﬁed—even if it turns out their lives do matter. But of course these examples would
only support the claim that some human lives are absurd, not all. In Nagel's parlance, they
support only conventional absurdity, not philosophical absurdity. I conclude that, though
ingenious, Nagel's doctrine of the absurdity of human existence, under the above

interpretation, is implausible.

 

46Steven Luper-Foy may be making the same basic point when he asks and answers the
following question: “Must the discrepancy occur in the lives of value skeptics? . . . So long as people do
not aspire to value things only under the impetus of a justiﬁcation for valuing, they can be value skeptics
and valuers without discrepancy. People need have no illusion about the fact that their lives consist in
pursuing ends which have no further grounds” (Luper-Foy, 96). Although Randolph Foczell's language in
what follows suggests an external perspective nonskeptical about mattering, he, too. seems to be making a
point similar to mine: “How can one act as if one is serious, that is live as if things have some transparent
signiﬁcance and justiﬁcation, all the while denying it? A good example of this arises in sports. Between
the extreme attitudes described by the slogans ‘Winning is not everything. it is the only thing.’ and ‘It is
only a game,’ is a paradoxical middle way, pursuing sport as if it had some ultimate signiﬁcance . . . and
at the same time realizing that it does not really nratter. It is to care. toil, and even suffer, while
embracing a reﬂective detachment undermining the signiﬁcance or justiﬁcation of your activity. It is to
recognize an apparent seriousness in action mediated by a reﬂective negation of that seriousness. both in
the unity of a single attitude” (Randolph M. Feezell, “Of Mice and Men: Nagel on the Absurd,” Modern
Schoolman 61 [1984]: 264).

CHAPTER 3

THE SECOND DOCTRINE

As I mentioned in the last chapter, I think we can glean from “The Absurd”
alternative interpretations of Nagel's doctrine. While these interpretations differ ﬁ'om the
ﬁrst one only in one respect, that respect is important: whereas under the ﬁrst
interpretation the external perspective is skeptical about mattering, under these alternative
interpretations the external perspective is nonskeptical about mattering. According to one
alternative interpretation, we have reason to believe that nothing matters, and according
to the other, we know that nothing matters. These two interpretations are attractive (at
least as far as the plausibility Nagel's doctrine is concerned) because they get around my
main objection to the ﬁrst interpretation. That objection exploited the skepticism of the
external perspective regarding mattering and maintained the skepticism precluded the
discrepancy between the two perspectives from being conspicuous. However, with no
such skepticism to exploit, the objection loses its teeth. If in fact we know that nothing
matters, or at least have good reason to believe that nothing matters, but nevertheless go
on believing and acting as if things do matter, then the discrepancy may indeed be a
conspicuous one, and our lives absurd. Thus before I can make a ﬁnal judgment about
Nagel's doctrine of absurdity in “The Absurd,” I need to address these two questions: (I)
does the text support either of the alternative interpretations? and if so (2) is Nagel's

doctrine under either of them plausible? I shall take the questions in order.

65

66
Textual Evidence for Alternative Interpretations

Making a case for either of the alternative interpretations is no easy task. It ﬁrst of
all requires discounting many statements in which Nagel characterizes the external
perspective as one that only generates “doubts” about mattering. Nagel remarks that the
external perspective makes the seriousness of everything we regard as serious “open to
doubt.” Our lives are absurd, he states, “because we ignore the doubts that we know
cannot be settled.” Early on he writes that he must defend his view of the “inescapability
of doubt.” He says that what the external perspective produces is “universal doubt.”
Moreover, he speaks of the “starting points of our skepticism.” In his discussion of why
our lives would be absurd in any other world, he tells us that a “larger purpose can be put
in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be.” He adds that “if we
can step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back
also from the . . . kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question
in the same way.” And he sums up this discussion with the general claim: “Once the
fundamental doubt has begun, it cannot be laid to rest.” All of these statements seem
irreconcilable with the position that we have reason to believe nothing matters, and even
more in conﬂict with the other alternative view that we know nothing matters.‘

Adding to the woes of the alternative interpretations is the analogy Nagel
painstakingly develops between his view on mattering and skepticism about the external
world. Such skepticism does not contrast appearances (what we take to be reality) with a
reality, nor does it inform us that there simply is no reality. Rather, it only maintains that
we have no reason to believe the external world exists. Likewise, Nagel states that
“philosophical perception of the absurd” does not contrast what we take to be serious and
important with what really is so, nor does it tell us that nothing really is serious and

important:

 

lNagel, “The Absurd,” 13-17.

67

In this respect, as in others, philosophical perception of the absurd resembles
epistemological skepticism. In both cases the ﬁnal, philosophical doubt is not
contrasted with any unchallenged certainties, though it is arrived at by
extrapolation ﬁ'om examples of doubt within the system of evidence or
justiﬁcation, where a contrast with other certainties is implied. In both cases our
limitedness joins with a capacity to transcend those limitations in thought (thus
seeing them as limitations, and as inescapable).2

Given this great mass of textual evidence against the alternative interpretations,
why would I even suggest that Nagel may have one of them in mind? The answer is that
notwithstanding all the counter-evidence, several other statements he makes in the essay
do seem to support these interpretations. In the last sentence of the essay, for example,
Nagel argues: “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.”3 In standard form, the argument is:

1. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters,
then that [namely, sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that
anything matters] does not matter either.

2. If that [sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything
matters] does not matter either, then we can approach our absurd lives with
irony instead of heroism and despair.

3. Sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters.

4. Therefore, we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or
despair.

To begin, it is noteworthy that the antecedent of the ﬁrst premiss is none other than the
proposition signifying value skepticism: there is no reason to believe that anything matters.

More evidence for the ﬁrst interpretation perhaps. However, it is also important to note

 

2Ibid., 18.

3The paragraph in which the sentence is located reads: “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 ean we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results
from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for 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 earried 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” (Ibid., 23).

68

that something is terribly wrong with the implication in the ﬁrst premiss: the antecedent
(sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters) does not imply
the consequent (‘sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything
matters’ does not matter either). What the antecedent does imply is this much more
modest consequent: there is no reason to believe the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis
there is no reason to believe that anything matters’ itself matters. In standard form, the

argument reﬂecting this change would be:

1. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters,
then there is no reason to believe the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis there is
no reason to believe that anything matters’ itself matters.

2. If there is no reason to believe the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis there is no

reason to believe that anything matters’ itself matters, then we can approach

our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters.

4. Therefore, we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or
despair.‘1

b)

Now we might say simply that Nagel was careless when he attached the
consequent to his previously established antecedent—and leave the matter at that.
However, we ourselves may be careless to quickly judge the matter in this manner. There
is another way to revise the ﬁrst premiss of the original argument, and that is to leave the

consequent of the conditional alone and instead change the antecedent. If we were to

 

4It is conceivable Nagel has given an abbreviated version of the following argument. However, if
that were so, I think he would not have left as much implicit, especially when ‘(b)’ below is in need of
support.

I. Ifsub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then either
nothing matters or something matters.

2. Ifeither nothing matters or something matters, then the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis
there is no reason to believe that anything matters’ does not matter. (For (a) if nothing
matters, then obviously the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that
anything matters’ does not matter either; and (b) if something matters, it is not important
that ‘sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters.’)

3. If the fact that ‘sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matrers’
does not matter, then we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or
despair.

4. Sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters.

Therefore, we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

3"

69

change the antecedent, it would become ‘sub specie aeternitatis nothing matters.’ In

standard form, the argument reﬂecting this change would be:

1. If sub specie aeternitatis nothing matters, then that [namely, sub specie
aeternitatis nothing matters] does not matter either.

2. If that [sub specie aeternitatis nothing matters] does not matter either, then we

can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Sub specie aeternitatis nothing matters.

4. Therefore, we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or
despair.

5"

Of course the big price of changing the antecedent to make the implication a good one is
abandoning the ﬁrst interpretation of Nagel's doctrine, for the revised antecedent (‘sub
specie aeternitatis nothing matters’) reﬂects the stronger of the two alternative
interpretations, and in so doing reﬂects value nonskepticism. Given the cost of this
alternative change, are there any reasons to support it? I think there are.

To start, it is at least curious that three of Nagel's critics in referring to the
argument simply revise its ﬁrst prenriss's antecedent without comment. I.J.H. Williams
states that “we are to regard the fact that nothing really matters with irony and carry on

as before.”5 And Jonathan Westphal and» Christopher Cherry write:

“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.” But this recursive intuition (that if nothing matters
[my emphasis] then that does not matter either) is not really solidly convincing.
Perhaps nothing matters except that nothing matters. Why not?6

Second, the phrase ‘there is no reason to believe that . . .’ does have a connotation that is
not epistemically neutral; we sometimes use it euphemistically to suggest there is good
reason to believe the opposite of what we are saying there is no reason to believe. “Mary,
you have no reason to believe that your good friend Patrick swiped your copy of Crime

and Punishment!” Here, I may well not be declaring that it is ﬁfty-ﬁfty whether Patrick

 

5Williams, 311. Emphasis mine.

6Westphal and Cherry, 102.

70

stole the book, but instead that it is unlikely he took the book or even that he did not take
it. Thus when Nagel states that there is no reason to believe that anything matters, he
might really mean the proposition that there is good reason to believe that nothing does.
Incidentally, we sometimes use the term ‘doubt’ to express this same inclination to
disbelieve something, instead of to express neutral uncertainty. The verb form can mean
“feel distrust of . . . inclined to disbelieve . . . suspicious of.”7 So it is at least possible
Nagel is using ‘doubt’ in this sense in those passages I cited above or that he unwittingly
switched connotations at some point in his own mind.

While I do not think this problematic last sentence itself (that is, isolated from the
rest of the essay), along with my commentary on it, is strong evidence that Nagel is, or is
at some point, really nonskeptical about mattering, it becomes stronger in view of other
remarks he makes which seem explicitly to aﬁirm that the external perspective reveals we
at least have good reason to believe nothing about our lives matters. For example, he
refers to “the cosmic unimportance” of our lives in the penultimate sentence of the essay,
the sentence preceding the problematic one just discussed.8 If indeed Nagel believes our
lives may or may not matter—if he thinks there is no reason to believe that anything
matters but no reason to believe nothing does—then certainly he would not purposefully
call our lives cosmically unimportant. In addition, when he argues earlier that we cannot
abandon the internal perspective and live solely by the dictates of the external standpoint,
he writes that “it is useless to mutter: ‘Life is meaningless; life is meaningless . . .’ as an
accompaniment to everything we do. In continuing to live and work and strive, we take

ourselves seriously in action no matter what we say.”9 And shortly thereafter he states

 

7Webster's New World Dictionary.
8Please see note 3 for the paragraph in which this quotation is located.

9Nagel, “The Absurd,” 20.

71

that from the external perspective our lives seem “trivial.”l0 If from the external
perspective we are skeptical about mattering, why on earth would Nagel imply that its
mantra is life is meaningless, or why would he claim that our lives seem trivial to it?

Yet another place in the essay strongly suggesting Nagel is nonskeptical about
mattering is in his discussion of why a mouse's life is not absurd. He states that the only
condition saving a mouse from absurdity is that a mouse cannot take up an external
perspective. If a mouse could, then his life, like ours, would become absurd; for he would
see that he is “only a mouse” but would nevertheless “have to return to his meager yet
frantic life.”ll The implication here is that we do see we are only human and nevertheless
return to our meager yet frantic lives, and hence we, unlike a mouse, lead absurd lives.
However, these descriptions suggest we know or at least have good reason to believe that
our lives are unimportant; for if the external perspective were genuinely skeptical about
mattering, we would not conclude from this perspective that we are only human or that
our lives are meager. (And, for that matter, neither would a mouse see himself as “only a
mouse” and his life as “meager yet frantic” if he could assume an external perspective and
that perspective produced skepticism about mattering.)

I think this textual evidence warrants our going back to Nagel's central claim of his
doctrine and seeing if it in any way lends itself to the alternative interpretations. Once
again that claim is: “If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity . . . it must arise from the
perception of something universal—some respect in which pretension and reality
inevitably clash for us all. This condition is supplied . . . by the collision between the
seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding
everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” As I indicated in

chapter 2, the one possible opening to the second interpretation lies in the term

 

loIbid., 21.

I 1 Ibid.

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“arbitrary.” What does Nagel mean by ‘the perpetual possibility of regarding everything
about which we are serious as arbitrary’? Does this mean the same thing as ‘the perpetual
possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as open to doubt’? Maybe
not. Let us consider other passages in the essay wherein Nagel refers to our arbitrariness,

as well as passages not containing this term but which may countenance nonskepticism:

Without developing the illusion that they [humans] are able to escape from their
highly speciﬁc and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie
aeternitatis—and the view is at once sobering and comical. . . .

The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring
reasons—the things that deﬁne what is a reason for us and what is not—are the
starting points of our skepticism. 'We see ourselves ﬁ'om outside, and all the
contingency and speciﬁcity of our aims and pursuits become clear. Yet when we
take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us
from life, and there lies our absurdity: not in the fact that such an external view can
be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be
the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded. . . .

It is as legitimate to ﬁnd ultimate justiﬁcation there [in a larger purpose] as
to ﬁnd it earlier, among the details of individual life. But this does not alter the
fact that justiﬁcations come to an end when we are content to have them
end—when we do not ﬁnd it necessary to look any ﬁirther. . . .

We adhere to them [the ordinary standards that guide our lives] because of
the way we are put together; what seems to us important or serious or valuable
would not seem so if we were differently constituted. . . .

By feigning a nebula's-eye view, we illustrate the capacity to see ourselves
without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly speciﬁc occupants of
the world, one of countless possible forms of life.‘2

Nagel in these passages expresses several related points, or premisses, that appear
to lead him to the conclusion that our lives do not really matter: (1) we feel and think
certain things are important rather than others, or rather than little else or nothing at all,
simply because of the way we have been constructed; (2) had we been put together
differently, other things would have seemed important to us, or maybe nothing at all; and
(3) there are both existing and countless possible other forms of life, and hence both

existing and countless possible value systems that differ from our own, which means our

 

”Ibid., 15—18. 21. Emphasis mine.

73

own value system is “peculiar” (or “idiosyncratic” or “highly speciﬁc”) and “contingent.”
From these premisses we can conclude that what from our idiosyncratic internal
perspective we think is signiﬁcant is only so from that perspective, and is not “really,
objectively signiﬁcant.”13

The ﬁrst and second premisses suggest that what in fact we value depends on how
we happen to be organized. (And what other existing creatures value depends on how
they happen to be organized, or what any possible creature would value would depend on
how it was put together.) They suggest that Nagel believes such subjectivity in valuing
encompasses not only all our emotional responses to states of affairs, but also our
reasoning. We have reasons for believing certain things matter, but these reasons
themselves are shaped by, and hence are only as deep as, our particular mental and
physical properties—had we a different structure, we would have counted other
considerations as reasons, or perhaps we would not have counted anything as a reason.
This consideration seems to lead Nagel to conclude that the view that values are “out
there in the world” for any creature with the suﬂicient sophistication to discover is naive
and mistaken; values are irreducibly subjective. The third premiss states that there are
both existing and countless possible organizational conﬁgurations, and hence value
systems, that differ from our own. And this fact—combined with the fact about the
subjective nature of values—would seem to prevent us from calling what we happen to
value universally valuable, or cosmically important.

Now if we could respond rationally to this understanding the external perspective
affords us, we would “disengage” ourselves from our “comical” lives we falsely believe
are objectively important ﬁ'om the internal perspective. (We might again think of Nagel's
hypothetical super-mouse, aware it is “only a mouse”) But we cannot disengage

ourselves. We cannot help but “drag the superior awareness through a strenuous

 

13Ibid., 19.

74

mundane life,” force the “engagement of a transcendent awareness in the assiduous pursuit
of mundane goals,” and hence our lives are absurd. '4

Moreover, our lives in any other world would be absurd too. For our concerns
and goals in another world would be just as irreducibly subjective and idiosyncratic as our
earthly ones are now. Whatever those concerns and goals would be, their validity would
extend only so far as our idiosyncratic organization, and we would not have had them if
we had been put together differently. As Gordon puts the matter: “If God exists . . . and
this is occasion for our joy, so much for our peculiar needs and the peculiar source of their
gratiﬁcation. Under that cold and withering gaze, this fact about our needs and the source
of their ﬁrlﬁllment becomes another arbitrary idiosyncrasy of the human drama.”'5 In a
word, values are only skin deep. There are a variety of skins we know to exist and an
inﬁnite number of forms skins could take. And that is all. There is nothing underneath
them that makes one the one true skin. '6

I think it is worth noting at this point a striking similarity between Nagel's language
in the passages above and his language in certain passages in his most recent book, The
last Word, wherein he describes what he explicitly tells us is the basic dialectic of ethical
subjectivism. If it is ethical subjectivism that Nagel describes in the book—and we know

it is—then it seems hard to deny that it is the view he describes in the essay.

Since all justiﬁcations come to an end with what the people who accept them ﬁnd
acceptable and not in need of further justiﬁcation, no conclusion, it is thought, can
claim validity beyond the community whose acceptance validates it. . . .

 

”Ibid., 22.
”Gordon, 18-19.

1“This explanation of why our lives would be absurd in any world is substantially different from
the explanation under the ﬁrst interpretation of the doctrine characterized by value skepticism. There the
explanation involved unsettlable doubt about mattering in any world: here, in contrast, such doubt is
replaced with knowledge that value in any given world would go no deeper than the peculiar. contingent
way we were constructed.

75

The subjectivist's all-purpose comment, applicable to anything we say or
do, including any procedure of justiﬁcation and criticism, is that it is ultimately the
manifestation of contingent dispositions for which there is no further justiﬁcation.
Justiﬁcation proceeds only within the practices which those dispositions
support—practices that reﬂect the common forms of life of our culture or our
species, but nothing more universal than that. . . . It is always possible to say, after
the ﬁnal justiﬁcation has been given, “But that is only something that satisﬁes you,
something you say with the conviction that it requires no further justiﬁcation: and
all that you say is merely a manifestation of the contingencies of your personal,
social, and biological makeup. The end of the line is not the content of your
reasoning but rather the fact that for you, justiﬁcations come to an end here; and
that is a natural fact.”l7

Notwithstanding, one might object that my reading of the term ‘arbitrary’ in
Nagel's central claim and elsewhere—and hence the interpretation of Nagel as
nonskeptical about values—is off the mark. Regarding the question of whether Nagel
means the same thing by ‘arbitrary’ and ‘open to doubt’ in the central claim, one might
point out that his grammar suggests he means the same. '3 The comma after ‘arbitrary’
indicates that ‘or open to doubt’ is an appositive, a word group that simply identiﬁes,
deﬁnes, or renames ‘arbitrary.’ Also, he neither states anywhere that the two terms
express different ideas nor explicitly gives them separate treatment. ‘Arbitrary’ can mean
“not ﬁxed by rules but left to one's judgment or choice,” or “based on one's preference,
notion, whim; capricious.”l9 All Nagel means by the term, then, is that given our
epistemic predicament, we cannot justify making the particular value choices we do make
over those we do not, which makes our choices in the end a matter of the way we are put
together—that is, a matter of whimsy, caprice. Arbitrariness in this sense is just another
way to express value skepticism. That our lives are arbitrary in the deeper sense of our

value system being on a par with other actual and possible ones is not part of Nagel's

 

l7Nagel, The Last Word, 4—5, 26—27.

‘3“This condition [of philosophical absurdity] is supplied. I shall argue, by the collision between
the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about
which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.”

”Webster's New World Dictionary.

76

doctrine. As Feezell writes: “We pursue justiﬁcations to a point at which our beliefs can
no longer be justiﬁed and we understand that our life can never be supported wholly by
reason. There must be [a] kind of arbitrariness about our life. . . . Thus, our life is absurd
‘because we ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with
nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them.’”20

I think such a reading of ‘arbitrary’ in the essay is, on its face, plausible. Its beauty
lies in making Nagel's essay consistent. Still, at the end of the day, I do not see the way to
reconcile it with many of the passages cited above. At the very least, I think those
passages preclude us from dismissing the possibility that Nagel is nonskeptical about
mattering and instead call for our going ahead and evaluating the alternative
interpretations. Moreover, even if neither reﬂects Nagel's true view, they seem to me
worthy of critical examination in their own right. I shall have a word or two more to say

about the issue of interpretation at the end of the chapter.

Evaluation of A lternative Interpretations

The main problem with the doctrine under the ﬁrst interpretation, we might
remember, is that the discrepancy between pretension (believing that, and acting as if,
things matter) and reality (not in fact having any reason to believe that anything matters) is
not conspicuous: even though we do not have any reason to believe that anything matters,
it is not ridiculous to go on believing and acting as if we do. The alternative
interpretations avoid this problem by changing the reality from ‘our not having any reason
to believe that anything matters’ to either ‘our knowing that nothing matters’ or ‘our
having good reason to believe that nothing matters,’ and in so doing perhaps making the

discrepancy conspicuous. However, the high cost of making the discrepancy conspicuous

 

20Feezell, 262.

77

and avoiding the main objection to the ﬁrst interpretation is the difﬁcult task of
establishing the new, bolder nonskeptical claims.
Gordon, for one, argues that it is impossible for us to be convinced that nothing

matters.21 To support this claim, he offers a thought experiment:

Imagine that we are beings in every respect like ourselves except in respect to
values. Now there are mutants among us who believe it is of great importance that
human beings be treated justly. But we, in our greater wisdom, know justice to be
of no importance, a foolish and sentimental ideal. Can this ﬁction reveal to us the
arbitrariness of our concerns. Surely not. . . .

[I] It is not enough that we be able to imagine a being differently
constituted ﬁ'om ourselves in order to call our own moral constitution into
question; [2] it is necessary that we be convinced that the alteration would leave us
no worse off [3] But it is impossible for us to believe this about a consciousness
that would systematically reject all our ultimate concerns, and so [4] this . . .
[thought experiment] must . . . fail to establish the arbitrariness of those
concerns.22

What I have labeled as Gordon's ﬁrst premiss is important, and I think it is true.
The fact that we can imagine countless possible creatures who do not share some or all of
our core values because they are put together differently does not relativize values any
more than the fact that we inhabit the world with creatures who do not share some of our
core values. The hypothetical beings and existing nonhuman beings may be incorrect in
their estimation of what is important and what is not, what is right and wrong—and we
may be correct. Indeed, those who think the ﬁrst premiss in the passage above is false
(and unfortunately Nagel might be one of them) commit the same mistake as those who
argue from the apparent fact that different human cultures have different moral codes to
the conclusion that there is no objective truth in ethics. That mistake involves inferring

what is actually the case from facts about what is believed. Scientists disagree about the

 

2|While Gordon does not recognize two main readings of Nagel's essay as I do (he believes
Nagel's view is the bold nonskeptical one that nothing matters). he does as far as I can tell offer objections
to both of them. In this way. Gordon's essay reﬂects Nagel's.

22Gordon. 23.

78

origin of our universe, but surely we would be wrong to infer from such disagreement that
there is no truth in the matter. The view that there is no universal tmth in ethics might be
true, but it cannot be inferred solely ﬁ'om the fact that different creatures could, and do,
have different values.

If “[1] it is not enough that we be able to imagine a being differently constituted
from ourselves in order to call our own moral constitution into question,” then what more
is needed? Gordon's second premiss answers this question. We would need to be
persuaded that if our values were changed in the manner suggested by the thought
experiment, the change would not really matter. However, according to Gordon (as
reﬂected in the third premiss), we would never concede that such a change would not
really matter. We would not because we value justice and friendship and courage and
generosity and the like ever so strongly—these values are “unassailably valid” to us.
Therefore, Gordon concludes, we could never seriously question that what is important to
us is important, period—that is, is not arbitrary.

Gordon's reasoning here closely resembles that involved in his objection to the ﬁrst
interpretation of Nagel's doctrine, and once again I think it can be criticized from a
Nagelian standpoint. The third premiss amounts to the claim that we could never be
convinced that there is no absolute value. Now perhaps from the internal perspective it is
practically impossible for us to believe the value alteration would not ultimately matter.
But it is not obvious that from the detached, disinterested external perspective we could
never be persuaded the change would not really matter. I do not think ethical subjectivism
would be beyond the reach of our acceptance if the arguments were there to back it up
any more than, say, atheism is beyond our reach, which many people do seem genuinely to
accept.

Therefore, I believe that Gordon's argument, as it stands, fails. Again, it does so
because its third premiss seems to be false and Gordon does not give us any reason to

believe it is true. However, I also believe the argument can be amended and made much

79

more plausible. If the problematic third premiss is replaced with the more modest one that
ethical subjectivism is controversial and that Nagel has not made a persuasive case for it,
then Gordon's conclusion follows and Nagel's doctrine of absurdity, interpreted as
nonskeptical about mattering, will have been shown to be inadequate. This alternative
objection to Nagel's doctrine is in fact Quentin Smith's main objection. Smith argues that
Nagel's doctrine begs the question against mattering, that Nagel assumes our ultimate

moral reasons are contingent and arbitrary. Smith asks:

Why should we accept this assumption? I do not see that Nagel has given us any
reason to think the end-points of ethical justiﬁcation are arbitrary and contingent,
or even has attempted to offer any argument for this claim. Why cannot we adopt
the objectivist and absolutist view that some end-points of justiﬁcation are
necessary and self-evident moral truths, such as that wisdom, friendship and
aesthetic appreciation are intrinsically good? . . . Perhaps this viewpoint on moral
issues is mistaken, but if so, it must be shown to be such and cannot simply be
dismissed without argument or ignored.23

Smith, unlike Gordon, stops short of claiming that any argument in support of
ethical subjectivism cannot succeed. However, Smith correctly points out that nowhere in
“The Absurd” does Nagel argue for ethical subjectivism, or against ethical objectivity, and
such a criticism, to my mind, suffices to put a heavy burden of proof on Nagel's shoulders.
My objection to Nagel's doctrine, then, is essentially the same as Smith's. Nagel neither
establishes that we know nothing matters nor even that we have reason to believe nothing
matters. It is true that we are only one among countless possible forms of life and that
countless possible forms of life would not ﬁnd important what we do; and in view of these
facts Nagel may be justiﬁed in calling our form of life or position highly speciﬁc and
idiosyncratic. Further, if by calling our lives contingent, Nagel means simply we are
beings who might not have existed or existed as we do now, then again he is probably
correct. Still we are not justiﬁed to infer from these facts that our lives do not matter, or

even that we have reason to believe that they do not matter. Perhaps our peculiar form of

 

”Smith, 121.

80

life is special in the sense that what we judge signiﬁcant is “really, objectively signiﬁcant.”
What has Nagel stated, let alone established, that supports the claim that our peculiar form

of life is not special? Smith correctly answers that Nagel has stated nothing.

Which Doctrine .7

In the ﬁnal analysis, which of the two doctrines, if either, most likely represents
Nagel's view in “The Absurd”? For their part, Nagel's critics are far from unanimous in
their reading of the essay. Feezell, Gordon, Westphal and Cherry, and Williams all to one
extent or another blur the two interpretations as Nagel himself does, and they seem as
unaware as Nagel that the doctrine so interpreted is incoherent.

Feezell in several places describes the external perspective as producing only doubt
about values, and he even makes the same comparison with skepticism about the existence
of the external world that Nagel makes. However, within this analysis Feezell appears to
slip into the nonskeptical stance. Offering a way to avoid the Nagelian conspicuous

discrepancy between pretension and reality, and hence a way to avoid absurdity, he writes:

How can one act as if one is serious, that is live as if things have some transparent
signiﬁcance and justiﬁcation, all the while denying it? A good example of this
arises in sports. Between the extreme attitudes described by the slogans “Winning
is not everything, it is the only thing,” and “It is only a game,” is a paradoxical
middle way, pursuing sport as if it had some ultimate signiﬁcance . . . and at the
same time realizing that it does not really matter. It is to care, toil, and even
suffer, while embracing a reﬂective detachment undermining the signiﬁcance or
justiﬁcation of your activity. It is to recognize an apparent seriousness in action
mediated by a reﬂective negation of that seriousness, both in the unity of a single
attitude.24

Interestingly, Gordon moves in the opposite direction. He begins with a discussion
of Nagel as nonskeptical about mattering, and in particular of Nagelian arbitrariness. At
one point he states: “Each of these activities [an ant's trying to lift an insect's carcass, a

man or a woman trying to create a piece of art, a man who devotes his life to the glory of

 

24Feezell, 261-65.

81

God] has its importance only within the narrow, idiosyncratic compass of the creature in
question. Take the backward step and any human enterprise—however vital, however
lofty from our ordinary perspective—becomes a curiosity, slightly comical, slightly
mad.”25 However, as the discussion proceeds, he seems to see Nagel as a value skeptic.
Now the arbitrariness that the external perspective reveals is alleged only to have “the
force of calling into question the legitimacy of my concerns as a man,” or “to call our own
moral constitution into question.” He states that “it is easy to exaggerate the ease with
which we may call all moral values into question, and it is this fact . . . that gives Nagel's
analysis its initial plausibility.”2‘5 Here, then, Gordon appears to think the external
perspective produces only skepticism about values.

Early in their critical essay on “The Absurd,” Westphal and Cherry describe the
Nagelian external perspective as “the expression of a certain sort of skepticism
characteristic of conscious beings who can take the backward step of self-reﬂection.”
Shortly thereafter, however, they state that “a man of integrity or humanity” lives a life
that “outshines the obscure arguments to the effect that everything must ultimately be
destroyed, or that nothing, in itself, matters, or the reﬂective consciousness which,
according to Nagel, stands behind them.” Then the two critics go back to calling the
external perspective “the skeptical view,” only later to suggest again a Nagelian
nonskeptical external perspective by using the term “ultimate disvalue” to describe what it
reveals.”

Finally, Williams seems to ﬂip-ﬂop too. He begins by viewing Nagel as a value
skeptic: “As reﬂective beings we will inevitably be afflicted by the form of doubt

responsible for the philosophical sense of absurdity Nagel is expounding.” Then he

 

25Gordon. 18.
“Ibid., 22—23.

27Westphal and Cherry, 99—102.

82

presents the nonskeptical view by stating that Nagel argues that “we are to regard the fact
that nothing really matters with irony and carry on as before.” However, one paragraph
later he appears to be back to the skeptical view when he describes the analogy between
epistemological skepticism and “doubt concerning the coherence of life.” And yet shortly
thereafter he writes: “A person may conclude that nothing matters, but he will draw this
conclusion ﬁ'om within the context of his own life, and from within the form of life to
which it belongs, not by philosophical reﬂection on the nature of reasons and
justiﬁcation.”28

For their part, Luper-Foy and Smith do not blur the interpretations, but each opts
for a different one: Luper-Foy consistently interprets Nagel as being skeptical about
mattering, while Smith views Nagel a nonskeptic. Luper-Foy writes that in “The Absurd”
“the problem is a kind of skepticism. . . . We are not to understand that in reality nothing
is signiﬁcant; instead, the idea appears to be that our encounter with the view sub specie
aeternitatis enables us to see that we lack any reason to think that anything matters. . . .
The skeptical doubts that so exercised Nagel when he wrote his essay leave open the
possibility that life really is worthwhile.”29 Smith, on the other hand, states that Nagel
“assumes without argument an ethical subjectivism and relativism . . .”30

In the ﬁnal analysis, I am more persuaded that Nagel had both interpretations in
mind when writing the essay than I am that he consistently had only one. Among the
considerations that have led me to this position are two main ones. First, while the two
interpretations are different, indeed incompatible, they can easily be confused, as ﬁve of
Nagel's critics bear out. Believing there is no reason to think something obtains may

subtly tempt us to think the thing does not obtain. Adding to this psychological

 

28Williams. 309—312.
29Luper-Foy. 86—87.

30Smith, 121.

83

motivation for Nagel to blur the two positions is, I think, a polemic one. To establish
absurdity Nagel needs a reality that is both defensible and, juxtaposed to a pretension of
ours, conspicuously discrepant. With value skepticism, a thesis with formidable
supporting arguments, Nagel gets a defensible reality; with the nonskeptical view that
nothing matters, he gets a conspicuously discrepant reality. (Put negatively, he does not
get a conspicuously discrepant reality with only value skepticism, and he does not get a
persuasive reality with only the nonskeptical view that nothing matters .) This
interpretation of the essay makes, to my mind, the most sense of Nagel's words in it. It
makes the most sense out of Nagel putting our knowledge of values on a par with
epistemological skepticism and then two sentences later asserting our lives are cosmically
unimportant. Having said this, I would also say that, ofﬁcially, Nagel is probably a value
skeptic, and my discussion in the next, and ﬁnal, section of this chapter should explain why
I believe this is so. Of course the question that is most crucial to answer is whether either
interpretation of the doctrine is plausible. I have argued that neither is. Either the
discrepancy Nagel explains to us is not conspicuous or it is conspicuous but not
established, and hence he has failed to make a good casein “The Absurd” that our lives

are absurd.

Conclusion

I would like to end this chapter, and my discussion of Nagel's doctrine of absurdity
in “The Absurd,” by discussing two further issues of interpretation that may seem to make
the essay even more puzzling than the discussion has made it out to be thus far. The ﬁrst,
which I mentioned in chapters 1 and 2, concerns the apparent inconsistency between either
of Nagel's doctrines of absurdity and his earlier criticism of the Death Argument. The
second issue has to do with the apparent inconsistency between either of the doctrines and
Nagel's views on the objectivity of values both before and immediately after he wrote “The

Absurd.” If these inconsistencies are not merely apparent but real, then a handful of

84

possible conclusions present themselves, ranging from Nagel contradicting himself in the
essay to my not having understood it. I shall take the two issues in order.

We may remember that the Death Argument concludes our lives are absurd on the
ground that none of our actions are justiﬁed or worth doing because they will come to

nothing when we die, to which Nagel responds:

Life does not consist of a sequence of activities each of which has as its purpose
some later member of the sequence. Chains of justiﬁcation come repeatedly to an
end within life, and whether the process as a whole can be justiﬁed has no bearing
on the ﬁnality of these end-points. No further justiﬁcation is needed to make it
reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibition of the work of a
painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove. No
larger context or ﬁrrther purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being
pointless.“

Later in the essay, Nagel, attempting to clarify the external perspective, writes: “The
crucial backward step is not taken by asking for still another justiﬁcation in the chain, and
failing to get it. The objections to that line of attack have already been stated;
justiﬁcations come to an end.”32 Here Nagel is expressing his approval of his objections to
the Death Argument, including the one contained in the passage above. So far so good.
However, immediately after writing this, he seems to suggest that individual end-links in

chains and the chains themselves are ultimately in need of justiﬁcation:

But this [that justiﬁcations come to an end] is precisely what provides universal
doubt with its object. We step back to ﬁnd that the whole system of justiﬁcation
and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality,
rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know
how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even
after they are called into question.

The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring
reasons—the things that deﬁne what is a reason for us and what is not—are the
starting points of our skepticism.”

 

31Nagel, “The Absurd,” 12.
”Ibid.. 15.

”Ibid.

85

And shortly after this passage, Nagel once again ﬁrst expresses his approval of his
objections to the Death Argument and then goes on and makes claims that appear to

undermine them:

It is as legitimate to ﬁnd ultimate justiﬁcation there [in a larger enterprise, such as
service to society, science, or religion] as to ﬁnd it earlier, among the details of
individual life. But this does not alter the fact that justiﬁcations come to an end
when we are content to have them end—when we do not ﬁnd it necessary to look
any ﬁrrther. . . .

. . . We notice that certain types of evidence convince us, that we are
content to allow justiﬁcations of belief to come to an end at certain points, that we
feel we know many things even without knowing or having grounds for believing
the denial of others which, if true, would make what we claim to know false. . . .

. . . We can ask not only why we should take aspirin, but why we should
take trouble over our own comfort at all. The fact that we shall take the aspirin
without waiting for an answer to this last question does not show that it is an
unreal question.34

First, we should note that these latter passages clearly reveal that (1)Nagel
believes he earlier gave more than one objection to the Death Argument, (2) he is aware of
these objections, and (3) he thinks they are perfectly consistent with his own argument for
absurdity. Now is it possible to provide an interpretation that shows all of the claims in all
of these passages are indeed consistent? Speciﬁcally, can we reconcile the following

numbered propositions with the lettered ones?

1. No further justiﬁcation is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a
headache. . . . No larger context or further purpose is needed to prevent [this
act] . . . from being pointless.

A. We can ask not only why we should take aspirin, but why we should take
trouble over our own comfort at all. The fact that we shall take the aspirin
without waiting for an answer to this last question does not show that it is an
unreal question.

2. It is as legitimate to ﬁnd ultimate justiﬁcation there [in a larger enterprise] as to
ﬁnd it earlier, among the details of individual life.

B. But this [the legitimacy of ﬁnding ultimate justiﬁcation in a larger enterprise
and among the details of individual life] does not alter the fact that

 

“Ibid., I6, 18, 19.

86

justiﬁcations come to an end when we are content to have them end—when we
do not ﬁnd it necessary to look any further.

C. The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring reasons—the
things that deﬁne what is a reason for us and what is not—are the starting
points of our skepticism.

Perhaps the way to reconcile the numbered propositions with the lettered ones is
to focus on what Nagel thinks the defender of the Death Argument contends. Perhaps
Nagel thinks this person contends that from the internal perspective (within the “system
of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to
rationality "), there are no end-links in chains of justiﬁcation since we must die. And
Nagel's response is that from this perspective, there certainly are such end-links; within
this system of justification and criticism, it is reasonable, not pointless, to take aspirin;
here it is legitimate to ﬁnd ultimate justiﬁcation in certain acts and enterprises. Hence
death does not cut off chains that might otherwise have end-links, and therefore death
cannot be what makes our lives absurd.

Now I suppose one might question this interpretation of Nagel's objection to the
Death Argument. Why, one might ask, would Nagel conceive the argument's defender as
offering the argument entirely within the internal perspective? Why would not Nagel give
the Death Argument defender the beneﬁt of the external perspective, interpret the
argument as a transcendental one, not unlike his own?35 (Of course if Nagel had—making
the argument's defenders main claim the transcendental one that there really are no end-
links in chains of justiﬁcation, or at least that we have no reason to believe there really are
such end-links—then in reﬁtting the Death Argument Nagel would at the same time be
refuting his own doctrine of absurdity.) The correct answer to these questions, I think, is

that Nagel claims only to be evaluating a “standard argument” for absurdity, one which

 

35By the term ‘transcendental’ here and below, I only mean the following: of or relating to
something (e.g., an argument or a claim or a question) that in some way. and to some extent, lies outside
the internal perspective. or that does not presuppose the “system of justiﬁcation and criticism, which
controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality.” Thus the question “But should we take
anything seriously?” is. in this sense, a transcendental question

87

many persons on the street give, and persons on the street make arguments from within
the “system of justiﬁcation and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our
claims to rationality.” This consideration, along with the one that the alternative
interpretation of Nagel's objection would indeed land him in a terrible contradiction, gives
us good reason to believe that the interpretation of the objection I have offered is correct.
Incidentally, the Death Argument does not seem to fare any better with the beneﬁt
of the external perspective and Nagel's above lettered claims it allegedly generates. For
suppose the defender of the Death Argument were given the external perspective and, on
Nagelian grounds, concluded that there really are no end-links in chains of justiﬁcation, or
at least that we have no reason to believe there really are such end-links. Certainly
immortality would not change anything. It would not give us end-links. So death, under
this supposition, would not have anything to do with what makes our lives absurd. In
view of this, Nagel might have stated that if the defender of the Death Argument wishes to
question the end-links of justiﬁcation by assuming an external perspective and arguing as
Nagel himself does, he or she may do so, but that will make death irrelevant; and if, on the
other hand, the argument's defender wishes to question the end-links from the internal
perspective, he or she is simply misguided—justiﬁcations come to an end within lifegand
hence once again the absurdity of our lives will not have anything to do with death.
However, Nagel is not in the clear yet. We might remember from chapter 1 that
after criticizing the Death Argument by contending that, from within, justiﬁcations come
to an end, Nagel offers another objection. This objection itself is a transcendental
argument (in the Nagelian sense) insofar as it purports to be an (external) defense of our

(internal) system of beliefs about values. Nagel writes:

Even if someone wished to supply a further justiﬁcation for pursuing all the things
in life that are commonly regarded as self-justifying, that justiﬁcation would have
to end somewhere too. If nothing can justify unless it is justiﬁed in terms of
something outside itself, which is also justiﬁed, then an inﬁnite regress results, and
no chain of justiﬁcation can be complete. Moreover, if a ﬁnite chain of reasons

88

cannot justify anything, what could be accomplished by an inﬁnite chain, each link
of which must be justiﬁed by something outside itself?

Since justiﬁcations must come to an end somewhere, nothing is gained by
denying that they end where they appear to, within life. . . .36

The objection condensed and in standard form seems to be this:

I. Justiﬁcations must end somewhere. (For if nothing can justify unless it is
justiﬁed in terms of something outside itself, which is also justiﬁed, then an
inﬁnite regress results.)

2. Nothing is gained by denying that justiﬁcations end where they appear to,
within life.

3. Therefore, justiﬁcations probably do end within life—certain actions of ours
probably are ultimately justiﬁed.

Here, I am afraid, no charitable interpretation is available that would make this
objection consistent with Nagel's own doctrine of absurdity, and in particular those
lettered propositions above. Here it seems Nagel really is inconsistent. When he states-—
transcendentally this time—that “justiﬁcations must come to an end somewhere” (the
conclusion of the inﬁnite regress argument), and further states, transcendentally, that
“nothing is gained by denying that they end where they appear to, within life” (that is,
from the internal perspective, from within the “system of justiﬁcation and criticism, which
controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality”), he gives us a reason to
believe that things matter and hence contradicts the main claim of his doctrine of
absurdity: that we have no reason to believe anything matters, or even that nothing does
matter.

This contradiction might motivate us to question both of my interpretations of
Nagel's argument for absurdity—especially if we combine the contradiction with what
seems to be Nagel engaging in normative ethics in his book that precedes “The Absurd”
and in an essay that succeeds it. To be sure, if “The Absurd” is sandwiched between two

works in which Nagel defends the claim that things matter and should be taken seriously,

then perhaps I have got the essay, and his argument for absurdity within it, all wrong.

 

“Ibid.. 12.

89

Let us ﬁrst consider the essay that was written shortly after “The Absurd.” The
essay I have in mind is “War and Massacre,” which, Nagel tells us in a footnote, was
completed in 1971, the same year “The Absurd” was published.” In the opening
paragraph of “War and Massacre,” Nagel plainly states his thesis, and it appears to
contradict the moral skepticism or nihilism I have alleged he defends in “The Absurd.” He
writes: “I wish to argue that certain [moral] restrictions [on the conduct of war] are
neither arbitrary nor merely conventional, and that their validity does not depend simply on
their useﬁrlness. There is, in other words, a moral basis for the rules of war, even though
the conventions now ofﬁcially in force are far from giving it perfect expression.” We need
not concern ourselves with the details of this thesis, but basically Nagel defends a
deontological view, which he calls “absolutism,” against utilitarianism regarding the
treatment of combatants and noncombatants in time of war. He states that he thinks
absolutism “underlies a valid and fundamental type of moral judgment—which cannot be
reduced to or ovenidden by other principles. And while there may be other principles just
as fundamental, it is particularly important not to lose conﬁdence in our absolutist
intuitions, for they are often the only barrier before the abyss of utilitarian apologetics for
large-scale murder.”38

For its part, Nagel's ﬁrst published book, The Possibility of A ltruism, whose
publication antedates “The Absurd” one year, yields normative conclusions as well, and

hence similarly appears to contradict my interpretation of his doctrine of absurdity in the

 

37I suppose it is possible Nagel wrote “War and Massacre” before “The Absurd,” but since “The
Absurd” was published in 1971 and “War and Massacre” was only completed that year and published late
1972. I think it is reasonable to conclude that he wrote “The Absurd” ﬁrst. In either case. the proximity.
not the order. is what is signiﬁcant. Thomas Nagel. “War and Massacre,” Philosophv and Public Affairs
1 (1972); reprinted in Nagel, Mortal Questions. All page references refer to Mortal Questions.

38Ibid.. 53, 56. l perhaps should note that Nagel argues that in rare circumstances neither the
absolutist principle nor the utilitarian principle is superior, resulting in an unresolvable moral dilemma.

9O

essay.39 In short, Nagel tries to establish that in two important respects ethics is not
founded on sentiment, but something deeper, thus giving ethics a more objective
foundation. First, the motivation for acting on moral propositions is contained in the
cognitive content of those propositions themselves (strong intemalism or prescriptivism),
rather than being dependent on something outside them, such as desire (extemalism or
descriptivism). Thus once we accept the truth of a moral claim, we thereby have a reason
to act on it; we do not need, in addition, a certain desire to have a reason for acting.
Reasons create desires for acting, not the other way around. Second, altruism does not
depend on feelings of sympathy or benevolence but rather on the realization that each of
us is only a person among many who are as real as we (universalizability). This realization
alone gives us reason to take the interests of others into consideration. Nagel believes that
this universal prescriptivism, then, provides the basis for constructing a normative ethical
theory; and while he stops well short of constructing such a theory in the book, he does
indicate that a plausible one will probably be moderately deontological. Thus it appears
that not only immediately after “The Absurd” but also before it, and for quite some time,
Nagel is committed to the existence of objective values, which makes the essay under my
interpretations seem very odd.

However, I think a close reading of The Possibility of A [truism reveals that it is
consistent with value skepticism, and hence with at least my ﬁrst interpretation of Nagel's
doctrine of absurdity in “The Absurd.” In fact, the book outwardly supports value

skepticism. Late in the book, Nagel writes:

Moreover it must be repeated that an interpretation of the kind I have offered is
neither a justiﬁcation of the conduct which it explains, nor a demonstration that
such conduct is necessary. It is not a justiﬁcation, because a justiﬁcation must
operate within the framework of an assumed system of reasons for action, and this

 

39Nagel tells us in the preface that the ﬁrst draft of the book was written in 1966—67 and that the
book grew out of his thesis for the B.Phil. at Oxford in 1960 and his doctoral dissertation at Harvard in
1963. Thus the major ideas of the book probably express his views for the entire decade preceding “The
Absurd.”

9l

interpretation offers to explain the most fundamental structure of just such a
system. It is not a demonstration of necessity, because it is possible to imagine an
individual fully capable of occupying the impersonal standpoint and possessing a
conception of himself as just another of the world's inhabitants, who nevertheless
remained from this standpoint split off, detached from his practical concerns and
his rationally motivated actions.40

What is of importance here are Nagel's remarks about justiﬁcation, but I ﬁrst want to say a
word or two in passing about his remarks about necessity. The individual Nagel believes
is possible to imagine is someone who does not at all live from the internal perspective and
hence does not take things seriously. In “The Absurd,” Nagel, we know, comes close to
denying the physical possibility of such an individual; and the plausibility of his doctrine of
absurdity, we also know, depends on there not being one, or at least not many of them.
Also, we shall see in the next chapter that after “The Absurd” the conspicuous discrepancy
making our lives absurd involves, neither value skepticism nor value nihilism, but the
existential inescapability of the kind of “split-offness” or “detachment” to which Nagel
refers here.

But ﬁrst things ﬁrst. Regarding the issue of justiﬁcation, Nagel in the above
passage tells us in effect that he only purports to be speaking within the “system of
justiﬁcation and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to
rationality.” He does not claim to be giving a justiﬁcation of the system itself, which is to
say that there is always the possibility of calling the system into doubt, and in particular of
questioning whether anyone's interests really matter. In other words, Nagel's view in The
Possibility of Altruism is that given one's own interests matter, one has an objective
reason to concern oneself with the interests of others. Though this conditional is rather
deep, it is a conditional nonetheless, and Nagel never suggests that it can be discharged.

In view of this position in the book, we have every reason to believe that Nagel thinks his
claims on behalf of absolutism in “War and Massacre” rest on this deep presupposition as

well. Therefore, while The Possibility of A [truism and “War and Massacre” may give us

 

”Nagel, The Possibility of A ltruism, 123.

92

reason to doubt that Nagel is a thoroughgoing value nihilist in “The Absurd,” they do not

give us any reason to doubt he is a value skeptic.

CHAPTER 4

THE THIRD DOCTRINE

Nagel's ﬁrst discussion of absurdity after “The Absurd” lies in “Subjective and
Objective,” which is the concluding chapter of Mortal Questions, the same book in which
he includes “The Absurd.” While Nagel does not say the order of the two essays in the
book reﬂects the order in which he wrote them, clearly it does for the following reason.
“Subjective and Objective,” ﬁrst published as the concluding chapter of Mortal Questions,
binds together “The Absurd,” which had been published eight years before the book, and
several other previously published chapters around a single problem. This fact strongly
suggests he wrote the concluding chapter speciﬁcally for the book and hence after “The
Absurd.” That “Subjective and Objective” binds together several chapters in the book
also indicates he wrote the chapter shortly before the book was published, and hence that
a signiﬁcant time elapsed between the time he wrote it and “The Absurd.”l

Now Nagel's opening remarks on absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” concern
the issue of whether the external perspective is skeptical or nonskeptical about our lives
mattering. These remarks reveal that it is nonskeptical and nihilist. Nagel states that
“from a point of view outside my life, my life does not matter,” that from such a point of

view “people, and oneself in particular, are perceived as having no signiﬁcance, and absurd

because they seem to accord their lives great importance in action, even though they can

 

lNagel writes in the preface: “These essays have both internal and external sources. Disparate as
they are, they are held together by an interest in the point of view of individual human life and the
problem of its relation to more impersonal conceptions of reality. This problem. which receives a general
discussion in chapter 14 [‘Subjective and Objective’], arises across the board in philosophy, from ethics to
metaphysics” (Nagel, Mortal Questions, xii).

93

94

also appreciate a broader point of view from which they have no importance.”2 Thus it
seems Nagel's position in “Subjective and Objective” is the same as the second doctrine of
absurdity in “The Absurd” (and at the same time corroborates the view that he does in fact
present that doctrine in that essay). Perhaps, then, we are justiﬁed in calling the second
doctrine Nagel's prorrrinent doctrine of absurdity. However, I am afraid this judgment is
premature; for as we read through “Subjective and Objective” and come to understand its
main thesis, it becomes clear that by no means is there a perfect match between Nagel's

doctrine of absurdity here and his second doctrine in “The Absurd.”

The Main Thesis

Nagel's main thesis in “Subjective and Objective” is that a general metaphysical
problem which has divided and plagued philosophers for centuries can be resolved. That
age-old problem is, as the title of the chapter suggests, the conﬂict between two points of
view, the subjective and objective, and the two realities or worlds that correspond to these
points of view. Later I shall describe in some detail what Nagel takes objective reality to
be, but it will suffice now to be brief and say that generally objective reality is impersonal
reality, reality from no particular point of view, or what is sometimes called a third-person
point of view. It is the reality of things in themselves: properties of things and relations
between things which obtain absent a viewer and which sufficiently intelligent beings with
different means of perception would agree do obtain. Subjective reality, on the other
hand, is reality from a particular point of view, or from what is sometimes referred to as a
ﬁrst-person point of view. It is the world as a subject experiences it, and as such it is the
world within which properties unique to an experiencing subject, or to a particular point of
view, exist. As Nagel writes: “The properties that make them [experiences] experiences

exist only from the point of view of the types of beings who have them.”3

 

2Nagel, “Subjective and Objective,” in Mortal Questions, 197.

3Ibid., 213.

95

Now Nagel tells us that we have had in the past, and still do today, a propensity to
accept only a single conception of reality corresponding to one or the other perspective:
either a wholly subjective reality (as the idealist tradition has advanced) or, more
popularly, a wholly objective one (as, say, the physicalist tradition has advanced). The
propensity stems from recognizing that to deny a single conception of reality “is in a sense
to deny that there is a single world,” and to deny a single world “is harder to accept than it
may seem, for it implies that there is no single way things are in themselves.”4 Yet when
we try to commit ourselves to a single conception of reality and way things are in
themselves, whichever it may be, the other conception keeps popping up and nags us and
makes us dissatisﬁed with our single conception. Hence we ﬁnd ourselves in a terrible
dilemma: we are dissatisﬁed with any single conception of reality and we are dissatisﬁed
with anything other than such a conception.

Nagel points out that this general problem is really at the heart of more speciﬁc
age-old philosophical problems, such as the problem of clashing perspectives regarding the
importance of our lives, which amounts to the problem of absurdity.5 Just as we are,
generally, dissatisﬁed with any single conception of reality, we are, speciﬁcally, dissatisﬁed
with a single view regarding whether our lives matter. Now if Nagel's doctrine of
absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” does in fact mirror his second doctrine in “The
Absurd,” wherein the nihilist objective perspective has the ﬁnal say about the importance

of our lives, we expect Nagel would propose solving the problem of absurdity (and

 

4Ibid., 212.

5To be exact, I should mention that while Nagel describes the problem in terms of absurdity, he
actually calls the problem “the problem of the meaning of life.” The discrepancy is understandable.
Nagel, I think, takes mattering (not mattering) to he basically synonymous with meaningful (meaningless)
with regard to our lives. If so, the problem of clashing perspectives regarding whether our lives matter
ean naturally be thought of as the problem of the meaning of life. Now what interests Nagel most about
the mattering/not mattering (or meaningful/meaningless) clash is the clash itself, which, he believes,
amounts to the absurdity of our lives. So for all intents and purposes. the problem of the meaning (or
mattering) of life is the problem of absurdity.

96

perhaps the general problem and its other instances as well) by judging supposed
subjective reality illusory and eliminating it in favor of objective reality. However, such a
solution is exactly what he criticizes in “Subjective and Objective.” He believes that the
move to eliminate the subjective or to reduce it to the objective (which he notes “has
dominated recent analytic philosophy in spite of Wittgenstein”) is just as implausible as
denying the reality of the objective.‘5 Against both kinds of reduction, Nagel insists that
the correct solution to the general problem and its instances is to accept the fact of two
irreducible realities, two irreducible worlds" Therefore, it should be clear that Nagel's
doctrine of absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” is not only not identical with the

second doctrine in “The Absurd,” but incompatible with it.

The Objective Perspective and Importance

If, then, Nagel's doctrine of absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” is not the
second doctrine, what exactly is it? To begin, as we know, Nagel in “The Absurd” thinks
the operative belief generated by the external perspective (nothing, including our lives,
matters) epistemically trumps that produced by the internal perspective (our lives matter).
There the belief that nothing matters is true; therefore, the belief that our lives matter is
mistaken. In contrast, Nagel's solution to the general problem of subjectivity and
objectivity in “Subjective and Objective” suggests he thinks that the belief of the external
view does not epistemically trump that of the internal view. It suggests that the two
beliefs are epistemic equals, not in the sense that we do not know which one is true

(which would amount to the value skepticism of the ﬁrst doctrine in “The Absurd”) but in

 

6Nagel also argues in the essay that attempts to annex the subjective to the objective fail as well
(Ibid., 210—211).

7Against the reductionist objective conception. he writes: “Reality is not just objective reality, and
the pursuit of objectivity is not an equally effective method of reaching the truth about everything.” And
against the reductionist subjective conception. he states: “Objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out
of existence anymore than subjective reality can” (Ibid.. 212—213).

97

the sense that, with a qualiﬁcation, both are true. The qualiﬁcation is that each belief is
true only from the perspective that generates it. Thus insofar as the external view “claims
a position of dominance, as the only complete conception of how things really are,” and
declares that “people, and oneself in particular . . . have no importance,” it is mistaken.
For its part, the internal perspective is incorrect for the same reason when it claims that
“issues of signiﬁcance are signiﬁcant only if they can be raised from inside,” that it “does
not matter that from a point of view outside my life, my life does not matter.”8 We might
call this new Nagelian view value perspectivism. It is not to be confused with value
subjectivism or relativism, which do not recognize and accept such dual perspectives on
value, not at least in their traditional forms.

I am not altogether conﬁdent this interpretation of the text is right on the mark.
One reason I am not is that Nagel states the speciﬁc problem of absurdity before he solves
the general problem of subjectivity and objectivity—and never readdresses the speciﬁc
problem in view of the general solution. Further, he leaves open the possibility that in
certain instances there may be no subjective reality or no objective reality; in certain
instances what the subjective perspective reveals may be illusory, and the same goes for
the objective perspective. Nagel suggests as much when in focusing on the objective
perspective he states that we should “stop assuming that understanding of the world and
our position in it can always be advanced by detaching from that position and subsuming
whatever appears from there under a single more comprehensive conception. Perhaps the
best or truest view is not obtained by transcending oneself as far as possible”9 If in a
particular instance an objective view is not the “best or truest” one, that would seem to
imply that what it reveals, or at least part of what it reveals, is unreal. In fact, it would

appear to be the case that in many instances a perspective reveals something illusory, since

 

“Ibid., 197.

9Ibid., 211.

98

on Nagel's view, as I shall explain in some detail shortly, there is really no one subjective
perspective and no one objective perspective but rather a “polarity,” degrees of
subjectivity and objectivity, and hence different subjective realities and objective realities
competing against one another in one instance. Maybe, then, it is the case that the most
distant objective perspective from which we supposedly conclude that our lives are
unimportant is not the best or truest objective perspective. Maybe one closer in is, and
this one is the one that is epistemically equal to the subjective view from which we
conclude that our lives are very important. Such an interpretation actually receives
support in both “Subjective and Objective” and Nagel's next book, The View from
Nowhere. Let me take a moment to explain.

Regarding the support ﬁom the book, Nagel there argues that the view that
nothing matters, including our lives, is not credible. At the same time, he argues that
another objective—but not so objective—view is credible: that our lives matter, but not
very much, a view he may think stems ﬁ'om consequentialist ethics. Now interestingly,
one of the instances of the general problem Nagel critically examines in “Subjective and
Objective” is the conﬂict between consequentialist and agent-centered ethical views, the
former being an objective view and the latter a subjective one. In short, Nagel states that
consequentialist views forbid us to pursue our personal aims and ambitions when doing so
conﬂicts with what is in the interest of the general good, whereas agent-centered ethical
views permit us, and sometimes require us, to pursue them in such circumstances. '0 Now
if we take ‘our lives’ to mean our personal aims and ambitions, we can see how Nagel
might think that the consequentialist view is one that maintains our lives do not matter
much and the agent-centered view is one that purports our lives do matter much. Thus

when all is said and done in “Subjective and Objective,” Nagel may think the view that

 

”Ibid., 202-206.

99

‘our lives do not matter’ is false and the views that ‘our lives matter little’ and ‘they matter
a lot’ are true within their perspectives.

In the previous two paragraphs, I have actually considered two alternative
interpretations of Nagel's view regarding the importance of our lives in “Subjective and
Objective.” One is that there are no epistemic equals in the case of mattering; that is,
there is no value perspectivism. With regard to values, there is only one reality. The
other interpretation is that there are epistemic equals, but they are the subjective view that
our lives are very important and the objective view that our lives are important, although
hardly so. In response to these alternative interpretations, I want to say, ﬁrst, that the
former can be safely discarded. Nagel as much as reﬁnes it in the opening of the chapter:
“There is a problem that emerges in several areas of philosophy whose connexion with one
another is not obvious. I believe that it can be given a general form, and that some
treatment of it is possible in abstraction from its particular instances—with results that can
be applied to the instances eventually.”” Here Nagel suggests that each of the speciﬁc
problems, among them the problem of absurdity, has the same fornr as the general
problem. The general problem involves the general statement that the subjective and
objective perspectives are epistemic equals. Therefore, it stands to reason that Nagel
thinks that each of the speciﬁc problems, too, involves a subjective perspective and an
objective perspective being equal epistemically. So while Nagel thinks we may be able to
resolve some individual clashes between subjectivity and objectivity by dismissing one of
the perspectives as illusory, he does not believe this resolution is available to the individual
clashes he discusses in the essay. -

Now regarding the other alternative interpretation (that there are epistemic equals
but that they are the subjective view that our lives matter much and the objective view that

our lives matter little), I do not think it can be dismissed as easily. However, for two

 

llIbid.. I96.

IOO

reasons I believe that it may not be as plausible as the original one I offered (that the
objective epistemic equal is the view from which we judge that our lives do not matter).
The ﬁrst reason draws from the same passage I used to criticize the ﬁrst alternative
interpretation. In this passage Nagel states that we can apply the solution of the general
problem of subjectivity and objectivity to the individual cases he discusses. This solution
does not involve replacing an objective perspective with another; it simply demands that
we accept each of the conﬂicting perspectives, which suggests that the clashing
perspectives in the individual cases he presents are indeed the ones that enjoy equal
epistemic status. On the objective side, the perspective in the problem of absurdity is the
nihilist one from which we judge that our lives do not matter, not the consequentialist one
from which we judge that our lives do matter, albeit just a little. We may recall Nagel's
statement of the clash cited earlier: “People, and oneself in particular, are . . . absurd
because they seem to accord their lives great importance in action, even though they can
also appreciate a broader point of view from which they have no importance.” Unless he
is being sloppy here, Nagel clearly thinks the clash, which he recommends should be
tolerated, involves an objective perspective that is nihilist.

The second reason I opt for the original interpretation is that there is a passage in
The View from Nowhere where Nagel seems to be referring to the problem of absurdity
and his value perspectivism in “Subjective and Objective”; and in this passage the objective

perspective is the nihilist one, not the one that accords our lives a little importance:

Even if the problem [of absurdity] can't be dismissed as unreal, it may have a
simple solution. Is it so certain that the [subjective and objective] attitudes really
conﬂict as they appear to? Since the two judgments arise from different
perspectives, why isn't their content appropriately relativized to those perspectives,
rendering the conﬂict illusory? If that were true, it would be no more problematic
that the course of my life should matter from inside but not from outside than that
a large mouse should be a small animal, or that something should look round from
one direction and oval from another. '2

 

”Nagel. The l- 'iew from Nowhere. 216. Emphasis mine.

IOI

Despite these two reasons, one might object that accepting the original
interpretation commits us to the view that Nagel believes there are not only two, but at
least three, perspectives with equal epistemic status regarding whether or how much our
lives matter. We are committed to this view because the objective consequentialist
perspective is one of the clashing perspectives in the problem of ethics he discusses in the
essay. Further, Nagel tells us in “Subjective and Objective” that he defends a version of
consequentialism in his ﬁrst book The Possibility of Altruism. '3 I am not sure how to
gauge the force of this objection, but one question I have is this: is a triple value
perspectivism any less plausible than a dualist one? In any case, let me end this discussion
on a positive note. We shall see that the original interpretation (that Nagel takes the
epistemic equal on the objective side to be the nihilist view that our lives do not matter)
and the second alternative interpretation (that he takes the epistemic equal on the objective
side to be the consequentialist view that our lives matter, but hardly so) will serve Nagel's

doctrine of absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” pretty much equally well. '4

The Third Doctrine
In view of Nagel's value perspectivism, whether triple or dual, it may very well
seem to us that he no longer has a doctrine of absurdity. In one fell swoop he has
legitimized the internal perspective—we can have our external perspective, and internal
perspective too—and hence seemingly dissolved the conspicuous discrepancy necessary
for absurdity. In other words, insofar as Nagel purports to have solved the general
problem of subjectivity and objectivity, does he not also purport to have solved the

speciﬁc problem of absurdity?

 

l3'Nagel, “Subjective and Objective,” 205.

MFor the sake of simplicity, I shall from hereon assume the original interpretation is the correct
one.

102

It may seem so, but really Nagel does not purport to have solved the problem of
absurdity. He does not think he has dissolved the conspicuous discrepancy. For he
believes that while ultimately no epistemic tension exists between the two perspectives, a
great and inescapable psychological tension does—and herein lies the fundamental
absurdity of our lives. We all naturally come to believe the two diametrically opposed
views concerning the importance of our lives, and they both are so alluring that we persist
in believing them throughout our lives. We take our own lives and the lives of others very
seriously ﬁ'om day to day, while at the same time feeling from a certain standpoint that all
our lives are utterly insigniﬁcant. We concern ourselves with issues and take strong stands
on them, and in a moment of reﬂection we judge, in viewing the world a particular way,
that those issues and our involvement are kind of silly. We fret and complain about
personal and world events, and then are secretly embarrassed for getting all worked up
over them when upon looking at them from a certain point of view we recognize they do
not matter. This never-ceasing psychological tension regarding the importance of our
lives, Nagel believes, amounts to a basic conspicuous discrepancy in our lives, and hence a
fundamentally absurd way of being.

Since our psychological commitment to this nihilist objective perspective is a
central component of Nagel's new doctrine of absurdity, it may be worth examining in
more detail what Nagel has to say about both the perspective and our alleged commitment
to it before turning our attention to the plausibility of the doctrine.

In “The Absurd” Nagel only brieﬂy describes the objective perspective, leaving us
somewhat in the dark as to what he really means by it. However, in “Subjective and
Objective” he devotes more time to this perspective. We learn, ﬁrst, that it is really not a

distinct viewpoint, but only one side of a “polarity,” the subjective viewpoint making up

103

the polarity's other side. '5 As for the nihilist objective perspective, it is the most extreme
objective perspective we take up, and as such it most closely approaches a pure objective
perspective, which is but an ideal. Actual “objective” viewpoints, then, are relative: at
timez a person's perspective may have been more objective than his or her perspective at
time] , but less objective than now at time3. Regarding this point, Nagel states that “a
general human point of view is more objective than the view from where you happen to
be, but less objective than the viewpoint of physical science.”'6 He also states that the
perspective of consequentialism in ethics is more objective than the agent-centered ethical
viewpoint, but less objective than the standpoint from which we judge that human
concerns are ultimately unimportant.

According to Nagel, the one deﬁning mark of the objective viewpoint is

“detachment.” He writes:

The attempt is made to view the world not from a place within it, or ﬁom the
vantage point of a special type of life and awareness, but from nowhere in
particular and no form of life in particular at all. The object is to discount for the
features of our pre-reﬂective outlook that make things appear to us as they do, and
thereby to reach an understanding of things as they really are. We ﬂee the
subjective under the pressure of an assumption that everything must be something
not to any point of view, but in itself. To grasp this by detaching more and more
from our own point of view is the unreachable idea! at which the pursuit of
objectivity aims. '7 ‘

The passage suggests that in assuming an objective point of view, we detach
ourselves from the peculiar contingencies of our particular selves, or, to be more
objective, we detach from the contingencies of a human perspective—or to be more
objective yet, from the mammalian point of view. Thus one paradigm of objectivity and its

pursuit would seem to be the traditional physical scientist who is a scientiﬁc realist, who

 

l~”Nagel tells us that he writes as if he believes a pure objective perspective exists only because it
is simpler: “Although I shall speak of the subjective viewpoint and the objective viewpoint, this is just
shorthand, for there are not two such viewpoints . . .” (Ibid., 206).

l6Ibid.

”Ibid., 208.

104

believes the objects of scientiﬁc research and theory exist independently of our knowledge
of them and whose aim is to discover and describe these real objects underlying their
appearances to us.

The passage also suggests that the pursuit of objectivity is motivated by a
particular dialectic (“We ﬂee the subjective under the pressure of an assumption . . .”).
Shortly after the above passage, we learn that this dialectic's point of departure is the
observation that a given object appears very differently to “differently constituted and
situated observers.” The best explanation of this observation is that there is in fact a way
the object is in itself and that the contingencies of observers' unique constitutions and
situations cause the object's diverse appearances. It seems to follow that “the respects in
which the results of various viewpoints are incompatible with each other represent
distortions of the way matters really are.” Conversely, the greater the number of
viewpoints that arrive at the same appearance, the closer the appearance probably is to
reality—and “the less an appearance depends on contingencies of . . . [a] particular self,
the more it is capable of being arrived at from a variety of points of view.” We can
conclude from all of these considerations that the more we each discount elements in our
own individual viewpoint that are idiosyncratic, the closer each of us will be to seeing
things the way they really are. Again, we shall be closer yet by discounting elements that
are peculiarly human, and even nearer to reality by discarding mammalian elements. In
sum: “The pursuit of objectivity . . . involves a transcendence of the self, in two ways: a
transcendence of particularity and a transcendence of one's type. . . . [It] aims at a
representation of what is external to each speciﬁc point of view: what is there or what is
of value in itself, rather than for anyone.”'8

While Nagel, as we now know, does not think the external perspective armed with

its dialectic renders null and void the internal perspective and subjective reality, he also

”Ibid., 208-209.

105

does not believe we can resist in practice thinking it does. We cannot help thinking, for
example, that our lives do not matter, period. As the following passages illustrate, Nagel
reminds us throughout the essay that the external perspective persistently allures us, and

he may be well aware that his doctrine of absurdity rides on this alleged fact:

[The individual] develops this kind of detachment naturally, to counter the
egocentric distortion of a purely internal view, and to correct the parochialism
engendered by the contingencies of his overspeciﬁc nature and circumstances. But
it is not merely corrective. It claims a position of dominance, as the only complete
conception of how things really are. This dominance is not imposed from outside,
but derives from the intrinsic appeal of impersonality to individual reﬂection. Life
seems absurd because it seems absurd to oneself, taking up a point of view that is
both natural and appealing. . . .

Objectivity is naturally linked with reality; it is easy to feel that anything
has to be located in the objective world in order to qualify as real, and that it must
have as its real nature some character which, whether physical or not, can be
regarded impersonally and externally. . . .

We ﬂee the subjective under the pressure of an assumption that everything
must be something not to any point of view, but in itself . . .

We cannot help wanting to extend it [objective transcendence] farther and
farther, and to bring more and more of life and the world within its range. But the
consistent pursuit of greater objectivity runs into trouble. . . . Two natural and
necessary ways of thinking [ﬁ'om a subjective perspective and from an objective
one] lead to a collision and cannot . . . be accommodated in a single view of how
things are. ‘9

In these passages, Nagel suggests that the pursuit of objectivity is psychologically
hard-wired in us. It is at least as “natur ,” “intrinsically appealing,” “easy to feel,” and
“consistent” as, say, our sex drive is throughout much of our lives. While of course the
objective perspective will ebb periodically, as does our libido, and give way to the
subjective perspective, it inevitably ﬂows again and again throughout our lives, its
expression immune to any intellectual counterforce. One manifestation of the objective
perspective is nihilism with regard to values, the viewpoint from which we judge that our

lives do not matter. In life we continually go back and forth—from believing and acting as

”Ibid.. 197. 202. 208, 210. Except for ‘oncself.’ emphasis mine.

106

if our lives matter, to believing and acting as if they do not, back again to believing and

acting as if they do, and on and on. The dance is an absurd one.

Evaluation of the Doctrine

Does this third doctrine of absurdity stand up to critical scrutiny any better than
the ﬁrst two? To start, one might want to attack Nagel's general metaphysical position of
perspectivism within which the doctrine of absurdity is situated. The fact is, Nagel does
little more than assert perspectivism. However, such an objection would miss its mark.
Nagel's general perspectivism really is not crucial to his third doctrine of absurdity; rather,
all that is crucial is that we are existentially committed to two views about the importance
of our lives each of which denies the truth of the other. If we are in fact so committed,
then whether Nagel's perspectivism is true or not is superﬂuous. This consideration leads
us, I think, to what a good objection would be. It would be one that plausibly denies that
we are existentially committed to at least one of the two opposing views. In the remainder
of this chapter, I shall try to establish that we are not so committed to the reductionist
objective perspective from which we judge that our lives do not matter.

To begin, a tension runs throughout Nagel's thinking in “Subjective and
Objective.” In the effort to sustain his decade-old claim that our lives are absurd, he sets
out to establish that we are constitutionally incapable of escaping a reductionist viewpoint.
Then toward the end of the essay, he comes very close to saying we can, and should, resist
the very same viewpoint: “The only alternative to these unsatisfactory moves [to bring
everything under an objective description] is to resist the veracity of the objective
appetite, and stop assuming that understanding of the world and our position in it can
always be advanced by detaching from that position and subsuming whatever appears ﬁom
there under a single more comprehensive conception.” Similarly, he states in the
penultimate sentence of the essay: “The task of accepting the [subjective-objective]

polarity without allowing either of its terms to swallow the other should be a creative

107

one.”20 At the very least, Nagel here seems to be holding out some hope that in the ﬁrture
we may learn to be living nonreductionists. But of course in doing so he is suggesting that
it is possible our lives need not be absurd. Thus by the end of the essay, he seems to tear
down the very doctrine he took pains to build up.

Now I realize that this objection may look like an ad hominem, that all it does is
point out Nagel is inconsistent, which does not effect the conclusion of his doctrine of
absurdity. However, I wrote, “at the very least, Nagel here seems to be holding out some
hope that in the future we may learn to be living nonreductionists.” I believe the two
passages cited above, as well and others, suggest that Nagel thinks he is well on his way to
incorporating the perspectivist viewpoint into his life. If so, and if he is not in bad faith, he
is not only inconsistent; he is a counter-example to his doctrine of absurdity.

Still, I can anticipate how Nagel might respond to this objection. He might say I
am forgetting an important distinction he makes: that between an epistemic discrepancy
between the subjective and objective perspectives and an existential one. Thus when he
encourages us to “resist the veracity of the objective appetite” and tells us that “the task of
accepting the polarity . . . should be a creative one,” he only means we can, and should, do
so intellectually, seated at our desks, not out in the street which, he would argue, is
impossible.

I am not conﬁdent that this is all Nagel means, but it does save him from a terrible
inconsistency, and, more importantly, from perhaps being a counter-example to his own
doctrine. The principle of charitable interpretation, 1 think, demands that I so favorably
interpret the passages, and so I shall.

Now the ﬁrst interesting thing to note about the doctrine under this interpretation
is that Nagel's view of exactly how the human condition signiﬁes an absurd one has ﬂip-

ﬂopped between the time he ﬁnished “The Absurd” and the time he wrote “Subjective and

 

201bi<1..211, 213.

108

Objective” in an even more curious way than has already been indicated. According to the
second doctrine in “The Absurd,” we know the operative belief of the subjective
perspective is false, but we cannot help acting on it in our day to day living. However,
according the doctrine in “Subjective and Objective,” we know the reductionism of the
objective perspective is false, but we cannot help acting on it in everyday life. What a
drastic change of view regarding the human condition! Of course pointing out such a
change of view, while perhaps shocking, is not in itself an argument against Nagel's
doctrine of absurdity in “Subjective and Objective” (or for that matter against the second
one in “The Absur ”). Therefore, given Nagel's claim is that we all cannot at least in
ordinary life escape a reductionist objective perspective, is such a claim true?

I indicated above that a paradigm of this perspective, as Nagel understands it, is
the perspective of the physical scientist who is a realist. If that is true, and if it is true that
we are all committed to reductionism, then our ordinary viewpoints must be similar to this
scientist's. But are they? Do we continually “ﬂee the subjective under the pressure of an
assumption that everything must be something not to any point of view, but in itself’? I
would gauge that many people have not once carried out the reductionist dialectic of the
objective perspective that Nagel has in mind, let alone “consistently pursued” it.
Moreover, I do not see that Nagel has given us any reason to think that those intellectuals
who have carried out the dialectic, and who do not ﬁnd it plausible, are only part-time
perspectivists or pragmatists or value realists, and are in bad faith if they believe
othenivise. In my view, Nagel has over-intellectualized the human condition. We are not
walking reductionists.

One might object on Nagel's behalf that I have unfairly presented the reductionist
attitude which Nagel claims comes natural to us all. I have exploited the most abstract
terms Nagel uses to describe it so as to make silly the suggestion that ordinary people
assume it. The suggestion that in day to day living we all “ﬂee the subjective under the

assumption that everything must be something not to any point of view, but in itself” may

109

indeed sound funny. However, if we cash such abstract language in for the ordinary terms
of the particular problem at issue, then the apparent silliness wears off. Ordinary people
probably do not carry out the reductionist dialectic at the same level of sophistication and
same degree of consciousness as Nagel and other philosophers. But in some manner they
do, and they persistently ﬁnd themselves concluding words to the effect that ﬁ'om a
nebula's-eye view their lives do not matter.

I think there is something to this criticism of my objection. To be fair, I should
represent the reductionist attitude in the most concrete terms possible, that is, as an
ordinary person might manifest it. Still, I think my objection stands. I do not think “we all
persistently find ourselves concluding words to the effect that from a nebula's-eye view
our lives do not matter.” Nagel never shows that we do, and the burden is on him to do
so. Moreover, even if I were wrong about ordinary people, Nagel still must show that the
many philosophers and scientists who do not countenance the reductionist dialectic, in
general, or value nihilism, in particular, cannot help appealing to it in everyday life.
Philosophers and scientists, not to mention everyone else, may not be able to stop
themselves from thinking that the sun is actually setting when they peer out at the western
sky in the evening. They may not be able to quell their libido for any substantial amount
of time. But I cannot see why they would be haunted, and persistently, by the viewpoint
they emphatically deny, such as “that everything must be something from no point of view
and that nothing is really something from a particular point of view.” Nagel must show us

that they are.

CHAPTER 5
THE FOURTH DOCTRINE

I argued in chapter 2 and chapter 3 that “The Absurd” presents us with two very
different doctrines of absurdity. Central to one is the skeptical claim that we have no
reason to believe our lives matter; central to the other is the nonskeptical claim that we
know they do not. In chapter 4, I noted that no such discrepancy appears several years
later in “Subjective and Objective” but also that the doctrine in this later work differs
substantially from the ﬁrst two, leaving us with three doctrines. According to the third (or
an interpretation of it I took to be the most plausible, all things considered), our lives are
unimportant ﬁ'om an objective standpoint but important from a subjective standpoint—and
neither standpoint epistemically has the ﬁnal say, resulting in what we might call value
perspectivism.

In light of these changes of view, it may not be surprising to learn that Nagel's
doctrine of absurdity changes once more in The View from Nowhere. In this work,
published ﬁfteen years after “The Absurd” and at least seven years after “Subjective and
Objective,” a view emerges that can only be described as a fourth doctrine of absurdity.
Against the value perspectivism of the third doctrine, we learn that our lives either do or
do not matter, period, and the objective perspective has the ﬁnal say. And against the ﬁrst
and second doctrines, we are told that while ﬁ'om an external standpoint we are tempted
to conclude nothing matters, the correct verdict from this perspective is that we have
reason to believe things do matter, including our lives to some degree. Now while news
that Nagel changes his doctrine of absurdity yet again may not be alarming, that the

doctrine allegedly involves the external perspective countenancing objective value

110

111

probably is. For such a view seems to negate, once and for all, the conspicuous
discrepancy needed for absurdity. Much, then, needs to be explained about this puzzling
new doctrine in The View from Nowhere, and that is what I intend to do in this chapter.
First I shall slowly explicate what I am calling the fourth doctrine, and in the process try to
establish that it is indeed an accurate interpretation of the text. Then I shall evaluate the

doctrine.

Traces of the Old Doctrines
I want to begin by acknowledging that passages in The View from Nowhere might
lead a reader to conclude that Nagel advances not a fourth doctrine of absurdity at all, but
one of the ﬁrst three, for these passages appear to support one or another of these
doctrines. For example, the following passage, which I cited in chapter 4, seems to

support the third doctrine:

Is it so certain that the attitudes [of the subjective and objective perspectives
regarding whether my life matters] really conﬂict as they appear to? Since the two
judgments arise from different perspectives, why isn't their content appropriately
relativized to those perspectives, rendering the conﬂict illusory? If that were true,
it would be no more problematic that the course of my life should matter from
inside but not from outside than that a large mouse should be a small animal, or
that something should look round from one direction and oval from another.

The passage is reminiscent of the value perspectivism advanced in “Subjective and
Objective,” and the passage immediately after it completes the argument of the third
doctrine. Nagel suggests that while seemingly “logical,” relativizing the verdicts of the
perspectives will not eliminate absurdity, for “the trouble is that the two attitudes have to
coexist in a single person who is actually leading the life toward which he is
simultaneously engaged and detached.”I In other words, although we may be able to

escape the conﬂict intellectually, we cannot escape it existentially. The human condition

 

lNagel, The View from Nowhere, 216.

112

essentially involves occupying these conﬂicting attitudes, and being committed to the clash
existentially is sufﬁcient to make human existence absurd.

While this text appears to reﬂect the argument of the third doctrine, we must reject
the claim that Nagel presents this doctrine of absurdity in The View from Nowhere. To
begin, Nagel in the second passage only indicates that relativizing the contents of the
perspectives seems logical; he does not offer any defense or discussion of the view, here or
anywhere else in the book. But much more importantly, Nagel throughout the book ﬂatly
contradicts value perspectivism. As I proceed to explain below Nagel's view on value, a
view he develops and supports in several chapters, it should become quite clear that he is
not a value perspectivist, but rather a thoroughgoing value realist.

If in The View from Nowhere Nagel does not advance the third doctrine of
absurdity, then maybe he goes all the way back to the ﬁrst doctrine, the one in “The
Absurd” in which the objective perspective is skeptical about objective values. Here is a

passage from the book that supports this suggestion:

The problem of the meaning of life [and so also the problem of absurdity] is in fact
a form of skepticism at the level of motivation. We can no more abandon our
unqualiﬁed commitments at will than we can abandon our beliefs about the world
in response to skeptical arguments, however persuasive we may ﬁnd them, as
Hume famously observed. Nor, I believe, can we avoid either problem by refusing
to take that step outside ourselves which calls the ordinary view into question.2

As though he had the essay in front of him in writing this passage, Nagel here
makes the same analogy he made ﬁfteen years earlier in “The Absurd.”3 The analogy is

between the epistemological status of our beliefs about facts and our beliefs about values:

 

2Ibid.. 218. Emphasis mine.

3Compare the passage with, for example. this one from “The Absurd”: “Philosophical skepticism
does not eausc us to abandon our ordinary beliefs. but it lends them a peculiar flavor. After
acknowledging that their truth is incompatible with possibilities that we have no grounds for believing do
not obtain—apart from grounds in those very beliefs which we have called into question—we return to our
familiar convictions with a certain irony and resignation. . . . The same situation obtains after we have put
in question the seriousness with which we take our lives and human life in general and have looked at
ourselves without presuppositions” (Nagel, “The Absurd,” 19-20).

113

just as the external perspective is skeptical about facts, so does it call “into question”
values. Now it would be difﬁcult to resist the claim that the view Nagel expresses here is
none other than the ﬁrst doctrine of absurdity, the one which states that despite being
aware we do not have any reason to believe our lives matter, we go ahead and believe and
act as if they do. And the ﬁrst doctrine receives additional support in the introduction of
The View from Nowhere where Nagel plainly admits to being an all around skeptic:
“Skepticism is radical doubt about the possibility of reaching any kind of knowledge,
freedom, or ethical truth, given our containment in the world and the impossibility of
creating ourselves from scratch. . . . I believe that skepticism is revealing and not
refutable. . . .”4

Despite this impressive textual evidence, we must also reject the ﬁrst doctrine as
being the doctrine of absurdity Nagel presents in The View from Nowhere. It is true that
in this text Nagel remains a skeptic, and in particular a value skeptic, and this fact would
seem to point to the ﬁrst doctrine. However, a careful reading of the introduction where
Nagel proclaims his skepticism, as well as the rest of the text, reveals that he only remains
a skeptic “of sorts,” as Steven Luper-Foy puts it.5 Later] shall explain more fully how
and why Nagel is only sort of a skeptic, but a few remarks now should convey the general
idea.

According to Nagel in The View from Nowhere, although it is possible that nothing
in fact matters, we nevertheless have reason to believe things do. Such a view is never
even hinted at in “The Absurd.“6 What we learn in that essay is that, at best, we have no

reason to believe things matter and no reason to believe things do not—the core statement

 

4Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 7.
5Luper-Foy. 87.

6There is. however. an interesting semblance between the modest version of the second doctrine
of absurdity and Nagel's view in The View from Nowhere. The modest version of the second doctrine
states that we have some reason to believe nothing matters. and the view in The l 'iew from Nowhere is
that we have some reason to believe things do matter.

114

of the ﬁrst doctrine. Now we may reasonably ask whether this difference makes a
difference. That is to say, if Nagel exploits the skepticism that remains in his new view to
get the conspicuous discrepancy needed for absurdity—and the passage above strongly
suggests he does—then it would seem that despite his now thinking we have some reason
to believe things matter, his doctrine basically nrirrors the ﬁrst doctrine in “The Absurd.”
As it turns out, however, he does not use this remaining skepticism in his new argument.
Notwithstanding the above passage, what in The View from Nowhere creates the
conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and reality that makes our lives absurd does
not have to do with what we do not know, but, as we shall see, with what we do know.
And that, in short, is why Nagel's doctrine of absurdity in The View from Nowhere is not
the ﬁrst doctrine of absurdity we encounter in “The Absurd.” As for why Nagel would
write the above passage in the book, I believe the most plausible view is that he is not
conscious of the fact that his view has evolved; he thinks his argument in The View from
Nowhere is basically the same as the one he gives in “The Absurd.”

Finally, one may point to a passage in The View from Nowhere that appears to
reﬂect Nagel's second doctrine of absurdity, the one that involves the nonskeptical claim

that nothing matters:

Finding my life objectively insigniﬁcant, I am nevertheless unable to extricate
myself from an unqualiﬁed commitment to it—to my aspirations and ambitions, my
wishes for fulﬁllment, recognition, understanding, and so forth. The sense of the
absurd is the result of this juxtaposition.7

Interestingly, this passage immediately precedes the passage 1 cited above (the one
that appears to support the ﬁrst doctrine and value skepticism), indicating that Nagel
ﬁfteen years after “The Absur ” still does not recognize the fundamentally distinct views
they express. (The two passages lumped together also corroborate the view that, probably

unbeknownst to him, he does present two doctrines of absurdity in “The Absurd”). At any

 

7Nagel. The View from Nowhere. 218.

115

rate, explaining why this passage does not make trouble for the view that Nagel offers a
distinct. fourth doctrine in The View from Nowhere is not difﬁcult. It is not difﬁcult
because after stating the argument expressed in the passage, Nagel explicitly rejects it. He
points out that one solution to the problem of clashing standpoints expressed in the above
passage is “a denial of the objective unimportance of our lives, which will justify ﬁill
engagement ﬁ'om the objective standpoint.” He goes on to say that “while this response
to detachment has some merit, the truth in it is not enough to resolve the conﬂict.”8 We
shall see below just why denying the objective unimportance of our lives “is not enough to
resolve the conﬂict” between the standpoints. What, however, is most signiﬁcant about
this statement is that the “merit” and “truth” of the response to which Nagel is referring is
none other than the claim that our lives do objectively matter—a clear renunciation of the
second doctrine of absurdity. The appearance of the second doctrine, then, is merely a
dialectical stepping stone to Nagel's true doctrine of absurdity in The View from Nowhere,
one importantly different from the second and, as I hope I have begun to make clear as

well, the ﬁrst and third.

Values
To this point I have done little more than allude to what Nagel's new view on
values is. Before setting out his main argument for absurdity in The View from Nowhere,
of which his new view on values is an integral part, I would like brieﬂy to rehearse his
argument for his new view on values, citing key text in the process. In addition to helping
the reader understand his general argument for absurdity, rehearsing his argument for his
new view on values will, I hope, leave no doubt in the reader's mind that Nagel does in

fact advance a fourth doctrine of absurdity.

 

“Ibid.. 219.

116

As I have already indicated, Nagel in The View from Nowhere remains a value
skeptic, of sorts. He believes that we cannot know for sure whether anything is
objectively important, or in particular whether our lives objectively matter. Reality might
be radically different from what it appears to be, and we have no way of ﬁnding out. At
the same time, he also believes that “it is worth trying to bring one's beliefs, one's actions,
and one's values more under the inﬂuence of an impersonal standpoint even without the
assurance that this could not be revealed from a still more external standpoint as an
illusion.”9 Bringing our values under the inﬂuence of an impersonal standpoint is
worthwhile, despite the possibility that everything this standpoint yields is false, not simply
for practical reasons, as we might suspect, but for theoretic reasons as well. Despite value
skepticism, we have more reason to hold certain claims about value than suspend belief or
hold rival claims. Generally, we have more reason to believe some values are objective,
and hence to be value realists, than to think all values are merely subjective, and hence to
be value antirealists. This new view of Nagel's is reﬂected in the announcement at the end
of chapter 8, entitled “Value”: “I have argued against skepticism, and in favor of realism
and the pursuit of objectivity in the domain of practical reason.”‘0 Now, then, how does
he so argue?

According to Nagel, value realists need to give us reason to believe that objective
values are at least possible; if these realists can do that, they can then argue that value
realism is more plausible than value antirealism because realism best explains the
appearances. While Nagel concedes that value realists do not possess a proof for the
possibility of value realism, he contends they can refute all the extant arguments that
purport to show objective values are impossible. Together these reﬁrtations make the

possibility of value realism stronger than its impossibility, which he believes is enough for

 

9Ibid., 7.

”Ibid., 162.

117

value realists to take the next polemic step and argue that value realism far better explains
the appearances than antirealism.

Nagel takes the time to explain and refute three antirealist arguments that he says
have had the “capacity to convince.” The second argument is noteworthy insofar as it
seems to reﬂect one of his own in “The Absurd” on which the second doctrine of

absurdity hinges:

Nothing has any objective value, because objectively nothing matters at all. If we
push the claims of objective detachment to their logical conclusion, and survey the
world from a standpoint completely detached from all interests, we discover that
there is nothing—no values left of any kind: things can be said to matter at all only
to individuals within the world. The result is objective nihilism. 1'

Nagel now argues that as tempting as this argument is from the external
perspective, it is nevertheless unsound, and can be shown to be so from this same
perspective. It is unsound, not because value antirealism must be false; antirealism might
be true. Rather, the argument is unsound insofar as it is a nonskeptical view about values,
one which makes the knowledge claim that there are no objective values. Nagel argues
that if from an external perspective we had nothing more to go on than data from this
perspective, then the conclusion we would reach would indeed be that there are no values,
for values are as absent and unintelligible from a purely perspectiveless viewpoint—a
viewpoint item no one and nowhere in particular—as the value of music is to a person
who has been deaf since birth and who has not communicated with anyone. From a purely
objective perspective, we cannot produce any normative reasons for action, make any
normative judgments whatsoever. Indeed, we cannot make any sense of them. From a
completely detached point of view, the world is devoid of value.

However, this verdict from the external perspective is mistaken, for from an
external viewpoint we have data from the internal viewpoint to consider. And such data

include appearances of value, everywhere. Just as accounts of what the factual world is

 

“Ibid.. 146.

118

really like use data from the internal perspective (that is, use the appearances from
particular perspectives to infer what the world is objectively like), an objective account of
value appropriately involves using appearances of value from particular perspectives. This
explanation of what an objective account of values properly involves no more implies that
values are objective than the explanation of what an objective account of the factual world
involves implies the existence of a material world. All Nagel is suggesting at this point is
that objective accounts of the world, whether the world of fact or value, legitimately use
subjective appearances as data. If this is the case, then the above argument which
purported to establish that values are unintelligible from an objective point of view is

unsound. '2 As Nagel puts the matter:

The fact that the point of something can't be understood from the objective
standpoint alone doesn't mean it must be regarded objectively as pointless, any
more than the fact that the value of music is not directly comprehensible to
someone deaf from birth means he has to judge it worthless. His knowledge of its
value must depend on others. And the objective standpoint can recognize the
authority of particular points of view with regard to worth as it can with regard to
essentially perspectival facts.l3

Nagel concludes by claiming that since this antirealist argument and the others fail,
it is reasonable to assume that objective values are at least possible; and once we grant the
possibility of objective values, then by far the best explanation of the appearances is that
there are objective values. In several places we read why Nagel thinks the appearances
support value realism.“ In one such place he argues for the objective badness of pain,
something he believes is objectively bad if anything is objectively bad. (The passage also
nicely illustrates Nagel's general method of arguing for value realism, which I have tried to

outline):

 

”Ibid.. 146—47, 219—20.
”Ibid., 219.

”Ibid., 145-46. 148, 154-55.

119

We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position,
that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively
recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe
headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside,
you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot
stove, just because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether
you can manage to withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical
reason makes any sense at all, so that there is some judgment to withhold, it does
not seem possible. If the general arguments against the reality of objective reasons
are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a reason, and not just an
inclination, to reﬁ'ain ﬁom putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the
possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. . . .

There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal [that I have no objective
reason to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove], but it seems nevertheless
insane. ‘5

Nagel's case for value realism is more substantial than what this passage and my
remarks leading up to it convey. If 1 were to evaluate his case, I would feel compelled to
do more justice to it. However, my interest, at least at this point, lies not in critically
examining his position on values but in explaining it and establishing that he indeed
defends a position on values which is fundamentally different from his earlier ones, and
hence that the doctrine of absurdity he presents in The View from Nowhere is
fundamentally different as well.

Thus, to sum up the evolution of his views on values: Nagel in parts of “The
Absur ” seems to be a thoroughgoing value skeptic, and he presents a doctrine of
absurdity reﬂecting this view; in other parts of the same work, though, he appears to be a
value nonskeptic and antirealist, and another doctrine of absurdity emerges that reﬂects
this view. In “Subjective and Objective,” he presents the objective perspective as
nonskeptical and antirealist with regard to values; however, its ﬁnal word is not the ﬁnal
word. The subjective perspective's ﬁnal Word on values is as good as that of the objective
perspective, and from the subjective perspective values are real and our lives really do
matter. Thus value realism and antirealism are relative to perspective. Finally, in The

View from Nowhere one clash over values takes place wholly within the external

 

”Ibid.. 157.

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perspective, and Nagel shows that the value nihilism of the external perspective is
mistaken; while it is still possible that values are merely subjective and that our lives do
not really matter, we have reason to believe there are objective values and that our lives do
matter. So Nagel goes from being a value antirealist and/or unmitigated value skeptic, in
“The Absurd,” to a mitigated skeptic who thinks we have reason to be realists about

values, in The View from Nowhere.

The New Discrepancy

When in the last chapter I announced that in “Subjective and Objective” Nagel
maintains that our judgment of value ﬁ'om the internal standpoint is epistemically immune
to the reductionist judgment of value we naturally make from the external standpoint, I
pointed out that it appears Nagel thereby kills his basic doctrine of absurdity, for he can no
longer refer to a discrepancy between pretension and reality. I then tried to show the
doctrine still has life, since Nagel argues that although an intellectual discrepancy does not
exist, a practical one does. Well, here again, in view of his new position on values in The
View from Nowhere, we cannot help but think Nagel undermines his basic doctrine of
absurdity. Not only does the subjective perspective countenance objective values, the
objective perspective does too. The objective perspective gives us reason to believe our
lives are important—that they matter, period—and hence apparently gives us a green light
to take ourselves seriously. So it seems we are not ridiculous in spending time in front of
the mirror after all.

Once more, however, Nagel without blinking claims that our lives are absurd
because of a fundamental discrepancy between pretension and reality. The new
discrepancy he has in mind (although he does not refer to it as such) has to do with the
amount of importance we naturally attribute to our lives, as well as to humanity in general,
from the internal perspective versus the amount of importance they may really have as

determined by the external perspective:

121

My life is one of countlessly many, in a civilization that is also not unique, and my
natural devotion to it is quite out of proportion to the importance 1 can reasonably
accord it from outside. . . .

We can try to avoid assigning ourselves a personal importance grotesquely
out of line with our objective value, but we can't realistically hope to close the gap
completely. So while the acknowledgment of objective worth inside human life
may make the conﬂict of standpoints less extreme, it doesn't eliminate it. . . .

Our constitutional self-absorption together with our capacity to recognize
its excessiveness make us irreducibly absurd even if we achieve a measure of
subjective-objective integration by bringing the two standpoints closer together.
The gap is too wide to be closed entirely, for anyone who is fully human. '6

The basic idea of the doctrine ought to be clear from my discussions of the other
doctrines of absurdity. However, I should clarify two things about the general doctrine
before moving on to Nagel's explanation and defense of its speciﬁc claims. The ﬁrst
concerns the distinction between objective values, on the one hand, and the objective value
or importance of an individual life, on the other. I made a big deal above about Nagel's
new view of value realism, indicating that it has a great bearing on his doctrine of
absurdity. But as we can see from the two passages 1 have just cited, the supposed
conspicuous discrepancy that makes our lives absurd does not have to do with objective
values per se, but rather with the objective value or importance of each of our lives. On
this distinction, Luper-Foy notes, “If it is not nihilism that threatens us with absurdity,
what does? Well, perhaps his real concern is that individuals might not have objective
importance, which is a matter that Nagel does not clearly distinguish ﬁ'om the thought that
objective values might not exist at all”!7 What, then, is the relation between objective
values and the objective value of our individual lives, or in Luper-Foy's negative terms,
between values not being objective and our lives not being objectively important?

Value realism is the view that certain acts, dispositions, and policies are good or

right and are so independently of the contingent, arbitrary, varying, and sometimes ﬂeeting

 

l6Ibid., 220, 223.

”Luper-Foy. 88.

122

attitudes or feelings we, or any other creatures, may have of them. The best reasons
support good or right acts, dispositions, and policies, and that is why they are good or
right; and ﬁrrthermore these reasons, unlike attitudes, are not contingent, arbitrary,
varying, or ﬂeeting. Now I think the ﬁrst, and somewhat obvious, point to make about
the relation between value realism and the objective value of each of our lives is that if
value realism is false, if values are merely subjective, then it would be impossible for our
lives to have any objective importance. To say of all my acts, for example, that they are
neither objectively good nor bad (or neither right nor wrong) is at the same time to say
they do not objectively matter. Thus the existence of objective values is a necessary
condition of our lives having some objective importance.

Now is the existence of objective values also a sufﬁcient condition of our lives
objectively mattering? To answer this question we perhaps ﬁrst need to make sure we
know what Nagel means by ‘our lives,’ which to this point I have not said much about.
Nagel in fact, to the best of my knowledge, never explicitly tells us what he means, but it
is pretty clear he has in mind something like ‘the totality of our intentional acts.’ Our
lives, he might say, are essentially deﬁned by what we do on purpose, so that the two
questions “Is my life important?” and “Are my acts important?” are basically
synonymous. '8 If this is correct, then the answer to the question above would, strictly
speaking, appear to be “no.” It is conceivable that whereas certain things are objectively
either good or bad, a human beings acts are not among them; that is, all our actions are
objectively neither good nor bad. But let us not give this picture any more credibility than
it deserves: it is only barely conceivable. We might recall what Nagel considers to be the
best reasons and evidence in support of the view that what best explains the appearance of

objective values is that objective values do exist. All of those reasons and evidence

 

l8This explanation is brief and rough, and maybe even somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, it
will do for now. The issue of what constitutes ‘our lives’ will come up again within my evaluation the
fourth doctrine. and there I shall say more about what Nagel's view may be. as well as say what mine is.

123

involve human beings and human affairs. Whatever we may think of Nagel's defense of
value realism, I believe we would have to agree that any considerations (appearances) that
motivate us to be value realists also motivate us to believe that among the things
objectively good or bad, right or wrong, are a human being's actions, the totality of which
we might call a human being's life.

In sum, while Nagel perhaps should have made explicit the distinction between the
existence of objective values and the objective value of our individual lives, we can now
see that his not doing so was both natural and harmless. The existence of objective values
and the objective value of our own lives are closely related. Before we can assert the
latter, we need to establish the former; and once we do establish the former we can feel
pretty conﬁdent in asserting the latter. Nagel, therefore, rightly defends value realism
before stating his doctrine of absurdity, and in stating it he is justiﬁed in attributing to each
of our lives objective value. Of course the degree to which our lives are objectively
important is altogether another matter. The claim that we have reason to be realists about
values does not tell us anything about how important our lives are. Nagel will have to go
beyond his discussion of value realism to gain support for his view, central to his fourth
doctrine of absurdity, that our lives do not objectively matter much. He does. And
shortly we shall see what he says.

The second clariﬁcation about the fourth doctrine involves another distinction: that
between the objective importance of an individual life and the objective importance of a
life form. It is one thing to claim that, distributively, human life does not objectively
matter much at all, and another thing to claim that, collectively, it does not. When I claim
the ﬁrst, I assert that my life, or any other given individual's life, does not matter much;
when I claim the second, I assert that the existence of humanity itself matters little. Nagel

claims both, and he does appear to keep them separate, not committing the fallacy of

124

composition. '9 He argues that from the inner perspective we give both our own selves
and humanity far too much importance. However, in view of the disproportionate space
he devotes to the claims, it is clear he is much more interested in arguing that we give our
individual lives too much importance than he is that we give human existence itself too
much. The reason his main interest lies with the former is probably this. First, he realizes
the plausibility of the claim that humanity matters little depends on the implausibility of the
claim that each of our lives matter much more than a little, and so he recognizes he must
establish that the latter claim is implausible before he entertains the former.20 However,
after he establishes the implausibility of the claim that each of our lives matter much more
than a little, he recognizes that having done so sufﬁciently shows our lives are absurd, and
so proceeding on to establish that humanity matters little is superﬂuous. Whether or not
this was in fact his reason, I think it is a good one and hence shall focus most of my

attention on Nagel's claim that each of our lives matter little.

Nagel's Defense of the Discrepancy
With these two clariﬁcations made, I turn now to Nagel's defense of the fourth
doctrine. Three key claims, it seems, need to be plausible for the doctrine itself to be

plausible: (I) that we can reasonably afford our lives and humanity only a little objective

 

19I do not mention the fallacy of division, for I believe that it would be appropriate to infer that.
distributively, human life matters little from the premiss that. collectively. human life matters little. It
may also be worth noting that 1 think it is appropriate to infer that human existence is absurd on the
ground that each human being's life is absurd. The fallacy of division is at issue here, and it is not
committed.

20This bit of reasoning seems to be expressed in the hypothetical statement in the following
passage. a passage in which Nagel seems to be suggesting that human existence as such cannot be much
important (and hence must be absurd) if its deﬁning mark is the alleviation of suffering: “But how could
the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery. deprivation. and injustice prevent people
from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless
[emphasis mine] and the only thing that really mattered was the elinrination of misery. that really would
be absurd” (Nagel. The View from Nowhere. 217). Nagel recognizes it must be established that “pursuing
positive goods.” by which 1 think he means each of us pursuing our personal aims and ambitions (or our
individual lives), is pointless. or of little importance, before it can be shown that “the main point of human
life.” is pointless. or of little importance.

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importance; (2) that we each as a matter of fact afford our lives and humanity much
objective importance; and (3) that the discrepancy between the objective importance we
are justiﬁed in attributing to our lives and humanity and the importance we do attribute to
them is conspicuous enough to make our lives absurd. Whether the third key claim is
plausible of course depends on the plausibility of the ﬁrst two, as well as their details. We

can, then, put aside the third key claim until we have critically examined the ﬁrst two.

The second key claim, especially as it concerns the value we place on our own
lives, is one with which we are already familiar, for it is a central part of the ﬁrst doctrine.
In fact, it is a major component of all four doctrines of absurdity. The ﬁrst passage that

follows comes from “The Absurd” and the second ﬁ'om The View from Nowhere:

[Human beings] spend enormous quantities of energy, risk, and calculation on the
details. Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his
health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-knowledge, the
quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and friends, how well he does his job,
whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life
is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

We worry about a bad haircut or a bad review, we try to improve our income, our
character, and our sensitivity to other people's feelings, we raise children, watch
Johnny Carson, argue about Alfred Hitchcock or Chairman Mao, worry about
getting promoted, getting pregnant, or becoming impotent—in short we lead
highly speciﬁc lives within the parameters of our place, time, species, and culture.
What could be more natural?21

As I mentioned above, Nagel seems less interested in showing our overvaluation of
humanity than he does our individual selves. All he states about the former is that our
admiration of the “achievements of humanity as a species” is excessive, that “the human
race has a strong disposition to adore itself, in spite of its record.”22 Part of what Nagel

probably has in mind here is our propensity to place much more value on our species than

 

2|Nagel. “The Absurd.” 15; idem. The View from Nowhere. 215.

22Here. he also mentions our excessive “pride in our culture. in our nation.” I suppose a culture
and a nation are. broadly speaking, life forms too. Ibid.. 222.

126

on other ones—indeed, other ones combined. When, for example, the life of a human
being and that of another kind of mammal are at stake, and we have the means to save
only one of them, the choice is crystal clear. Few of us would hesitate a moment, nor
would we feel the least bit of compunction with our decision, or at having decided
instantaneously. Moreover, if we ever encountered a race of beings who were sentient,
benevolent, and very intelligent (say, similar to the ﬁctional cinematic alien ET), we would
no doubt value our kind much more than theirs, just as any particular human culture
cannot help thinking it is above the rest.23

Now as for our overvaluation of our own selves, to which the two passages really
refer, Nagel insists that while some of us take ourselves less seriously than others take
themselves, even the least self-absorbed among us show a great deal of concern about
their own lives from day to day. Who among us, Nagel would ask rhetorically, do not do
the kinds of things suggested above, all of which express such concern? In response,
many of us self-proclaimed enlightened beings who believe we harbor no illusions about
our self-importance, might simply declare that we do not do these kinds of things or,
perhaps more plausibly, that we do them, but with little passion. I, for one, responded in
like fashion when I ﬁrst read the above passages. 1 reasoned that Nagel is probably one of
those people who take themselves much more seriously than I and others take ourselves
and that he therefore has made a hasty generalization from his own case; or perhaps he is
not one of these people himself but has focused all his attention on them. However, after
reﬂecting on the matter—including the psychological discomfort I experienced, seemingly

embarrassment, in entertaining the thought that I might take myself seriouslyz‘L—I had to

 

23Nagel might also think that in addition to feeling humanity is relatively important, we feel that
somehow our kind is important absolutely. We cannot help thinking the universe is for humanity, that we
are truly the center of it all, Copernicus notwithstanding. I hesitate. though. to assert that he goes this far.

24Does Nagel's doctrine explain this psychological discomfort? Is my embarrassment an
expression of my objective side reluctantly owning up to the objectively unwarranted egocentric acts of my
subjective side, owning up to them. that is, insofar as the objective side is a side of me? Another question:
might it be that doubts as to the veracity of Nagel's claim that we each take ourselves very seriously are

127

admit Nagel's ﬁrst key claim is plausible. Here is some anecdotal evidence in support of it,
drawn (with some reluctance) from my own experience.

(I) I think the whole phenomenon of fashion is pretty silly. I dress very casually
most of the time and rarely buy clothes; my hair is long and unstyled, and I do not worry
about a “bad hair day.” It would seem, then, that I am a good counter-example to Nagel's
claim that we all sweat over our appearance. Yet, truth be told, I suppose I am concerned
about how I appear in the eyes of others—not just to prospective employers and mates,
but to people in general. For example, I do not want my students to think that my clothes
look ugly or that I look ridiculous in them. I do not want them to think I am physically
unattractive. If a stranger stopped me on the street and told me I had a great look about
me, I probably would feel good all day and recall the compliment for a few days, warming
myself with the recollection. Upon returning home, I might even look in the nrirror and
wonder if there was something particularly appealing about my appearance that day.

(2) I recall occasions when I have felt compelled to dress up. Since I own few
clothes and have little insight into fashion, I worry at these times about looking at least
presentable. I can remember on two occasions before weddings feeling the need to
purchase attire. In both cases, I made a trip to a large department store. Although I felt
some discomfort, I tried on several sport coats and pants and looked at myself in the
mirror after putting each selection on. I turned this way and that and wondered how I
looked. When I persuaded myself that certain combinations would pass muster, I then
tried to decide which one looked the best. After deciding, I moved to the shirt and tie
area and runrinated over these components. Again, I narrowed the ﬁeld down to those I
judged to be at least satisfactory and then tried to choose the most attractive ones. While
I did not buy any shoes (I thought I could get away with the old pair of dress shoes I

owned, reasoning that shoes are hardly noticeable), I remember looking down at my shoes

 

really manifestations of the clash of perspectives and so not evidence against, but evidence for, Nagel's
doctrine of absurdity?

128

when I dressed for the weddings and wondering whether they would really be as
inconspicuous as I originally thought. I looked at them in the mirror, turned to the right
and then to the left, and assured myself they did not look bad. As far as I could tell, my
attire and I blended in at the weddings, although I may have been a bit disappointed at the
extent to which I did blend in. Perhaps I hoped someone would have said I looked nice.
So do I sweat over my appearance? No. But my behavior does suggest I take it at least
somewhat seriously some of the time.

(3) My behavior also suggests I take myself seriously in other ways, and probably
more seriously than my physical appearance. For example, I act as though succeeding in
philosophy (in school, scholarship, and teaching) matters. Failing a comprehensive exam
humiliated me; and then passing it made me euphoric. A poor performance in presenting a
paper awhile back left me feeling miserable for quite some time; recalling that disaster still
hurts. Earlier, a good performance made me feel great. A publication of an essay thrilled
me—my words and name in print. Another piece having been rejected for publication
depressed me. A ﬂat teaching performance upsets me, and causes me to work arduously
to turn things around the next class session. A good class always has a positive effect on
me, and a great class makes my day. I am anxious whenever I am handed my course
evaluations and relieved when the marks are good, although bothered by any negative
comments. If ever my overall marks revealed mediocrity or below, I know I would be
very upset. If the marks did not improve, I would quit, and would probably be devastated
in the short term and bothered in the long term at having failed in this profession.

(4) My actions suggest I am much concerned about my personality as well. The
other day, for instance, I argued with two older men in a cocktail lounge. Sitting at the
bar to my right, they were enjoying attacking public policies I strongly support when I
butted in and questioned some of their assumptions. We spent the next half hour engaged
in a loud, heated debate. In the thick of it, I was so appalled at their ideas that I spoke

faster than I could form coherent thoughts, which resulted in moments of near babble.

129

When they had had enough they retreated to the door shaking their heads, served some
last minute ad hominems my way, and walked out. Immediately I regretted the
confrontation. I was upset at myself. I recall scolding myself for butting into their
conversation and for having been so damned inarticulate. I remember being embarrassed,
even ashamed, at causing everyone in the lounge, including the owner, to stop talking and
turn their attention to me and my two opponents. I felt I had shocked and disappointed
these people around me. Until then I had been a ﬁiendly, quiet patron; the owner, staff,
and regulars over time had grown fond of me, as I did them, and we were now on a ﬁrst
name basis. But I felt that with this outburst their image of me was degraded. They now
knew I could be loud and hateful and inarticulate. For several days afterward, I was upset
at myself, and though certainly not as much, I remain so to this day.

(5) A few months ago I watched a ﬁlm with two good ﬁiends, a married couple,
with whom I have engaged in several ﬁiendly debates. As usual, we critiqued the ﬁlm
after watching it. I offered a criticism, and one of them objected to it in defense of the
ﬁlm. I reconsidered and said I thought my criticism was off the mark, to which they
responded in playful amazement: “Can you believe it, he's admitted he's wrong!” Just as
playﬁrlly I responded, “I'm very willing to admit I'm wrong when I am, but it is just the
case that I rarely am.” They booed this comment, and we continued to critique the ﬁlm.
In truth, their comment stung me. Am I perceived by others as being someone who will
never admit to being wrong? I hope not.- 1 do not want to be that sort of person.

(6) My mother died of cancer in 1992, and I still remember visiting her at her
house on one particular occasion when the cancer was at an early stage. As I walked into
her living room she was sitting on the couch switching TV channels with her remote
control. A certain sitcom turned up on the screen; she paused; and before she could say
anything I made a negative offhand remark about the program to the effect that it was
corny. She either mentioned that she found the program entertaining and then turned the

channel or simply turned the channel (I cannot recall exactIY). but I later learned she

I30

watched the program regularly; in fact, it was a favorite of hers. To this day, I think about
the event, and it grieves me. I had insulted her, and the part of the event that pains me the
most is that she did not turn to me and defend her favorite program but kept her eyes on
the TV and tried her best to ﬁnd a program that she thought would meet my approval.
Seeing her in my mind's eye clicking that remote, arm extended toward the TV, trying to
please me after I had derided her, hurts. Occasionally 1 come across reruns of the sitcom,
and I always watch them.

Now I do not think these last three examples should be interpreted as indicating
that I am preoccupied with my personality. I do not believe I am. Anyway, it is only
occasionally that 1 actually think about my personality. That said, I believe the sitcom,
ﬁlm critique, and cocktail lounge examples do indicate that I take my personality seriously.
I want to be an intelligent, interesting, and, above all, pleasant and caring person. I want
people to like me and to enjoy being around me. I do not want to be pretentious,
arrogant, pompous, combative, or self-righteous. Whenever I think I have displayed one
or more of these bad qualities, I get upset at myself. Whenever I believe someone ﬁnds
me boring or uninteresting, I feel bad.

Reﬂecting on my behavior (as well as the behavior of others, which I think in form
resembles mine) has, then, led me to accept Nagel's second key claim. Nagel is probably
correct that we all take ourselves seriously, that we all act as if our lives are important.
My only problem with the claim concerns the extent to which we all take ourselves
seriously, we all act as if our lives are important. Nagel's view is that we all take our lives
very seriously, that we act as if our lives are very important. Indeed, at one place in The
View from Nowhere he writes that our lives from the internal perspective seem to us
“monstrously important?“ I, however, am at this time reluctant to go that far. At any

rate, if I thought that the plausibility of the fourth doctrine of absurdity hinged on the

 

”Ibid.. 209.

131

second key claim, I would need to examine this issue. But I do not think it does. I think
that another major component of the fourth doctrine is implausible and that consequently
the doctrine itself, at least as it stands, is untenable. The implausible component of the
doctrine is the ﬁrst key claim that our lives objectively matter very little, and to Nagel's

defense of it I now turn.

It seems the conjunction of two considerations lead Nagel to posit the ﬁrst key
claim. One consideration is that each of our lives “is one of countlessly many, in a
civilization that is also not unique.” The other consideration is that each of us “is no more
important than anyone else and that the human form of life is not the embodiment of all
value.”26 The ﬁrst consideration simply points to the fact that there are innumerable
fellow valuers in the world: millions and millions of other human beings with their own
concerns, as well as a great number of nonhuman creatures with interests of their own. In
addition, humanity is just one of many life forms in the world. As for the second
consideration, it seems to be none other than the principle that many moral philosophers
take to be the cornerstone of morality: the principle of impartiality. This principle states
that from the moral point of view no one's concerns are inherently more important than
anyone else's, or, in Nagel's parlance, that from the objective perspective, the value of
every human being's life is the same, as is perhaps the value of every life form.

Now it is these two considerations, in tandem, that seem to lead Nagel to conclude
that each of our lives has little objective value or importance, as does each life form
including humanity. However, at this point we may question whether we really can infer
this conclusion ﬁ'om the considerations. We might ask, as Luper-Foy does, why it is not
the case that “everyone is extremely important even if none is more important than

others”? Luper-Foy speculates as to what Nagel's answer may be:

 

26Ibid.. 220-21.

132

Nagel reaches his conclusion [that each person's life is objectively trivial] because
he assumes that the objective value of people's ends is roughly equal to (certainly
no greater than) how strongly we (anyone) would be motivated by those ends once
we assign equal importance to everyone's ends and construct a collective project
accordingly. Given this tie between motivation and value, no individual's concerns
are more important than they ‘feel’ to anyone who takes up the collective project.
We can care less and less about each individual involved in a collective project as
more and more individuals are involved, so that when we have to consider all
human beings . . . as involved in a collective project, no individual's aims or life can
be taken very seriously.“

The basic idea seems to be that we can determine the objective importance of an
individual's personal aims by asking ourselves to what degree we would feel concerned
that they in particular be attained when, in embodying the impartiality principle, we feel
equally concerned about the personal aims of countless other individuals. The obvious
answer is that an equal concern for everyone's aims would leave us feeling negligible
concern for any one individual's aims. One way for us to appreciate this answer is to
imagine ourselves with the task one afternoon of caring for thirty toddlers, none of whom
we know personally and care about more than the rest, and all of whom pretty constantly
want this or that. It is clear that our attention to any particular toddler would be very
limited. Now concerning ourselves equally with, not thirty toddlers, but all subjects of
value, will clearly leave us feeling at best an iota of concern for any one.

We should understand that on this conception the degree of motivation is what
determines objective value, and this “strong intemalist view,” as Luper-Foy calls it, gains
support as being what Nagel has in mind in light of some of Nagel's remarks on death. He
points out that when we step back and contemplate the hundreds of thousands of times a
day death occurs, the felt awfulness of each death is slight. The reason is that “we cannot
regard all those deaths with the interest with which their subjects regard them: sheer
emotional overload prevents it, as anyone who has tried to summon a feeling adequate to

an enormous massacre knows. The objective standpoint simply cannot accommodate at

 

2i’Luper-li‘oy. 90.

133

its full subjective value the fact that everyone, oneself included, inevitably dies.”28 That is
to Say, the objective awﬁrlness of an individual's death is determined by the extent to
which we would regard it awful while at the same time equally concerning ourselves with
the thousands and thousands of other individual deaths which occur daily (as the principle
of impartiality, in particular, and the objective perspective, in general, demand). The
degree of awfulness felt about each death would be very little indeed. Thus the death of a
particular person is far less objectively awﬁil (important) than the awfulness (importance)
which that person him or herself regards it as having.

If, as these remarks on death suggest, Nagel's claim that our lives matter very little
does rest on an essential link between motivation and value, the claim would appear to be
implausible. Luper-Foy uses Nagel's remarks on the minimal objective importance of an
individual's death as a reductio ad absurdum to Nagel's general claim that our lives matter
little. Luper-Foy writes: “Suppose that the awfulness of ﬁve deaths is the maximum
people can regard with the interest with which their subjects regard them. Does it follow
that objectively speaking six deaths is no worse than ﬁve? Five billion no worse than ﬁve?
Is there no reason objectively speaking to prefer saving billions of lives to saving few
given how limited people are in their capacity to take on the interests of others?”29 His
point seems to be that since our emotional reaction to the accumulation of individual
deaths will at some point level off, any additional deaths beyond that leveling off point are
objectively superﬂuous on Nagel's view, which is obviously false. Hence Nagel's view on
values in general is incorrect.

As I understand Nagel's remarks on death, they may imply something even
stronger and stranger than what Luper-Foy states: each individual's death loses degrees of

objective importance as a death count rises, given a constant felt awfulness. In keeping

 

28Nagel. The View from Nowhere, 230.

29Luper-Foy. 91 .

134

with Luper-Foy's simple example, ﬁve or six deaths elicit the same degree of awfulness
from me, but since with six deaths this awfulness must be spread out over more individuals
than with ﬁve deaths, each individual's death is less important when six deaths occur than
when ﬁve do. Thus under this view of the objective importance of an individual's death,
such importance not only depends on the number of deaths an individual's death occurs
alongside, but actually declines as fellow casualties rise. In sum: the basic misconception
lying behind this implausible conclusion regarding the objective importance of an
individual death is that our human motivational capacity, which seems merely subjective
and contingent, essentially determines an individual's objective importance.

However, I am not so sure the above argument is the one Nagel uses to arrive at
the claim that our lives objectively matter very little, even in view of those remarks on
death. Luper-Foy himself seems less than conﬁdent,30 but he thinks that “if we dropped
Nagel's strong intemalist claim, there would no longer be any motivation for his view that
our lives are objectively trivial.”31 I want now to suggest other ways in which Nagel
might be so motivated.

First of all, if ﬁ'om the objective standpoint we acknowledge the objective value of
subjective concerns, but also that the subjective concerns of individuals are equally
important, then it might seem to follow, from this standpoint, that maximizing the
satisfaction of subjective concerns is what is most important. Given the great number of
individuals, this judgment entails that whether any particular individual's concerns are
satisﬁed is of little importance, since the effect either way will be negligible on the scale

measuring the sum satisfaction of concerns. In other words, Nagel may think, a la

 

30“In spite of the fact that the connection between motivation and value explains his fear that
individuals are objectively unimportant, I hesitate to say that Nagel makes the connection. For one thing,
it is not clear why Nagel makes it. . . . It would be better for Nagel to say (in the spirit of his moral
realism) that certain aspects of the truth about objective value are relatively inaccessible to people because
of their limited emotional capacities. . . .” (Ibid.. 90—91).

“Ibid.. 91.

135

Richard Hare and other utilitarians, that (l) the satisfaction of interests is objectively very
important; but (2) no one's interests are more objectively important than anybody else's; so
(3) what is objectively most important is maximizing the satisfaction of interests. Now
since (4) there are countless interests, (5) we can conclude that objectively the satisfaction
of any particular individual's interests matters little. Here the importance of an individual's
interests does not, or at least does not appear to, amount to how important “they ‘feel’ to
anyone who takes up the collective project,” the central (and problematic) claim in the
account Luper-Foy attributes to Nagel. Rather, such importance is determined by only
moral logic and the nonmoral facts, expressed in ‘(l)’ through ‘(4)’ above.

Turning now to these propositions, ‘(2)’ and ‘(4)’ are of course the tandem
propositions I have already noted Nagel emphasizes in reaching his second key claim,
which is basically ‘(5).’ While I have not yet said anything about proposition ‘(1),’ Nagel
does write much that is relevant to it in chapters 8 and 9, which I shall discuss shortly.
Suffice it to say now that critics of Nagel's ﬁrst key claim would not contest ‘(1).’ As for
‘(3),’ speciﬁcally the inference to it ﬁ'om ‘(l)’ and ‘(2),’ it is also new, and it seems
crucial. While there are only hints of textual evidence that Nagel makes the move, these
hints are located at one of the very few places he tries to establish that our lives matter
little. In the following passage Nagel states and responds to an objection to his view that
a conspicuous discrepancy exists between the importance we attribute to our lives from
the inside and the amount we are justiﬁed in attributing to it from the outside. Both the
objection and response suggest Nagel makes such a utilitarian move. In particular, they
suggest he is a utilitarian who rejects fellow utilitarian John Stuart Mill's claim that the

principle of utility warrants considerable attention to one's own affairs:

It is true that my life is the one among all these [possible forms of life] that I am in
the best position to devote attention to, and it could be argued that the traditional
principle of division of labor warrants my concentrating on it in the usual way as
the best method of contributing to the cosmic pool. But while there is something
in this, it should not be exaggerated. The argument would not really justify us in

136

engaging fully with our personal aims from an objective standpoint, and such
engagement as it warranted would be on sufferance from an objective concern for
the whole of which we were apart. This is at best a method of partial
reconciliation between inner and outer views. . . .32

Supposing this is Nagel's defense of the ﬁrst key claim, what are we to make of it?
To begin, it would appear Nagel's fourth doctrine of absurdity so understood is, at best,
only as plausible as the controversial reasoning utilitarians employ. Does the objective
recognition of the value of an individual's interests, ‘(l)’ above, combined with the
objective recognition that no one is more important than anyone else, ‘(2)’ above, logically
entail the principle of utility, ‘(3)’ above? Many people argue they do not, and hence will
not be persuaded by Nagel's fourth doctrine so interpreted, at least not until he can get
them to change their minds about this utilitarian reasoning. I take this to be an unhappy
situation for Nagel and the fourth doctrine. At any rate, I am not going to spend time on
whether this utilitarian reasoning is sound, at least not at this point. One reason I am not .
is that I believe propositions ‘(l)’ through ‘(5),’ rather than supporting the thesis of
absurdity, actually undermine it. And the second reason is that a more detailed account
than has been given of Nagel's view on values and ethics (which he brings out in the three
chapters immediately preceding the one in which he discusses absurdity) reveals that,
despite the passage above, Nagel in the end does not use the utilitarian reasoning just
sketched to derive his ﬁrst key claim that our lives matter very little, and hence the fourth
doctrine itself is not wedded to such controversial reasoning.

Let me begin with why I think the so-called utilitarian conception of value is no
good for Nagel's doctrine of absurdity. Such a conception implies that the relative
importance of the satisfaction of an individual's concerns will vary as the total number of
individuals vary. This implication (aside from being a part of what makes utilitarianism
implausible to many nonutilitarians) in turn seems to imply that if, say, nuclear bombs went

off tomorrow and the earth's population of living things dramatically dropped, the

 

32Nagel. The View from Nowhere, 220. Emphasis mine.

I37

objective value of the satisfaction of the concerns of the individuals still alive would
dramatically rise. 80 before the bombs went off, that my concerns are satisﬁed objectively
matters little. But after the bombs explode and I am one of the few survivors, that my
concerns are satisﬁed is—prestol—objectively very important, or at least more so than
they were. What this implication suggests is that our lives may be absurd now (because
multitudes of us and other living things exist), but they may not be absurd tomorrow or
sometime in the future (because a much smaller number of us and other living things may
exist), which amounts to a repudiation of Nagel's fourth doctrine of absurdity. In other
words, because it is possible that the lives of individual human beings will be considerably
more important in the future, it is possible that the discrepancy between pretension and
reality will vanish or at least will not be conspicuous. However, since the latter is
possible, human existence as such is not absurd. And it seems we can make the argument
even stronger if to the future possibility we add a fact about the past: that at one time the
human population was much smaller.

There does seem to be a way for Nagel to head off this objection, and interestingly
two statements he makes suggest it. They indicate that he regards as proper subjects of
value not only the countless actual individual valuers (and the many other actual kinds of
valuers) but also the inﬁnite number of possible individual valuers (and possible kinds of
valuers): “To the external view, many different actual and possible subjective values must
be acknowledged. . . . From there [the objective perspective] I can accord it [my life] no
more importance than it merits in a global view which includes all possible forms of life
and their value on an equal footing.”33 Now if all actual and possible individuals have
equal value, then no ﬂuctuation of the value of an individual can occur. The number of

actual beings would be irrelevant regarding each's value; it neither would increase with

 

33Ibid.. 220. Emphasis mine.

138

fewer actual valuers nor decrease with more actual valuers. Consequently, the objection
centering on ﬂuctuation vanishes.

Unfortunately, the move to throw all possible valuers, and all possible kinds of
valuers, into the cosmic pool with actual valuers, and actual kinds of valuers, appears to
be an ad hoc one. What metaphysics and ethics would afford all possible beings value
and, if that were not enough, the same value as any actual being? Luper-Foy seems to be

on the mark when he writes:

Here Nagel's argument teeters on the threshold of incomprehensibility. Having
said that the objective standpoint acknowledges that my life is of value, does he
really mean to add that objectively speaking my life is of damn little importance
since it has the same signiﬁcance as that of any living thing and the same,
moreover, as any possibilia, so that it is no better than the life of the possible angry
man standing in the doorway? . . . [I]t is patently absurd to say that the concerns of
individual people are no more important than those of individual possible people,
individual plants and animals, and individual possible plants and animals.3‘1

If this metaphysics and ethics is not “patently absurd,” then Nagel needs to show why,
which he does not. I myself cannot conceive of how the story would go.

Another, and more plausible, way Nagel may respond to the ﬂuctuation objection
is, ﬁrst, to agree that human existence as such is not absurd but, then, to insist that all
along he has really been defending the more modest claim that human existence as we
know it is absurd—and human existence as we know it is a world in which plenty of
human beings exist. This response of course comes at the cost of making the fourth
doctrine of absurdity a more modest one. But the doctrine so interpreted is still pretty
bold, and so I think this response may be available to Nagel.”

However, at this point I want to call into question the view that Nagel uses some

kind of utilitarian reasoning to arrive at the claim that our lives objectively matter very

 

34Luper-Foy, 89.

3S'Shortly. I shall revisit the plausibility of the second view. or something very similar to this
view, and argue that, appearances to the contrary. utilitarian reasoning does not in fact lead to the
conclusion that our lives are of little importance.

139

little. I believe he in fact employs another kind of reasoning, and although we have to
hunt for it in places where he does not explicitly discuss absurdity, it receives signiﬁcantly
more textual support than the two previously discussed views, so much more that I think
it warrants being called Nagel's official account.36 To understand it, we need to
understand Nagel's normative realism in more detail, especially the distinction he makes in
The View from Nowhere between moral reasons that are “agent-neutral” and those that are
“agent-relative.”

Nagel believes we have “objective reasons” to want or do certain things. For him,
to say that reasons are objective is to say that they can be “understood and affirmed ﬁ'om
outside the viewpoint of the individual who has them.”37 And to say that reasons can be
afﬁrmed ﬁ'om outside is to go beyond the nonnormative, causal, merely explanatory—that
is, antirealist—sense of reason, in whose context we would simply say that that woman's
“reason” for acting was that she had this desire or motive. In affirming that there are
objective reasons, Nagel afﬁrms value realism.

However, according to Nagel's own conception of value realism, there are “two
levels of objectiﬁcation” with regard to reasons. On one level are what he, following
Derek Parﬁt, calls “agent—relative reasonS”; on the other are “agent-neutral reasons.”38
The important difference between the two for the issue at hand is that having an agent-
relative reason to want or do something depends on being a particular person with a

particular perspective in a particular circumstance, whereas having an agent—neutral reason

 

36One may wonder why I even bothered with the ﬁrst two views given this strong endorsement of
the third. I bothered with the ﬁrst because Luper-Foy. a competent critic. attributes it to Nagel and
provides text. albeit a limited amount. that seems to support it. As for the second view. I think that. ﬁrst.
it is suggested by the passage 1 cited, which is centrally located within Nagel's argument for absurdity;
second. it is a more credible account of objective value than the ﬁrst view: third. it receives some support
in “Subjectivity and Objectivity” as the view Nagel espouses; and fourth. it. as 1 shall discuss shortly. may
be compatible with the third view and. in Nagel's mind. work with it.

37Nagel. The View from Nowhere, 153.

38In The Possibility of A ltruism, he calls the two kinds of reasons “subjective reasons” and
“objective reasons.”

140

to want or do something does not depend on these things. So, to take an example Nagel
is fond of, if I have an agent-relative reason to take aspirin to relieve a bad headache, that
is just because anyone from the objective view can understand and affirm that my presently
occupying a speciﬁc perspective—one with particular conscious experiences, along with a
particular system of beliefs and values—makes reasonable my wanting the headache to go
away and to take aspirin for this purpose. The objective justiﬁcation here stems from an
objective recognition that the pain is bad from my particular perspective.” At the same
tim&and this is the feature of agent-relative reasons that will turn out to be most
crucial—if the reason to relieve my bad headache is only agent-relative, then since people
do not occupy my perspective they do not have a reason to do anything to relieve my pain,
nor even a reason to want it to go away. (Of course they do have a reason to want to
relieve and to relieve their own pain.) This feature follows by deﬁnition alone.40 As Nagel

explains:

As objective spectator, I acknowledge that TN [Thomas Nagel] has a reason to
want it [TN's suffering] to stop, but I see no reason why it should stop. My
evaluation of it is entirely conﬁned within the framework of a judgment about what
it is rational for this person to want. . . .

From within I am directly subject to certain agent-relative reasons. From
without all I can do is to acknowledge the reasonableness for the person I am of
being motivated by those reasons—without being motivated by them myself, qua
objective self.”“l

Now if, in addition to this agent-relative reason, I have an agent-neutral reason to
take aspirin for the purpose of relieving my bad headache, that is just because anyone ﬁ'om

the objective perspective can recognize that the pain is not only bad from my perspective,

 

39It should be added that anybody from the objective perspective understands and affrnns, as
well, that anyone occupying the same kind of specific perspective has reason to want his or her own
headache to cease and to take aspirin for this purpose. While an agent-relative reason is relative to a
perspective. it is not relative to an instance of this perspective. Objectivity always requires generalization,
and. as Nagel emphasizes. such a generalization in part explains why agent-relative reasons are objective.

“Ibid.. 159.

4‘Ibid.. 160. 170.

141

but also bad from no perspective in particular, that is, bad from the objective perspective
itself. “The pain,” states Nagel, “though it comes attached to a person and his individual
perspective, is just as clearly hateful to the objective self as to the subjective
individual. . . . The pain can be detached in thought from the fact that it is mine without
losing any of its dreadﬁrlness. It has, so to speak, a life of its own.”“2 What this feature of
agent-neutral reasons implies most importantly, in stark contrast to that important feature
of agent-relative reasons, is that everyone has a reason to want to relieve my headache and
to relieve it. Any rational agent has a reason to want to eliminate and a reason to
eliminate what is objectively bad.‘3

Now how, according to Nagel, do these reasons and their features relate to value,
and in particular to the claim that our lives objectively matter very little? Let me start with
agent-relative reasons and their relation to value, and let me ﬁrst make one last remark
about agent-relative reasons and then one introductory remark about value. The last
remark about agent-relative reasons is that on Nagel's view a person's interests, together
with their strength relative to one another, will in general determine what he or she has
agent-relative reason to want or do. The introductory remark about value is that on
Nagel's view we can speak of two kinds: subjective value, what is of value to a particular
perspective, and objective value, what is of value to no perspective in particular, or from
the objective perspective.

Now regarding agent-relative reasons and their relation to subjective value: just as
the strength of an interest will in general determine what a person has agent-relative
reason to do, the strength of an interest will determine its subjective value. In other

words, the subjective importance of the interest is generally equivalent to what the person

 

42Ibid.. 160. Nagel is actually referring to a severe burn in this passage. but the source of the
pain is irrelevant.

“Ibid.. 159.

142

whose interest it is says it is.“ So if my strongest interest at this time is to ﬁnish my
doctoral dissertation (and if this interest is not irrational in view of other particular facts
about me), I have a very strong agent-relative reason to want to ﬁnish it and to ﬁnish it;
and the subjective value of wanting to ﬁnish it and ﬁnishing it is likewise great.

However, as for the objective value of something that a person has only an agent-
relative reason to want or do (no matter how strong), it is at best minuscule. The reason it
is minuscule is that something a person has only an agent-relative reason to want or do
does not engage the objective will. It does not engage the objective will because for
something to engage it, the objective will must have a reason to want or do that
something, which in the case of things that a person has only a relative reason to want or
do, it does not. This much is clear about Nagel's view of the objective value of something
that a person has only an agent-relative reason to do. Now whether Nagel believes such
value is absolutely zero or whether he thinks it is just very little is not clear. He hedges.
For example, about a personal ambition that one has only an agent-relative reason to want
or do, he writes: “[It] has no value except from the perspective of its subject—at least
none in any way comparable to the value reasonably placed on it by the person whose
ambition it is.”45 The sliver of objective value such a thing might have consists in the

sympathy the objective will may have for the agent. In a few places, Nagel mentions such
sympathy:

When you look at your struggles as if ﬁom a great height, in abstraction from the
engagement you have with this life because it is yours—perhaps even in
abstraction ﬁom 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. . . .

Those [subjective values] arising within my life may evoke sympathy, but
that is not the same as true objective engagement.46

 

44The exceptions are cases when one is wrong about one's own feelings. beliefs. values. etc.
“Ibid.. 169.

“Ibid.. 216. 220.

143

I shall not pause any more than 1 have to examine this issue. The reason is that the
more modest view, the one which assigns an iota of objective value to things a person has
only relative reasons to want or do, should serve Nagel as well as the bolder view in his
attempt to establish the claim that objectively our lives matter very little.

Let me turn now to the relation between agent-neutral reasons and value. The
subjective value of something that a person has an agent-neutral reason to want or do
roughly amounts to the importance he or she assigns it from within his or her particular
perspective. Thus the same thing that determines the subjective value of something that a
person has a relative reason to want or do also determines the subjective value of
something that a person has a neutral reason to want or do.

As for the objective value of something a person has an agent-neutral reason to
want or do, it would appear to be substantial. In fact, Nagel in several places suggests
that it is comparable to the subjective value of something that a person has a weighty
agent-relative reason to want or do. Let me try to make this point clear by giving an
example of something Nagel actually thinks a person has both a relative and neutral reason
to want and pursue: relief from physical pain. Nagel indicates that in any given case the
objective value of this state is comparable to its subjective value. To quote a part of a
passage 1 cited earlier: “The pain [ﬁom a severe burn] . . . is just as clearly hateful to the
objective self as to the subjective individual. . . . The pain can be detached in thought ﬁom
the fact that it is mine without losing any of its dreadﬁrlness.”47 And a little later Nagel
suggests the same thing in the process of asking why the objective value of something that
a person has only an agent-relative reason to want or do is not the same as its subjective
value: “Why shouldn't the satisfaction of my desire to climb the mountain [which I have

only a relative reason to do] have impersonal value [objective value] comparable to the

 

”Ibid.. 160.

144

value it has for me [subjective value]—-just like the elimination of my headache?”48 The
passage seems to imply that the objective value of something that a person has a neutral
reason to want or do, in this case relief ﬁom a headache, is comparable to its subjective
value.

Now, all we need to do is ﬁll in what in general Nagel thinks we have agent-
relative reasons to want or do and what we have agent-neutral reasons to want or do, and
we should be able to understand why he believes our lives matter little.

To begin, we have an agent-neutral reason to promote sensory pleasures (those of
“food, drink, sleep, sex, warmth, and ease”) and to relieve sensory pains (those of “injury,
sickness, hunger, thirst, cold, and exhaustion”).“9 We have, in addition, an agent-neutral
reason to promote individual “ﬁeedom“ and “self-respect” along with individual access to
“general opportunities” and “the basic resources of life.”0 In contrast to these goods
(which for the time being I shall call interpersonal goods) are other ones (which I shall call
personal goods), and we have only agent-relative reasons to promote them. These
personal goods include the remainder of our concerns, which, according to Nagel, account
for “most of the things we pursue.”51 Some examples Nagel uses are stamp collecting,
learning to play the piano or all of Beethoven's piano sonatas, climbing to the top of
Mount Kilimanjaro, spending time at the race track, building a monument to a god, and
securing posthumous fame. While generally each person has a (relative) reason to pursue
his or her personal goods, everyone else does not have a (neutral) reason to promote

them. In other words, the objective will could not care much less about them.

 

“Ibid.. 167.
4911510.. 156.
”Ibid.. 171.

”Ibid., 168.

145

And that, at last, is exactly why Nagel thinks our lives objectively matter very little.
We now understand that what he really means by ‘our lives’ when he states that our lives
objectively matter little is our personal lives, which he deﬁnes in terms of our personal
aims and ambitions. That a particular person is free of pain is objectively important. That
others respect her is objectively important. That she has access to opportunities and
resources that will allow her to lead a fulﬁlling life is objectively important. That she
learns the nine Beethoven piano sonatas, however, is not objectively important. That she
ﬁlls up her stamp collecting books or climbs Mount Kilimanjaro are not. That she
succeeds at, or even has, any of her other idiosyncratic ambitions or projects is not either.
But, as Nagel points out, she herself takes these things very seriously. She acts as if they
do objectively matter very much—and that precisely is why her life is ridiculous, absurd.
And because we all devote ourselves to our own “optional ends,” as he sometimes calls
our personal aims and ambitions, our lives are absurd too. Nagel uses a wonderful

analogy to drive home his case:

From outside we do indeed tend to see most of our pursuits as important
only relatively. Watching the human drama is a bit like watching a Little League
baseball game: the excitement of the participants is perfectly understandable but
one can't really enter into it. At the same time, since one is one of the participants,
one is caught up in the game directly, in a way that cannot include an admission of
relativity. When you are considering a career, marriage, children, or even whether
to go on a diet, review a book, or buy a car, the external standpoint is excluded
and you face the matter directly, from the internal standpoint of ordinary life. The
detached external view just has to come along, and accommodate itself to the
unqualiﬁed concerns that it can't internalize.’2

We can now see why Nagel may not be inconsistent, contrary to what Luper-Foy
thinks, when, perplexingly, Nagel writes: “From the objective standpoint, the ﬁrndamental
thing leading to the recognition of agent-neutral reasons is a sense that no one is more

important than anyone else. The question then is whether we are all equally unimportant

 

”Ibid.. 217—218.

146

or all equally important, and the answer, I think, is somewhere in between.”3 Luper-Foy
responds: “But clearly Nagel must think that objectively we are more nearly unimportant
than important, or else he would not have said that ‘human life even at its subjective best’
is threatened with ‘objective meaninglessness’ . . ., nor that we ﬁnd our lives ‘objectively
insigniﬁcant’ . . 7’54 The apparent inconsistency between the passage and the two
statements vanishes if we interpret Nagel” in the way 1 have been suggesting and if we
charitably interpret the passage and two statements. The charitable interpretation of the
passage is that insofar as our basic, interpersonal interests (pleasure, pain, freedom, etc.)
are concerned, we are all equally very important, but with regard to our personal interests,
we are all equally unimportant. The charitable interpretation of the two statements is that
Nagel has in mind our personal interests alone when he refers to ‘human existence’ and
our ‘lives.’ (That he does have this alone in mind makes sense in light of his view that our
personal interests comprise “most of the things we pursue”) Thus, on Nagel's view, our
lives are somewhat important if by ‘our lives’ we mean both our (nearly unimportant)
personal interests and our (important) interpersonal interests, and our lives are nearly
unimportant if by ‘our lives’ we mean only our (nearly unimportant) personal interests.
But then again one might argue, in defense of Luper-Foy's position, that Nagel's
true position is that each of our lives is nearly unimportant even when our interpersonal
interests are included. The reason is that our interpersonal interests are important—but
only in the abstract, only before they are practically considered, that is, in the context of
what actual people ought objectively to strive for in the world. What it seems they ought
to strive for is maximizing utility, utility being the interpersonal goods. This principle of
utility is objectively warranted because we all need to be impartial in promoting such

goods, for “no one is more important than anyone else.” However, the principle leaves

 

”Ibid.. 171.

“Luper-Foy. 90.

147

any particular person's pleasure, ﬁ’eedom, and so on minimally important in view of the
countless number of people in the world.

This distinction between something's objective value “in the abstract” and its
objective value “in the concrete” can be made more intelligible by considering the
following. There are no doubt many instances in which a person has competing agent-
neutral reasons to want or do different things, and in such instances it seems that certain
things have signiﬁcantly less objective value than they would if they did not have to
compete against other things. That is to say, just as the market value of a home decreases
when the fact that it sits in a crime-ridden neighborhood is taken into consideration, so too
does a portion of something's objective value get canceled out whenever the neutral
reason to which it is attached competes with a stronger neutral reason to want or do
something else.

This view of objective value, and along with it the position that Nagel thinks that
each of our lives is nearly unimportant even when our interpersonal interests are included,
does seem to square nicely with the second interpretation of Nagel's defense of the ﬁrst
key claim, which I presented a short while ago and referred to as the second view. We
might remember that this view generated the claim that our lives matter little by using
utilitarian reasoning, and it was supported by the passage in which Nagel speaks of our
“contributing to the cosmic pool” and our “objective concern for the whole of which we
are a part.” Moreover, if we deny that Nagel believes that each of our lives are practically
unimportant even when our interpersonal interests are included, then it is hard to
understand why he emphasizes the fact that each of us is “one of countlessly many, in a
civilization that is also not unique.” There appears to be no reason for Nagel to emphasize
this fact if his argument supporting the claim that our lives matter little has solely to do
with the value of our personal goods. On Nagel's view, our personal goods would be
practically unimportant regardless of the number of subjects of value. In contrast, there

does seem to be a point in emphasizing the countlessly many subjects of value if the

I48

argument involves a utilitarian calculation in conjunction with the interpretation of
objective values just presented.

I think in the ﬁnal analysis that it is possible Nagel believes the objective value of
an individual's interpersonal interests (pain, pleasure, freedom, etc.) must be brought down
to earth, subjected to utilitarian reasoning, and adjusted in the way just suggested.
However, if he does believe this, I think he is incorrect. Rather than speak of objective
value somehow “in the abstract” and then “in the concrete,” it makes much more sense to
say that, from a utilitarian point of view, all interpersonal interests are very important,
period, but that, depending on the circumstances, some interpersonal interests are more
important than others (that is, with regard to whether they ought to be satisﬁed). In other
words, from a utilitarian standpoint, all interpersonal interests are very important and
should be addressed, which means they ought to be included in the utility calculation; but,
because of the way the world is, some interpersonal interests, regretfully, ought to be left
unsatisﬁed. Therefore, given the plausibility of the principle of utility, we may be bad in
paying special or exclusive attention to our own interpersonal interests “on sufferance
from an objective concern for the whole,” but we are not absurd in doing so.

Nagel, then, might just as well say, if in fact he does not, that an individual's
interpersonal interests are important but that his or her personal ones practically are not.
That an individual's personal interests are practically unimportant might well enough
justify the claim that each person's life matters little, or in any case might create enough of
a discrepancy in our lives to warrant calling them absurd. The important question now is
whether Nagel can make a case for the view that some individual interests are objectively
important while others practically are not. By using the labels personal interests and
interpersonal interests above, I have already hinted at why he thinks some interests
engage the objective will while others do not. However, to be fair, I should take some

time to explore these labels to try to get a better sense of Nagel's view before 1 evaluate it.

149

We might remember Nagel emphasizing that the evidence for any objective value
begins with reports of value from subjective perspectives. However, he is quick to add
that this does not necessarily mean that all appearances of objective value are veridical,
just as not all appearances of empirical facts are veridical. (We have reason to believe, for
instance, that colors are not attributes of external objects, even though they appear to be.)
Now given the existence of objective value, the question is how to determine which
appearances of objective value are veridical and which are not. Nagel's answer seems to
be that the more something is not tied to a particular perspective the more likely it has
objective value and, inversely, the more something is tied to a particular perspective the
more likely its value is merely subjective. One of the things it means for something to be
bound up with a particular perspective is that the appearance of this thing's value depends
on the very personal likes and dislikes associated with that person. It is valued by the
person because of his peculiar interests; without them it would have no value for him. If I
were not a person with peculiar interests, I would not have this great desire to climb
Mount Kilimanjaro, nor would I support anyone else doing it, unless that climber was a
ﬁiend and I felt some special obligation to him or her. Now if the appearance of a thing's
value is contingent on a person's idiosyncratic perspective, that would strongly suggest its
value is merely subjective. For in order for something to have signiﬁcant objective value it
must be appreciated from an objective perspective; but if something is tied to a particular
perspective, it will not be appreciated once one assumes an objective perspective and the
particular perspective is left behind.

In contrast, one of the things it means for something not to be bound up with a
particular perspective is that the appearance of the value of the thing does not depend on
the very personal likes and dislikes of an individual. It, unlike the thing that has merely
subjective value, is not valued by the individual because of his or her speciﬁc concerns;
just the opposite—concems are evoked because of its value. The value of a thing that is

not tied to a particular perspective “simply come[s] at [a person] independently of his

150

choices.” He need not have these individual aims and ambitions or those personal
concerns and projects to value this thing; he would value it from any perspective. And to
say that he would value it from any perspective is to say that while historically the value of
such a thing, like the value of everything, arises as an appearance of a particular
perspective, it “can just be taken over by the objective self.” Its value is “transparently
good or bad.” The badness of the pain one experiences from a severe burn, for example,
is evident to a person directly and immediately; it is not bound up with his or her particular
dislikes. The person would judge the pain bad regardless of his or her personal dislikes
that are among his or her distinguishing characteristics. These facts about physical pain
strongly suggest that if anything has objective value, physical pain does. As a person
leaves his or her personal perspective behind when assuming an objective one, the badness
of the pain is still appreciated because it is not tied to the unique aspects of that subjective
perspective.”

Such an analysis leads Nagel to make a claim he admits sounds paradoxical: “The
more subjective the object of the desire, the more impersonal [or objective] the value of its
satisfaction.” What Nagel is essentially saying here is that the likeliest candidates of
objective value are those that can be identiﬁed with a person's mental states, or with, as he
puts it, “the quality of the subject's experience.” Physical pain and pleasure are two prime
examples. The unlikeliest candidates of objective value, on the other hand, are those that
hardly involve, if at all, a person's mental states, which he tells us are “things happening in
the world outside our minds.” These turn out to be all those concerns, projects, and goals
of ours that are personal and optional, such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and learning all
of the Beethoven piano sonatas. About these objects, Nagel writes: “It seems too much to
allow an individual's desires to confer impersonal [or objective] value on something

outside himself, even if he is to some extent involved in it. The impersonal authority of

 

55Nagel. The View from Nowhere, 166—68.

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the individual's value diminishes with distance from his inner condition.” Nagel thinks we
can easily see the merely subjective value of these objects outside our minds if we consider
those that can in no way impinge on one's mental states, such as securing posthumous
fame. We strongly believe that we have no agent-neutral reason to secure anyone's
posthumous fame. “If someone wants posthumous fame, he may have a reason to do
what he thinks will achieve it but one cannot see it as anything but a good for him. There
is no agent-neutral value whatever in the realization of his hope. . . But what exactly is
behind this conviction? Nagel's answer is that the satisfaction of this desire will have
absolutely no effect on the famous person's mental states. Because it will have no such

effect, its value is merely subjective.56

Evaluation of the Distinction and Doctrine

Nagel is a moderate deontologist, not a consequentialist. However, he is a
moderate deontologist who happens to think consequentialist considerations, along with
the principle of impartiality, describe much of what is of objective value and what we are
morally obligated to do.” At the same time, Nagel pits himself against those
consequentialists who do not distinguish between preferences, such as Richard Hare.
They believe that all preferences are objectively important, and so must be included in the
utility calculation. Now the question before us is in effect how plausible Nagel's case is
against these consequentialists. How plausible is his case for a distinction between
interests that are objectively important and those that are hardly so? Once again 1 want to
emphasize the distinction's importance with regard to Nagel's fourth doctrine of absurdity.

If he can successfully make it (and if he is right that we regard as very important those

 

“Ibid.. 169-71.

”“1 am not an ethical hedonist, but I think pleasure and pain are very important. . . (Ibid.,
156). “There is one important component of ethics that is consequentialist and impersonal. . . . [Slome
kind of hedonistic. agent-neutral consequentialism describes a signiﬁcant form of concern that we owe to
others” (Ibid.. 164). “Difﬁcult as it may be to carry out. each of us has reason to give signiﬁcant weight to
the simple sensory pleasure or pain of others as well as to his own” (Ibid.. 166).

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interests of ours that objectively matter very little, and if these interests are not negligible
but make up a good portion of our interests), then his doctrine of absurdity may very well
be compelling. If, on the other hand, he cannot successﬁrlly make the distinction, then he
fails to generate a conspicuous discrepancy and consequently is left with no plausible
doctrine of absurdity. So is Nagel's case for the distinction persuasive? My view is that it
is ingenious, but not persuasive.

The central problem of Nagel's argument for making a radical value distinction
between preferences can best be described as a dilemma in which the argument, I believe,
lands him. I shall ﬁrst outline this dilemma by identifying its two horns and then defend it.

Under one of two possible interpretations of Nagel's argument for the distinction,
which I take to be the ﬁrst horn of the dilemma, Nagel gives personal preferences that
objectively barely matter wide scope. By this I mean he includes as our personal
preferences all of our personal goals, concerns, projects, and ambitions. However, the
problem with this position is that it is false that the satisfaction of all these preferences is at
best minimally associated with our pleasure and pai‘n. I want to argue that the satisfaction
of many of these preferences is inextricably bound to “the quality of the subject's
experience.”

If this is correct, then it seems Nagel must give personal preferences that
objectively hardly matter narrow scope. Under this interpretation, which I take to be the
second horn of the dilemma, while some of our personal preferences (namely, those that
have a strong connection to our mental states) are objectively important, the rest are
practically unimportant. However, the trbuble with this position, as I shall argue, is that
not enough objectively practically unimportant personal preferences are left to warrant
calling our lives, or human existence, absurd. We might be ridiculously attached to certain
goals and projects, but our attachment to many others is not ridiculous. So while we may
be justiﬁed in saying that some of our concerns and pursuits are absurd ones, we would

not be justiﬁed in saying our lives are absurd.

153

In standard form, the dilemma, then, is this:

1. Either Nagel gives personal preferences that objectively barely matter wide
scope or he gives them narrow scope.

2. If he gives personal preferences that barely matter wide scope, then he commits
himself to the untenable position that none of our personal preferences are
strongly tied to the quality of our subjective states, and hence has not shown
that our lives are absurd.

3. If he gives personal preferences that objectively barely matter narrow scope,
then a signiﬁcant number of our personal preferences will be important, and
consequently our lives will not be absurd.

4. Therefore, either Nagel commits himself to the untenable position that none of
our personal preferences are strongly tied to the quality of our subjective
states, and hence has not shown that our lives are absurd; or a signiﬁcant
number of our personal preferences are important and consequently our lives
are not absurd.

Now let me discuss and defend this dilemma, beginning with the ﬁrst horn (premiss
‘2’). Its two major claims are (I) that many of our personal preferences are tied up with
our pleasure and pain and (2) that if so, they, on Nagel's view, must be objectively
important since the quality of our mental states is objectively important. Now what
exactly do I mean by the ﬁrst major claim? I simply mean that the satisfaction of many of
our personal preferences will make us happy and give us pleasure and that their not being
satisﬁed will make us sad and give us pain. Nagel is certainly right that we do take these
preferences very seriously—after all, they are our personal projects and ambitions! Indeed
it is in large part for their sake that we continue to do all the unpleasant things that take up
so much of our time. It is largely for their sake that we go to work and put in our forty,
ﬁfty, sixty hours each week, that we put up with all the daily drudgery: the dish washing,
laundry, housecleaning, and yard work. Nagel is certainly correct that we take our
personal interests very seriously. But ironically that is where his problem lies. Satisfying a

preference that we cherish is apt to bring‘us great pleasure; not satisfying it is likely to

154

bring us great pain, in many cases enduring misery. I take this point to be pretty obvious.
But let me support it with some anecdotal evidence that quickly comes to mind.58

(1) As I have already indicated, one of my personal aims is to earn a Ph.D. degree
in philosophy. It is a personal aim insofar as it is, as Nagel says, “optional,” idiosyncratic
and one I most likely could do without. But that I have not yet earned the degree really
bothers me. I usually feel anxious and uneasy whenever I do something unrelated to this
aim—and even when I am working on it. Moreover, one of the requirements of getting
the degree is taking and passing comprehensive examinations. When I failed one, I was
positively miserable.

(2) A woman in her early forties is childless and trying to become pregnant. This
is one of her (optional) personal preferences, and a very important one. She desperately
wants to be a mother. She has been trying to get pregnant for over a year and knows her
maternal clock has little, if any, time remaining. With every period she grows sadder and
sadder. She knows adoption is a possibility, but she very much wants to give birth. She is
distraught.

(3) A young man got a full-time job with a large horticulture business a few years
back. One of his goals last year was to be “employee of the year.” He worked very, very
hard to get this award. It was quite important to him. He felt a strong desire to make his
wife, father, and older siblings proud of him. He won the award, and was euphoric.

Now it is certainly true that the extent to which the satisfaction or frustration of
our personal preferences effects the quality of our experience varies. For example, had the
young man not won employee of the year, his pain probably would have been signiﬁcantly

less than what the woman's pain and my pain would be if we fail in our aims.S9 And

 

”Again, I would prefer to use nonpersonal examples. but I am most conﬁdent about the personal
ones. Please indulge me.

”What I have in mind here by “signiﬁcantly less” is a rough measure of pain arrived at by
considering different respects in which pain is bad. a to Jeremy Bentham.

155

certainly 1 have personal preferences whose ﬁustration would be less, and many far less,
than what the young man's would have been. Recall that example I used in chapter 2. The
fact that my coming up troutless after a day of ﬁshing when my buddies have managed to
land some ﬁsh often upsets me. Chances are the displeasure I feel in a given instance is
signiﬁcantly less than what the young man would have experienced had his employer not
given him the award. Notwithstanding, we can all, I believe, readily identify personal
concerns and projects of ours intimately bound up with the quality of our subjective
experience.

Moving over to the other horn of the dilemma (premiss ‘3’), it is possible that the
personal preferences Nagel believes are barely important are only those that at best have a
minimal effect on our mental states. We might remember the example he highlights, the 1
personal preference of posthumous fame, whose satisfaction or frustration has no effect on
the person's mental states. (The person will not be around to experience his or her having
succeeded or failed.) To this example we might add the many cases of winning or losing
in ﬁiendly competitions, such as a set of tennis or a game of bridge or chess. Often the
outcomes of these events hardly effect the quality of our subjective experience, one way or
the other. No doubt still other kinds of cases could be added, in general any cases
involving mild concerns of ours and goals and projects we pursue but with little
enthusiasm.

I am quite willing to grant Nagel all of these cases, but I hasten to add that these
preferences are just not the ones that deﬁne our lives. If individual human existence were
accurately characterized as the pursuit of posthumous fame, then Nagel would be in
business. But it is not. And our lives cannot accurately be characterized in terms of our

mild concerns either.60 If any characterization of our lives in terms of our personal

 

. 60If they were so characterized, Nagel's doctrine of absurdity would be none the better, for it
would lack the conspicuous discrepancy on which it hinges. The only discrepancy obtaining would be one
involving our taking certain personal preferences that were objectively unimportant as being minimally
important—hardly a conspicuous discrepancy.

156

preferences is accurate, it is one involving our lifelong aims and ambitions whose
satisfaction we enjoy immensely and from whose frustration we suffer much pain and
sorrow. Therefore, the move to limit personal preferences that are barely important to
those at best minimally connected to the quality of our experience seems just as
problematic as claiming that all of our personal preferences are minimally so connected
and hence are practically unimportant. It
While Nagel does not directly address either horn of the dilemma, he does make i

some statements about the connection between personal preferences and pleasure and pain

 

that I think indicate what his response to the dilemma would be. These statements occur L

in the following passage:

There is nothing incoherent in wanting to be able to climb Kilimanjaro or play all
the Beethoven piano sonatas, while thinking that impersonally it doesn't matter
whether one can do this. In fact one would have to be dotty to think it did matter
impersonally. It doesn't even matter much impersonally that if someone wants to
play all the Beethoven sonatas by heart, he should be able to. It matters a little, so
that if he is incapable of achieving it, it might be better if he didn't want to—
leaving aside whatever value there may be in the ambition itself. The neutral value
of pleasure and pain come into effect here. But even that is a rather weak neutral
value, since it is not the neutral correlate of the agent-relative reasons deriving
directly ﬁ'om the ambition, whose object is not pleasure. If an interest is developed
by the agent himself through his own choices and actions, then the objective
reasons it promotes are primarily relative."

First, I need to draw attention to a distinction Nagel makes in the ﬁrst and third
sentences of the passage. The distinction is between (1) whether it matters that one can
play the Beethoven piano sonatas, without considering if he or she wants to, and (2)
whether it matters that one can play them, considering that he or she wants to. The ﬁrst
question is more abstract than the second insofar as the ﬁrst does not refer to someone
actually wanting something; it just asks about the value of the thing (all by) itself. Now
without considering if anyone wants to play the sonatas (that is, thinking about them in the

abstract), it does seem “dotty to think,” as Nagel claims, that it objectively matters

 

"Ibid.. 170.

157

“whether one can do this.” Interestingly, it may not seem foolish to think that it matters
objectively that one is in severe pain. 18 it, then, this contrast, along with others involving
other personal preferences and pleasure or pain, that persuades Nagel that pain and
pleasure are objectively important but personal preferences are not? Maybe. In any case,
I want to suggest that the contrast is misleading. It is misleading because implicit in the
claim that it objectively matters that one is in pain is another claim, namely, that one hates
the experience of pain—and it is this claim (which, we may notice, does involve a
consideration of what one wants) that wholly drives our value judgment. That is to say, I
submit that if we were totally to disregard the implicit claim, we would judge one
experiencing pain as being neither important nor unimportant. In disregarding the implicit
claim, we would in effect be assuming that extreme objective perspective ﬁ'om which
Nagel tells us value judgments make no sense and which he warns us not to assume if we
are trying to ﬁnd out what, if anything, objectively matters. Therefore, if Nagel thinks the
claim about playing the Beethoven sonatas in the second clause of the ﬁrst sentence
advances his position that personal preferences do not objectively matter, he is mistaken.
The proper question for Nagel to address, then, is whether it objectively matters
that one can play the sonatas, considering that he or she wants to (just as the proper
question regarding one experiencing pain is whether it objectively matters, considering
that he or she hates it, or wants it relieved). And it is this question that Nagel addresses
after the ﬁrst two sentences. His answer is that playing them matters, but only an iota. He
suggests that the little importance stems ﬁ'om the pleasure in succeeding or the pain in
failing (“the neutral values of pleasure and pain come into effect here”). So, to begin,
Nagel does acknowledge a connection between personal preferences and pleasure or
pain—enough of a connection so that he admits these preferences have objective
importance, albeit just a little. But even so, if he can plausibly show that our personal
preferences do not matter much, the discrepancy between this fact and the fact that we

attribute to them a lot of importance may be conspicuous enough to make our lives

 

158

absurd. Thus the next question is why exactly, according to him, do they not matter
much? Nagel's answer lies in his statement that the pleasure from succeeding in playing
the sonatas “is a rather weak neutral value, since it is not the neutral correlate of the
agent-relative reasons deriving directly from the ambition, whose object is not pleasure.”62
What he seems to be saying here is that the agent-relative reasons one has for wanting to
learn the sonatas and for learning them do not have to do with any pleasure the person
may experience from learning them, unlike the relative reason one has for, say, engaging in
sex. Rather, the agent-relative reasons concern other things (perhaps, for example, an
idiosyncratic need to pay homage to the great Beethoven). And if pleasure is not among
the (relative) reasons the person has for wanting to learn and for learning the sonatas, but
is merely an unintended by-product, it cannot have much objective value. The pleasure
cannot, it seems, because it simply will be a weak sensation, qua unintended by-product.
Before I respond to this argument, I want to suggest the possibility that I may have
partly misinterpreted it. It is possible Nagel is making a different, and perhaps more
subtle, point than what my last sentence in the last paragraph conveys. Maybe his point is
that, regardless of the strength or weakness of the sensation, unintended pleasures have
much less objective value than intended ones. The pleasure, for example, one enjoys from
sex for pleasure, has more objective value than the same amount of pleasure another
person derives from learning all of the Beethoven sonatas for the sake of Beethoven. The
fact that pleasure was the aim in the ﬁrst case is just what gives this pleasure more
objective value than the pleasure in the second case. It is as though the idiosyncratic
intention of paying homage to Beethoven clouds over the pleasure the person derives ﬁ'om
learning all of the sonatas and negates all'but a peephole of the transparency needed for

the pleasure to be “taken over by the objective self.”

 

62As far as I can tell the subject to which the clause in quotes refers (that is. to which the
pronoun ‘that’ just preceding the clause refers) is the pleasure from succeeding in playing the sonatas.

 

159

Now if something like the above does accurately represent Nagel's argument, then
he needs to tell us exactly why the objective value of pleasure depends on whether it is
intended or not—why pleasure is not simply pleasure. To the best of my knowledge he
does not, and I myself cannot think of any plausible explanation within the parameters of
his theory of value. In fact, on this interpretation of the argument, sex for pleasure would
have more objective value than sex for procreation, all else remaining the same. I ﬁnd
plausible the view that our very personal aims and ambitions by themselves, that is,
divorced from the pleasure they may produce, have little or no objective value. But that is
quite different from the view that these aims and ambitions qua producers of pleasure have
little objective importance if and only if pleasure was not the reason, or primary reason,
the subjects pursued the aims and ambitions.

So let us return to the original interpretation of the argument Nagel makes in the
passage above: since pleasure is not one of the primary reasons the person wants to learn
all of the Beethoven sonatas, the pleasure she derives from succeeding in her endeavor will
be little, and so, then, will be its objective value. My criticism of this interpretation of
Nagel's argument is that he drastically underestimates the amount of pleasure or pain the
satisfaction or frustration of many of our personal projects produce—regardless of the
agent's own reasons for pursuing these projects. I submit the following generalization
about human psychology, which I alluded to above and which I take to be fairly obvious:
the more seriously 8 person takes his or her personal interests, the more pleasure will
come from their being satisﬁed and the more pain will come from their going unsatisﬁed.

I would add that the satisfaction or ﬁustration of the personal interests a person takes
most seriously produces much pleasure or pain, relative to his or her other pleasures and
pains. If I succeed in getting my Ph.D. degree, I am conﬁdent that I shall experience much
pleasure (so much that the term ‘joy’ would probably better describe my mental state). If,
on the other hand, I fail I shall be grief-stricken. I am conﬁdent as well about the extent to

which the childless woman in her early forties becoming pregnant or failing to do so will

160

effect her mental states. What about that piano player? That depends on how badly she
wants to learn the sonatas. If other aims and projects are much more important to her,
chances are success or failure will not effect her much. But in this case the success or
failure of those aims and projects that are much more important to her will bring her much
pleasure or pain.

Once more, no matter how idiosyncratic are our strong personal interests, no
matter how idiosyncratic is our perspective that developed these strong interests, their ,
satisfaction or ﬁustration will greatly effect our mental states, will produce much pleasure
or pain. This claim is an empirical generalization. As an empirical generalization, its truth
or falsity depends on the way the world is, speciﬁcally on the facts about human
psychology. 1 have arrived at it as the result of observations of myself, friends,
acquaintances, and strangers. While it is of course possible these observations are off the
mark, I feel conﬁdent in them and in the end can only ask others to check their
observations to see if they match mine. Also, as. an empirical generalization, the claim
admits exceptions. But a warranted generalization is more than enough to undermine
Nagel's response to my original objection.

In conclusion, I believe I have cast serious doubt on the distinction Nagel makes
regarding the objective importance of preferences. He has not given us any good reason
to think either that all personal preferences do not yield much pleasure or pain, or that if
some do they, unlike other pleasures or pains, can hardly be objectively appreciated. He
has failed, then, to meet his main condition of absurdity: a conspicuous discrepancy
between pretension and reality. Consequently, the fourth doctrine of absurdity as it stands

is not plausible.

 

CHAPTER 6
THE VIEW FROM EREWHON

My critical examination of Nagel's views on human absurdity has come to an end.
In the preceding ﬁve chapters I have tried to establish three major claims. The ﬁrst is that
all of Nagel's objections to the four so-called standard arguments for absurdity fail to
undermine them and that these arguments therefore warrant further investigation. The
second is that, appearances to the contrary, Nagel offers, not one, but four distinct
doctrines of absurdity in three works he wrote over a ﬁfteen-year period. And the third
claim is that none of the four doctrines succeeds in showing that human existence is
absurd. Now in looking at these claims all at once, one may get the impression that this
dissertation has amounted to a wholesale dismissal of what one philosopher has had to say
about absurdity; and with this impression, one may question the value of such a negative
project. I think both of these reactions are understandable, and I want to address them.

First of all, I should admit that insofar as my primary purpose in the preceding
chapters has been to criticize Nagel's arguments, it can fairly be characterized as negative.
I believe, however, that in philosophy there is generally value in this sort of purpose. It
seems to me the value of the philosopher whose (negative) aim is to refute an argument is
not unlike that of a prosecuting attorney whose (negative) aim is to disprove the presumed
innocence of a defendant. Given our ultimate goal in law is getting at the truth of the
matter when an allegation of wrongdoing is made, we value the crucial role the

prosecuting attorney plays in this effort. Without this ofﬁcial's work, our efforts to

161

 

I62

discover the truth would be severely thwarted. Likewise, to the extent that our ultimate
goal in philosophy is getting at the truth (however we may wish to conceive ‘the truth’),
the role of the “prosecuting philosopher” has value. Without the work of this “official,”
our efforts to get at the truth would be hindered. I believe that when we are apt to
question the value of the prosecuting attorney and prosecuting philosopher, we forget the
ultimate goal the work of each of these officials serves.‘

Regarding the impression that this dissertation has amounted to a blanket dismissal
of what Nagel has had to say about absurdity, I want ﬁrst to repeat that I understand the
impression. It certainly may seem that I think there is little, if anything, to be learned ﬁ'om
Nagel's works on absurdity, that is, other than that they fail to establish what they set out
to. However, in spite of its seeming so, this impression does not actually reﬂect my view.
In truth, I believe there is much to be learned from Nagel's works on absurdity, and I want
to spend the rest of this chapter (acting now as Nagel's “defense lawyer”) trying to show
this. Speciﬁcally, I would like to try to support the following two related claims: (1)
Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy helps us to understand the general concept of
absurdity and so may provide us with a touchstone for determining whether something,
anything, we are inclined to call absurd is so; and (2) Nagel's more speciﬁc notion of a
conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality is useful in getting
us to think of ways in which our lives might be absurd, ways which Nagel himself has not

explicitly considered. I shall take the two claims in order.

Absurdity As Conspicuous Discrepancy
According to Nagel, a conspicuous discrepancy of a particular kind makes our

lives absurd. I have argued that he has not established such a discrepancy and hence has

 

lI might also mention that I do not think my project up to this point has been thoroughly
negative. Both my attempt to defend the standard arguments for absurdity against Nagel and my effort to
clarify Nagel's texts can. I think. be properly construed as positive.

163

not shown that our lives are absurd. This claim of mine suggests, however, that if I
thought Nagel had established a conspicuous discrepancy in all our lives, then he would be
correct to say they are absurd. I do believe that to be the case. In fact, I think Nagel
captures the core of the concept of absurdity in associating it with the notion of
conspicuous discrepancy. By this I mean two things: (1) that a conspicuous discrepancy
of some kind is sufficient (and perhaps necessary too) for human absurdity; and (2) that a
conspicuous discrepancy of some kind is sufficient (and perhaps necessary too) for all

other kinds of absurdity as well. If these claims are true, then I think Nagel's analysis of

 

absurdity helps us to understand the concept more clearly.

Let me start with the second claim. Not only might we say that our lives are
absurd; we might say that certain propositions of ours are absurd. To see this, consider
the argument form reductio ad absurdum. We use this argument form to show that some
claim X is false, and we show that by using the claim as a premiss by itself, or along with
premisses that are obviously true, and deducing either a self-contradictory proposition or a
strikingly false proposition. If a self-contradictory proposition or a strikingly false
proposition is deduced, then, in the case of just one premiss, that premiss (claim X) must
be false (q.e.d) or, in the case of more than one premiss, at least one premiss must be false,
and since all the premisses but claim X are obviously true, it must be the false prenriss
(q.e.d). Now the feature of a reductio of interest to us is the fact that we consider the
deduced self-contradictory proposition or strikingly false proposition absurd, as the name
of the argument form suggests. Granted we are correct in doing so, what exactly makes

them so?2

 

2Perhaps one would want to say that what is shown to be absurd in a reductio is not the
conclusion of the argument but the opponent's major claim. or even the opponent's position that contains
this major claim. That is to say. it is the opponent's major claim or position that gets reduced to
absurdity. not the conclusion. However, while it is certainly true that the opponent's major claim (or
position) gets reduced to absurdity. it gets so reduced as the result of logically entailing an absurd
proposition. the conclusion of the reductio. Thus if sound. a reductio actually shows that all three
elements are absurd: the opponent's position and major claim of that position and the conclusion of the
reductio. To keep the analysis simple, 1 shall only discuss the last of these three elements.

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Let us consider self-contradictions ﬁrst. We know that a self-contradictory
proposition is at the same time an affirmation and a denial that something is the case, as is
illustrated by the following formal compound proposition: All S is P, and some S is not P.
As such, a self-contradictory proposition-expresses a kind of opposition, disharmony,
disagreement, or incongruity—in other words, a kind of discrepancy. And the particular
kind of discrepancy it expresses is a logical one. However, a self-contradictory
proposition is not just any logical opposition, disharmony, disagreement, or incongruity; it
is a radical, jarring, glaring one—that is, a conspicuous one. The formal compound
proposition ‘All 8 is P, and some S is P’ is logically discrepant insofar as its second
component (whose quantity is particular) can be true and its ﬁrst component (whose
quantity is universal) can be false. But it is not conspicuously discrepant. The reason this
compound proposition is not conspicuously discrepant is that it can be true. Of course
any self-contradictory proposition cannot be true—it is logically false-which explains just
why it is conspicuously discrepant. Therefore, just as a conspicuous discrepancy between
pretension or aspiration and reality makes our lives absurd, a conspicuous discrepancy
between components of a proposition makes that proposition absurd. In this way, Nagel's
analysis of the conditions of existential absurdity helps us to better understand the
conditions of logical absurdity, in this case self-contradiction.

Let us now turn to absurd conclusions of reductio ad absurdum arguments that are
not self-contradictory but rather only strikingly false. I believe we can also use Nagel's
analysis of absurdity to help us understand why these propositions are absurd. It seems to
me that being strikingly false, like being self-contradictory, is a way for a proposition to be
conspicuously discrepant. Consider ﬁrst the following argument, which is a version of the

argument from potential, an anti-abortionist argument:

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1. All potential persons are beings that have a right to life.
2. All human fetuses are potential persons.
3. Therefore, all human fetuses are beings that have a right to life.3

Now look at the argument below, which is a reductio ad absurdum argument against the
argument from potential. Its ﬁrst prenriss is the major claim of the argument ﬁ'om
potential. Its second premiss is a proposition the reductio's proponents believe is
obviously true. Its intermediate conclusion, or subconclusion, is a proposition they
consider strikingly false, and hence absurd. Lastly, the reductio's ﬁnal, or main,
conclusion is the assertion that the ﬁrst premiss, assumed to be true for the sake of

argument, must be false:

1. All potential persons are beings that have a right to life.
. All human sperm and ova are potential persons.
3. Therefore, all human sperm and ova are beings that have a right to life.
(But that is absurd!)
4. Therefore, it is false that all potential persons are beings that have a right to
life.4

 

3By ‘person‘ most defenders of this argument mean a being that possesses most of these
psychologieal characteristics: consciousness. self-awareness. self-motivated activity. reasoning, language.

“If the hundreds of medieal ethics students I have taught are any indication. most
people—including most defenders of the argument from potential themselves—do agree with the
reductio's author that proposition three is absurd. In referring to the claim that contraception and
abstinence are seriously morally wrong (which can be immediately inferred from my proposition three).
Bonnie Steinbock writes: “Very few defenders of the potentiality principle are willing to accept this
conclusion” (Bonnie Steinbock. “Abortion: A Pro-Choice Perspective.” in Ethical Issues in Modern
Medicine. ed. John D. Arras and Bonnie Steinbock. 4th ed. [Mountain View. Calif .: Mayﬁeld Publishing
Company, 1995]. 334). And in a footnote Steinbock writes: “RM. Hare may be the only potentiality
theorist who does not hinge his argument on a morally signiﬁcant difference between embryos and
gametes” (Ibid.. 342. note 18). Thus I am inclined to think most people will ﬁnd this example of a
reductio an apt one. Incidentally. most defenders of the argument from potential attack the reductio by
attacking proposition two. For examples, see John T. Noonan Jr.. “An Almost Absolute Value in
History.” in Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine. ed. John Arras and Nancy Rhodcn. 3d ed. (Mountain
View, Calif: Mayﬁeld Publishing Company. 1989). 261—65: Rosalind Hursthouse, Beginning Lives
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell in association with the Open University. 1987). 80: Richard Warner, “Abortion:
The Ontological and Moral Status of the Unborn” in Today's Moral Problems. ed. Richard A.
Wasscrstrom. 2d ed. (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company. 1979). 57: Stephen Buckle, “Arguing
from Potential.” Bioethics 2 (July 1988), 230—4 1: and Joel Feinbcrg. “Abortion.” Matters of Life and
Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy. ed. Tom Regan. 2d ed. (New York: Random
House. 1986). 267. '

166

The argument is sometimes expanded to include another intermediate conclusion,
derived ﬁ'om the existing one, which its proponents take to be strikingly false, and
consequently absurd, as well: contraception, abstinence, and male masturbation are
morally horrendous. Now, to begin, given that the propositions ‘all human sperm and ova
are beings that have a right to life’ and ‘contraception, abstinence, and male masturbation
are morally horrendous’ are in fact false, how exactly is each one discrepant? What two
things disagree with, or are opposed to, one another or are disharrnonious or
incongruous? It seems to me that the discrepancy characteristic of each proposition is,
quite simply, between what these propositions assert to be the case and what is the case.
What each asserts to be the case is not so, and therefore that proposition is discrepant with
reality. We might think of this kind of discrepancy as a factual one, in contrast to the
logical kind of discrepancy characteristic of self-contradictions. Whereas the content of a
proposition, including how this content squares with reality, plays no role in a logical
discrepancy—a logical discrepancy is purely formal—a proposition's content does play a
role, and a central one, in a factual discrepancy.

The next question is what makes the two propositions that are factually discrepant
conspicuously so? The answer, probably coming at no surprise, is the striking manner in
which they are false. The mere suggestion, let alone the assertion, that sperm and ova
have a right to life (meaning, it seems, that we have a moral duty not to kill them or
otherwise deprive them of continued existence) is, most of us think, not simply false, but
laughingly so. And the same goes for the proposition that contraception, abstinence, and
male masturbation are morally horrendous. According to this second proposition, the
celibate Catholic priest is a horrible person. Morality demands that he procreate so as to
save at least a few beings that have as much a right to life as the priest himself. Similarly,
Mother Teresa, while saving many lives, also deprived a great many others of theirs. Bad

Mother Teresa! But of course most of us think these claims are just plain silly. Mother

I67

Teresa was a saint, and many Catholic priests are morally outstanding people. Her
chastity did not violate anyone's right to life, and neither do theirs.

Now just why one contingently false proposition is strikingly false (conspicuously
discrepant) and another one is merely false (discrepant) is not altogether clear. I have
already mentioned that the former are laughingly false. Okay, but why exactly are they?
Gilbert Ryle's notion of a “category mistake” may shed some light on the matter. It is not
simply the case that sperm and ova do not have a full-ﬂedged right to life. They do not
have any claim to life. In fact, they are not the sort of beings that have any moral status
whatsoever. To place sperm and ova in the category of ‘beings that have moral status’ is
to commit a category mistake, which is what makes the proposition appear preposterous
to us. In contrast, we might consider the proposition ‘late gestation human fetuses are
beings that have a full-ﬂedged right to life.’ Many people believe this proposition is false.
At the same time, many who hold this opinion probably would not call the proposition
absurd. If this is correct, what is the explanation? Why, in other words, do not these
people ﬁnd the proposition conspicuously discrepant? I think the answer is that they do
not believe a category mistake is committed in asserting that late gestation human fetuses
are beings that have a full-ﬂedged right to life, for these people think late gestation human
fetuses may have at least some claim to life.

I do not believe, however, that the notion of a category mistake explains why we
ﬁnd strikingly false all the propositions that we do. Take for instance the proposition
‘there are no human beings on earth.’ We may well ﬁnd it strikingly false and absurd, but
it does not seem to involve a category mistake. If the proposition is strikingly false but
involves no category mistake, then we need to search for another reason it is strikingly
false. What might it be? It seems to me that this proposition, as well as a host of others,
is strikingly false because it is contrary to what is plainly and commonly evident. It
certainly does not take a rocket scientist to know that there are humans on earth. That

there are humans on earth is evident to every small child who understands the terms

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‘human,’ ‘existence,’ and ‘earth.’ In contrast, the proposition ‘Mars is smaller than earth’
is not plainly and commonly evident. That is why we judge the assertion that Mars is
larger than earth as just false, not strikingly so, and hence not absurd.5 If Dee Dee were to
say candidly to Butch that Mars is larger than earth and Butch responded, “That's absurd!”
both would be wrong. Dee Dee because Mars is smaller than earth; Butch because Dee
Dee's false proposition is not absurd since it is not plainly and commonly evident that Mars
is smaller than the earth. In fact, chances are Butch's pronouncement was not even
sincere. He was probably just showing off his knowledge or trying to insult Dee Dee.

Now the question as to which propositions are plainly and commonly evident and
which are not is a difficult one. We might wonder how plainly and commonly evident a
proposition must be for us appropriately to classify it as plainly and commonly evident.
And of course what is evident to one group of people may not be to another. As I
suggested above, the proposition ‘Mars is smaller than earth’ is not evident to Dee Dee
(and, I am sure, not to many other people as well). However, it is probably evident to any
astronomer worthy of the title. If so, then even though Butch may not be justiﬁed in
declaring “Absurd!” regarding the proposition ‘Mars is larger than earth,’ might an
astronomer be justiﬁed if, say, in the context of a debate with another astronomer over
some astronomical matter, this astronomer were able to show that her opponent's position
entailed the proposition? If so, then, with regard to at least some propositions, we may be
correct in relativizing those that are plainly and commonly evident to groups of people.
And it would seem to follow that whether some propositions are strikingly false (hence
conspicuously discrepant, hence absurd) depends in part on the context in which they are
asserted.

So far I have suggested that Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy serves to

clarify and explain different ways in which propositions can be absurd. I now want to

 

5The assertion does not commit a category mistake either. Nor does it seem to be strikingly false
in any other way.

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consider a possible way in which sentences can be absurd and to see if the notion of
conspicuous discrepancy serves to clarify and explain it too. Given it is correct to make a
distinction between sentences and propositions and to construe sentences as the means by
which we assert propositions, it seems right to say that sentences can sometimes fail to do
what they are commonly supposed to do.6 Consider a standard example of such a failure:
Colorless green ideas sleep ﬁrriously. First of all, this is a sentence. It is syntactically
sound: it has a subject (in this case, a noun phrase) and a predicate (in this case, an
adverbial predicate). Nevertheless we may judge this well-formed sentence absurd. If we
would be correct in doing so, what exactly makes it absurd?

Once again, I think we may proﬁt by turning to Nagel for the answer. We might
say that the sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is conspicuously discrepant.
The discrepancy (opposition, disharmony, disagreement, incongruity), this time, is
between what sentences are commonly supposed to do and what this sentence does.
Sentences are commonly supposed to state propositions, and this sentence states no
proposition. In other, perhaps simpler, words: sentences are commonly supposed to mean
something, and this sentence does not—it has no meaning, it is meaningless. Now as for
the conspicuousness of the discrepancy, it seems to lie in the fact that the sentence as a
sentence is completely—that is, from beginning to end—meaningless. Consider a second
sentence: In green pajamas, I sleep furiously. This sentence is discrepant to the extent that
its complete predicate (‘sleep ﬁiriously’) is senseless, which in turn precludes the sentence,
taken as a whole, from stating a proposition. At the same time, it seems right to say that
this sentence is in part meaningﬁrl, that in uttering it we are asserting a proposition,
namely, that I sleep in green pajamas. But we assert no proposition whatsoever when we

utter ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Despite the fact that each of its words is

 

6In referring to the function of sentences here (“what they are commonly supposed to do”) and in
the following. I do not mean to suggest anything Aristotelian. All I mean by the function of sentences is
what they, as a matter of fact. happen to be used for.

I70

meaningful, the sentence, as such—that is, as a group of syntactically related words—is
wholly meaningless; for each of its syntactic units is meaningless: the conjunction of the
simple subject and simple predicate (‘ideas sleep’), the conjunction of the simple predicate
and its modiﬁers (‘sleep ﬁrriously’), the conjunction of the simple subject and its modiﬁers
(‘Colorless green ideas’), even the conjunction of the simple subject modiﬁers (‘Colorless
green’). Since this ﬁrst sentence, unlike the second, completely fails to do what a sentence
is commonly supposed to do, it seems appropriate to refer to it as a conspicuous
discrepancy, which explains why, I think, we call it absurd.

I can imagine, however, someone complaining that while ‘Colorless green ideas
sleep ﬁrriously’ perhaps fails worse than ‘In green pajamas, I sleep furiously? the latter
sentence is absurd too. I imagine this person saying, “‘In green pajamas, I sleep
furiously '—that's absurd! The sentence commits a category mistake, which makes the
sentence absur On its face, this complaint is persuasive. In fact, my linguistic intuitions
have pulled me both ways: a part of me has wanted to say the sentence is not absurd and
another part has wanted to say it is, albeit not as absurd as the other sentence. For the
sake of argument, let us concede that the sentence ‘In green pajamas, I sleep furiously’ is
absurd, though perhaps not as much as the other one. Does this concession imply that, at
least with regard to sentential absurdity, what is absurd need only be discrepant, not
conspicuously discrepant?

I do not think so. Consider this third and last sentence: I, in my colorless green
pajamas, slept soundly. Like ‘In green pajamas, I sleep furiously? one syntactic unit in
this third sentence is meaningless (‘colorless green’). Unlike the old sentence, however,
the meaningless syntactic unit occurs, not in the main clause, but in a prepositional phrase
that modiﬁes the subject of the main clause. Moreover, the prepositional phrase itself is a
nonrestrictive modiﬁer (indicated by its being set off by commas) and hence provides
nonessential information about the subject it modiﬁes. Because the meaningless unit is not

part of the main clause, and since the phrase in which it occurs is nonrestrictive and hence

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nonessential, it seems wrong to judge the whole sentence absurd. In other words, the
main assertion of the second sentence (In green pajamas, I sleep furiously) corresponding
with the main clause, is that I sleep ﬁrriously—a senseless assertion. However, the main
assertion in third sentence (I, in my colorless green pajamas, slept soundly) is that I slept
soundly—which makes perfect sense. Given that the main assertion, corresponding with
the main clause, makes perfect sense, the sentence, though discrepant, is not
conspicuously discrepant, and hence not absurd.

Yet I can imagine someone complaining again: “‘1, in my colorless green pajamas,
slept soundly’-—that's absurd! This sentence asserts a contradiction.” Now what I think is
going on here—and what, in the ﬁnal analysis, I think is going on in the complaint about
the second sentence—is that the objector is failing to note a legitimate distinction, one
between (I) there being something absurd about, or in, a sentence and (2) a sentence itself -
being absurd. There is something absurd about, or in, the sentence ‘I, in my colorless
green pajamas, slept soundly.’ It is that one of its syntactic units does not make any sense.
But the sentence makes some sense—or, we might say, basically the sentence makes
sense—and so while there is something absurd about, or in, it, the sentence itself is not
absurd. In fact, what I suspect the person who declares . . —that's absurd!” is really
referring to is the one meaningless syntactic unit, not all of the individual units, nor all of
the units as a group. That this is so is indicated by the accent on the meaningless syntactic
unit: “‘1, in my colorless green pajamas, slept soundly’—that's absurd!” True, it was my
decision to include the accent, but I did so only because in imagining one who would
argue that the sentence is absurd, I hear the person doing so.

I have discussed two general ways in which propositions can be absurd and one
general way in which sentences can be absurd. I certainly do not claim to have said all
that can be said about these ways, nor do I claim to have exhausted the ways in which
propositions and sentences can be absurd. And I do not think that, along with lives,

propositions and sentences are the only things that can be absurd. However, I do hope I

172

have shown that we may proﬁt from Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy in thinking
about the general concept of absurdity, that we might even be able use this notion as a
touchstone for determining whether something is absurd. I would like to end this section
by considering the conceptual connection between absurdity and conspicuous discrepancy
one last time, this time in the context of existential absurdity. Speciﬁcally, I want to try to
show that Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy helps us to see just why a very
popular conception of human absurdity is inadequate, as well as why the misconception is
so popular.

Many people, including many philosophers, use the terms ‘meaningless’ and
‘absurd’ interchangeably in speaking about human life or a human life. That is, they think
to say ‘life is meaningless’ is to say ‘life is absurd’ and to say ‘life is absurd’ is to say ‘life
is meaningless.’ But I believe Nagel gives us a reason to think this is a mistake, even
though occasionally he himself commits it.7 The reason is that meaningless human
existence, strictly speaking, signiﬁes no conspicuous discrepancy. It does not, anyway, if
by ‘meaningless’ we mean ‘having no objective, overarching purpose or point? Let us
suppose that (1) human life is meaningless in this sense. Further, let us suppose that (2)
Helen is someone who believes human life is meaningless, (3) she genuinely does not mind
life being meaningless, and (4) the way she lives her life is consonant with both the fact
that life is meaningless and her attitude toward this fact—in short, she does not act as
though her life or human existence has some point to it. Do these things add up to an
absurd existence? I do not think so. After all, there really is nothing silly or laughable
about Helen. She is not playing the fool.

We might consider for a moment a human appendix. As far as we can tell, this
growth, at least now, serves no purpose. If we are right, then there is a sense in which it is

meaningless. But it seems incorrect to say the appendix is absurd. That would be going

 

7Nagel. ”The Absurd.” 20: idem. The l 'iew from Nowhere. 214—215.

I73

too far. Why, then, think Helen's life is absurd? True, there are many differences
between, on the one hand, an appendix and its existence and, on the other, Helen and hers.
But what difference makes a difference regarding absurdity? I myself cannot think of one.
If there is no such difference, then it is one thing for an appendix and our lives to be
meaningless and quite another thing for them to be absurd.

I believe the temptation to say Helen's life is absurd arises only when we place
ourselves in her shoes and unwittingly consider the question of absurdity from our
perspective, not hers, and the corresponding way in which we live our lives, not the way
she lives hers. Of course when we do this, we violate conditions ‘(3)’ and ‘(4)’ above,
and so distort the thought experiment. Interestingly, what we in effect do when we
unwittingly make the shift is create a discrepancy, and one which may be conspicuous.
And that, I want to say, is precisely what accounts for our judgment of absurdity. This
discrepancy (and possible conspicuous discrepancy) is between (a) the fact that life is
meaningless and (b) our perspective and corresponding way of living that in one way or
another clash with the fact about life. We think of ourselves—and our goal-oriented, nose
to the grindstone ways—in Helen's meaningless world, and the incongruity we apprehend
between us and it may tempt us to throw up our arms and declare, “Absurd!”

If my explanation of our temptation to call Helen's existence absurd is correct, then
we can understand that meaningless existence and absurd existence are indeed
conceptually distinct and that Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy helps to explain
why. At the same time, my explanation of our temptation to call Helen's existence absurd
might suggest that while meaningless existence and absurd existence are conceptually
distinct, they are not existentially distinct. That is to say, it might be true that if our lives
were meaningless, then—given our deep human desires or aspirations—our lives would be
absurd. That would depend, assuming the Nagelian viewpoint, on the extent to which the
meaninglessness of our lives and our desires or aspirations clashed or, in other words, on

whether the discrepancy, if there inescapably were one, was conspicuous. Perhaps the fact

174

that so many people take meaningless human existence to be synonymous with absurd
human existence indicates that the clash (discrepancy) would indeed be great enough
(conspicuous), and hence that meaningless human existence and absurd human existence
are not existentially distinct. At any rate, Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy may
help us to understand not only why we are mistaken conceptually to equate meaningless
human existence and absurd human existence, but also why it is quite easy to make that

mistake.

The Erewhon Argument

I now want to go beyond the claim that Nagel's notion of conspicuous discrepancy
clariﬁes the concept of absurdity and suggest one way in which we might actually use this
notion—and, more speciﬁcally, the notion of a conspicuous discrepancy between
pretension and reality—to argue that human existence is absurd, one way, that is, which
Nagel himself has not considered. Although I have not concluded it is sound, I happen to
think this argument I have in mind is, at least on its face, compelling. However, my
purpose here is not to offer a full-length defense of the argument, but only to explain it
and to show that it is a serious argument. This purpose is appropriate, I think, given my
primary interest in this chapter is to point out ways in which we may proﬁt from Nagel's
thoughts and ideas on absurdity. I hope it will become evident that the following
argument for absurdity is Nagelian, and perhaps in more ways than one.

Samuel Butler, in his novel Erewhon or Over the Range, describes the imaginary
community Erewhon (basically ‘Nowhere’ spelled backward) in which its members hold
views that are backward in relation to views of Butler's Victorian England, as well as in
relation to views common to the whole of human civilization. For example, Erewhonians
perceive the moral delinquent as we perceive the sick, and they perceive the sick as we
perceive the moral delinquent. The moral delinquent, in their eyes, is a victim who is to be

pitied and treated, certainly not blamed and punished. The Erewhonians have their

175

“straighteners” who, with a good nurse's compassion, do their best to cure the poor
delinquent of his or her inﬁrmity. Here, for instance, the narrator relays how one
Erewhonian described another Erewhonian who is a known embezzler: “‘He is a delightﬁrl
man . . . but has suffered terribly from’ (here came a long word which I could not quite
catch, only it was much longer than kleptomania), ‘and has but lately recovered from
embezzling a large sum of money under singularly distressing circumstances; but he has
quite get over it, and the straighteners say that he has made a really wonderful recovery;
you are sure to like him?” On the other hand, Erewhonians view a person in bad health as
a bad person, deserving contempt and chastisement, which in many cases turns out to be
imprisonment. They regard typhus fever, for instance, “as one of the worst of all crimes.”
And pulmonary consumption, while no longer punishable by death, is no minor
wrongdoing either. In the following passage, an Erewhonian judge is delivering a
sentence of life in prison to a convicted consumptive. (The narrator tells us he cannot give
“more than a faint idea of the solemn, not to say majestic, severity with which it was

delivered”)

Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under
pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your
countrymen, you have been found guilty. . . . [Y]ours is no case for compassion:
this is not your ﬁrst offense: you have led a career of crime. . . . You were
convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I ﬁnd that though you are now
only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen
occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character. . . . It is all very well for
you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your
childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these
are the ordinary reﬁrge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened
to by the ear of justice. . . . You are a bad and dangerous person, and stand
branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with one of the most heinous
known offences.8

Our ﬁrst reaction upon hearing about the Erewhonian treatment of the sick, and in

particular the actions and views expressed by this judge, might be to exclaim to ourselves,

 

8Samuel Butler. Erewhon or Over the Range, ed. Hans-Peter Breuer and Daniel F. Howard
(Newark: University of Delaware Press. 1981). 97. 102. 114.

176

“Absurd!”9 For the Erewhonians do not simply misunderstand sickness; they radically
misunderstand it, and the price their victims pay for the misunderstanding is high indeed.
If we imagined this practice actually occurring in our world, we no doubt would be
outraged at the obvious injustice of the practice, horriﬁed by the needless pain and
suffering it caused, dumbstruck by its utter stupidity, nauseated by the pomposity and self-
conﬁdence of its perpetrators. When we hear about a ten year old boy just diagnosed with
an inoperable brain tumor, our hearts break. We feel tremendous sympathy for this poor
child. And we know our feeling and attitude are justiﬁed. The mere thought of chastising
the boy for his ultimate misfortune—say, barking contemptuous words at him and then
putting him in prison—is so repugnant, so very short of making any sense as to make it
extremely hard even to entertain. Simply put, the general practice of blaming and
punishing people for bad health is preposterous. Just as in the case of Nagel's board
members of a philanthropic foundation who elect a notorious criminal as their president,
the Erewhonians have got things, not just wrong, but terribly wrong. In both cases, there
is a striking incongruity between, on the one hand, what people take, very seriously, to be
the case and, on the other, what actually is the case. That is, there is a conspicuous
discrepancy between pretension and reality.

But of course that is the make-believe land of Erewhon, certainly not our land.
Erewhonians are absurd perhaps, but we are not Erewhonian. Indeed, regarding their
treatment of criminals and the sick, we and the Erewhonians are polar opposites. So it
seems I may have just corroborated the view that we humans are not absurd.

Well, Butler (the young Butler of the ﬁrst edition of Erewhon, anyway) was a wily

fellow, and I am at least trying to be. His ultimate target was not Erewhon but his very

 

9This was the narrator's reaction too. He regards the Erewhonian trial of the consumptive as one
of the “inﬁnite absurdities with which I came daily in contact” (Ibid.. 1 13). Referring to the judge a few
pages later. the narrator states: “Yet for all this. old and learned as he was. he could not see things which
one would have thought would have been apparent even to a child” (Ibid.. 120). This last comment,
incidentally. may bring to mind my discussion of strikingly false propositions as evidently false
propositions.

177

own England, and perhaps human civilization in general. Likewise, my ultimate target is
humanity. Let me explain, beginning with Butler's motives.

Except for the particular words naming the offense, the Erewhonian judge's words
in the passage above actually come straight from an English newspaper report. Butler
basically replaced ‘theft’ with ‘pulmonary consumption’ and inserted the newspaper report
in his novel.‘0 Why? He is trying to get his reader to see a connection between moral
delinquency and physical disease that he thinks is probably true: just as disease is beyond
our control, so too is moral delinquency. Butler uses the “maleontents” in Erewhon, who
object to the Erewhonian view and treatment of the sick, as mouthpieces for this view of
his regarding moral delinquency (for ‘these malcontents’ and ‘these radicals’ read ‘Butler’

and for ‘illness’ and ‘consumption’ read ‘moral delinquency’):

[These malcontents] assert illness to be the inevitable result of certain antecedent
causes which were beyond the control of the individual, and that therefore a man is
only guilty for being in a consumption, in the same way as fruit is guilty for being
rotten; it is true, the fruit must be thrown on one side as being unﬁt for man's use;
and the man in a consumption must, in like manner, be put in prison for the
protection of his fellow-citizens; but these radicals would not punish him further
than by loss of liberty and strict surveillance. So long as he was prevented from
injuring society, they would allow him to make himself useful by supplying
whatever of society's wants he could supply. "

Might it be the case that the thief in the newspaper report had no more control
over his stealing than that man in Erewhon had over his contracting pulmonary
consumption? If so, then the English judge's behavior may approximate the absurdity of
the Erewhonian practice of blaming and punishing the sick. In fact, his behavior, Butler
would say, ought to be more like how the Erewhonians treat the moral delinquent. As it
turns out, then, Butler's main point in describing the way in which the Erewhonians treat

the moral delinquent and the sick is not to lampoon their lives and praise ours—quite the

 

l0See editor's footnote 3 (Ibid.. 116).

HIbid..121.

178

opposite. His main point is to show that it may be we who are crazy and the Erewhonians
who are sane, at least as far as the treatment of the morally delinquent is concerned. ‘2

And that, at last, is basically my point too. If our wrongdoers really have no
control over what they do, then our views, attitudes, and actions regarding them may be as
“childish”——that is, as silly, foolish—as the Erewhonian treatment of the sick, epitomized
by the travesty of justice in that Erewhonian trial. '3 The Erewhonian judge says to the
consumptive: “It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and
had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution;
excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one
moment be listened to by the ear of justice.” This is exactly what we say to our criminals
and moral wrongdoers. In both our legal proceedings and our personal relations, we
assume our wrongdoers do have control, categorically could have done otherwise. When
they suggest otherwise, we are outraged. However, if they are correct, then it is we
judges and judgers, not they, who are the proper subjects of outrage. It is we judges and
judgers who are outrageous.

What, then, I am suggesting here is nothing other than a certain conspicuous
discrepancy between pretension and reality that makes our lives absurd. The pretension is
our propensity to treat wrongdoers as though they have control over their actions. The
reality is the fact that they do not. Just as with the Erewhonian treatment of the sick,
several related factors contribute in making the discrepancy conspicuousness: the obvious

injustice of the practice, the needless pain and suffering it causes, its utter stupidity, the

 

”However, I gather Butler thinks the Erewhonian attitude toward and treatment of the moral
delinquent are a bit unrealistic, and perhaps go a little too far. They seem to ignore the truth there is in
deterrence. It seems Nietzsche, for one, would concur. He argues that we should treat the criminal as we
treat the insane, although, he adds, “not with haughty mercy but with the physician's good sense and good
will.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, in The Portable Nietzsche. ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Penguin Books. 1982). 86.

. l3What I count here and below as having control is what the libertarian (contra-causalist) does.
not what the compatibilist does. I am suggesting that our views. attitudes. and actions regarding
wrongdoers are libertarian ones.

179

pomposity and self-conﬁdence of it perpetrators. All of these factors add up to a striking
incongruity that characterizes our lives, and so makes them absurd. For convenience, I
shall call this argument for absurdity the Erewhon Argument.

Before critically examining the Erewhon Argument, 1 want to pause a moment to
note a curious connection between Butler and Nagel regarding conspicuousness and the
argument. To the extent that they would be sympathetic with the argument, they both
might add to my list of factors comprising conspicuousness, or even substitute for them,
the perpetrators' believing, deep down, the reality, yet carrying on with the pretension.
In certain parts of the Erewhonian judge's speech, parts which I have not quoted, Butler
makes it pretty clear that the judge, jury, and courtroom audience believe, deep down, the
defendant's contracting consumption was beyond his control. And Butler reinforces the
view that they know by some of the narrator's comments, such as: “It was impossible that
any one in the court should not have known that it was but by an accident of birth and
circumstances he was not himself also in a consumption . . .”'4 Now it seems for Butler
this awareness, at least in part, is what makes the Erewhonian treatment of the sick
absurd. As for Nagel, we already know he thinks awareness of the reality is just what
makes the pretension-reality discrepancy resulting in absurdity conspicuous (he does so,
anyway, in “The Absurd”). Therefore, it may be correct to say that if either Butler or
Nagel were to present the Erewhon Argument, they might want to describe the
conspicuousness in the pretension-reality discrepancy as our believing, deep down, that
people have no control over their wrongdoing, yet carrying on as though people do have
control. Now as I indicated in chapter 2, while I think such awareness may heighten the
extent to which something is absurd, I do not think it is, generally speaking, a necessary
condition of absurdity. I am inclined to think the Erewhon Argument represents no

exception. In fact, I think that if the Erewhon argument depended on such an awareness,

 

l“Butler, 120.

180

it would be unsound, for it seems to me many people do not believe, deep down, that

wrongdoers do not have control over their actions.

Evaluation of the Erewhon Argument

Now it is easy to state in general terms how one might attack the Erewhon
Argument. One might attack the alleged pretension, the alleged reality, or (granting the
discrepancy) the alleged conspicuousness of the discrepancy. Let me, then, examine these
attacks. What I shall say on their behalf, and then in defense of the Erewhon Argument,
will be quite sketchy but, I hope, enough to show the argument is worthy of ﬁuther
discussion. I shall begin with the second of the three attacks, since my guess is that it
would be the most popular one.

One may complain that it is far from obvious that we have no control over our
actions. Disease is one thing. Action is quite another. Phenomenologically speaking, it
certainly appears we, at least in some circumstances, do genuinely make choices, that we,
and we alone, determine what we shall do. In other words, we really feel that sometimes
we control our own destiny. While at this time we may not be able to understand fully
contra-causal free will, that is not to say there is no such thing. Perhaps we are not yet
smart enough to understand it fully. And it is possible we shall never be. Highly
intelligent astronomers admit to not ﬁrlly understanding black holes; really smart physicists
do not claim to comprehend wholly the nature of the most fundamental constituents of the
atom. But that does not keep these people from believing these entities exist. Thus, at
the very least, a burden—and a quite heavy one at that—is on the shoulders of the
proponent of the Erewhon Argument to show it is true that people have no control over
what they do.

This critic, it seems to me, is quite right to demand reasons, evidence, and
argument for the supposed reality. I think, however, that the defender of the Erewhon

Argument is not at a loss for them, especially when the metaphysical view assumed to be

181

true is physicalism. ‘5 To begin, the argument's defender might appeal to correlations the
scientiﬁc community has discovered between behavior, on the one hand, and nature and
nurture, on the other. From genetics to neurobiology, neurophysiology, and
neuropsychiatry; to biochemistry and biocybemetics; to psychoanalysis, psychobiology,
psychodynarnics, and psychopharrnacology; to sociobiology and sociology—scientists are
making more and more correlations, and more and more sophisticated correlations,
between our actions and our bodies and environment. True, many correlations scientists
have in the past proposed have turned out to be false; many of those that have not been
disproved are quite general and rough; and many of those that have not been disproved
and are relatively precise remain at this time just correlations. But the number of sound,
relatively precise correlations is quite impressive; and while we are correct to keep in mind
the distinction between correlation and cause, we have reason to believe that, in time, we
shall justiﬁably elevate many of them to the status of cause, just as we have done, for
example, in the case of the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. Evidence
strongly suggests that the sufficient causes of our behavior extend outside the narrow
conﬁnes of our minds.

The proponent of the Erewhon Argument might also point to the lack of scientiﬁc
evidence supporting the claim that we can control our actions, that is, evidence supporting
libertarian self-determination. Scientists have discovered some pretty bizarre features of
our natural world, but they have not come up with any evidence corroborating the view
that at some point in our evolutionary development our physical stuff reached a
metaphysical boiling point and out arose self-determination bubbles that now somehow
ﬂoat above the ﬁay. The metaphor here may seem uncharitable, but how better to make
sense of self-determination in a world natural through and through? In fact, it is not

altogether clear the notion makes sense.

 

l51 might remind the reader that the dissertation assumes this metaphysical view (see pp. 7—8
above).

182

It is hard enough to make sense of the idea of a self-determining Being who is
immaterial, all-powerful, and eternal. About the only remark we can make is the negative ,
one that since we do not understand spirituality, omniscience, and immortality, we cannot
expect to understand the idea of a being (with these qualities) who is self-determining. At
the same time, given an acceptance of the existence of an immaterial, all-powerful, eternal
Being, that remark may be enough to keep the skeptic at bay, for “there are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philos0phy.” But of course we do
not have recourse to that appeal to ignorance when we accept the view that the self-mover
is physical, ﬁnite, and not all-powerful. It seems there is a burden on the libertarian to
make some concrete sense of the notion of a self-mover.

We are told, abstractly, that a self-determined decision is one that originated with
the self or person. What this means is that while such a decision was causally determined
by the self, the self itself was not causally determined to make that particular decision. In
other words, the self could have decided otherwise. Now we might ﬁrst ask what exactly
this self or person is. (What is the bubble that ﬂoats?) We might also ask just how, and to
what extent, the self or person is causally dis-connected from the rest of the natural world.
(How does the bubble ﬂoat?) Finally, we might ask why the selfs free decision-making is
not random, for while the self caused the decision, nothing caused the self to decide. It
seems that, ultimately, it just did. One might answer by suggesting that external factors
inﬂuenced the selfs ﬁ'ee decision-making. However, if none of these factors, individually
or jointly, were sufﬁcient causes of the selfs deciding, then, once again, the selfs deciding
seems, when all is said and thought, to be random, a metaphysical clean jerk. Insofar as
the libertarian view denies that free decision-making is random, the view appears to be
incoherent.

Now the critic of the Erewhon Argument might instead question the alleged
pretension. Has all of humanity indeed judged its wrongdoers in such a way as to

presuppose they had control over their deeds? If so, will it always do so? If either answer

183

is “no,” the Erewhon Argument is unsound, for it would have failed to establish an
inescapable universal pretension—a condition necessary, on the Nagelian view, to make
our lives absurd in the philosophical sense, as opposed to the merely conventional sense.
Now it seems the critic might really want to press the second of the two questions,
especially in view of the empirical evidence the Erewhon Argument's proponent is eager to
give in support of the reality. If, as the result of scientiﬁc inquiry—of all those ologies
listed above—it is becoming increasingly clear that people have no control over their
actions, then it stands to reason that in the not too distant ﬁrture we, or at least a
signiﬁcant number of us, shall stop judging people as we do now. And the critic might
(though need not) add that the libertarian view is the brainchild of religion, as Nietzsche
was correct to point out. As religion slowly but surely continues to lose its grip on the
psyche of humankind as science slowly but surely makes its weight felt, the libertarian
view will lose hold as well. While Nietzsche himself was not convinced that such a
transformation in time will take place, he did express optimism, and we have reason to do

so as well:

Today, to be sure, he who has been harmed always wants his revenge,
quite apart from the question of how this harm might be undone again, and he
turns to the courts for its sake; for the present this maintains our abominable penal
codes, with their shopkeepers scales and the desire to balance guilt and
punishment. But shouldn't we be able to get beyond this? . . . Let us remove the
concept of sin from the world—and let us soon send the concept of punishment
after it. May these banished monsters live somewhere else henceforth, not among
men, if they insist on living at all and do not perish of their own disgust. . . .

Shouldn't we be able to say: every “guilty” person is a sick person?

No, the hour for that has not yet come. The physicians are still lacking,
above all, for whom what we have hitherto called practical morality must be
transformed into a piece of their art and science of therapy; as yet, that hungry
interest in these things is lacking, but some day it may appear in a manner not
unlike the storm and stress of those old religious agitations. . . .‘6

However, the defender of the Erewhon Argument might use the case of Nietzsche

against this critic. It has been well over a century since Nietzsche wrote those words and

 

”Nietzsche. 86-87.

184

both little has changed and much has changed. What has changed little is how we regard
our wrongdoers. We judges and judgers still think people have control over what they do.
We blame and punish wrongdoers in the manner, and basically to the same degree, as
Nietzsche and Butler's nineteenth-century European society did. Moreover, religion
seems to be as much alive today as it was in the nineteenth century. Now what has
changed is the sophistication of our science. Most of our ologies today did not exist back
then. Although we still have a long way to go, we know signiﬁcantly more about the
connection between human behavior and our bodies and the environment. Yet with all the
additional evidence against the view that people can control what they do, we still believe,
and believe strongly, that they can control their behavior. Indeed, any politician who
would suggest otherwise, even conﬁning this suggesting to a few particular cases of
(legally sane) criminal wrongdoing, would be thrown out of ofﬁce in a ﬂash—and
probably would be viewed with nearly as much contempt as the wrongdoers.

The truth is, the proponent of the Erewhon Argument might go on to say, seeing
ourselves anew as having no more control over our actions than the rest of nature
represents nothing less, and in fact much more, than a Copernican Turn. The view that we
are not at the center of the universe and the view that we are a product of
evolution—even the view that we are godless—though certainly traumatic, are all perhaps
views with which we are willing to live. But the view that we have no control over what
we do is one that, if not differing in kind, differs in signiﬁcant degree from these others. It
is 8 Turn that we shall refuse to take, no matter the evidence produced in its favor, no
matter the utter lack of evidence for the opposing view (not to speak of the questionable
intelligibility of the opposing view). “Damn the truth,” we say and shall continue to say
regarding the issue of free will. “We are not complex machines. We shall never be. We
shall never waive our last claim to distinction.”

With this last response in mind, the critic of the Erewhon Argument might call into

question the conspicuousness of the discrepancy. It seems the more at stake in

185

abandoning the view that people have control over their actions (and, as we have just
seen, the Erewhon Argument's defender, in the effort to support the universality of the
pretension, wants to stress that much is at stake), the more sense there is in maintaining
this view. And the more sense there is in maintaining the view that people have control
over their actions, the less silly or preposterous—the less absurd—it and the
corresponding behavior are. In a word, if making this Copernican Turn would crush us
humans, then making the turn would be what is absurd. But that is not all. Treating
people as though they have control over their behavior deters wrongdoing. If we were to
treat people otherwise, wrongdoing would overwhelm us, destroy us. Therefore, once
again, relinquishing our libertarian ways, rather than holding on to them, spells absurdity.
For both these reasons, we can see that while the Erewhon Argument's defender may be
correct about there being a certain discrepancy between pretension and reality, this
discrepancy is by no means conspicuous, and hence the Erewhon Argument is unsound.

It seems the defender of the Erewhon Argument may have at least two replies.
The ﬁrst is simply to deny the critic's empirical claim that abandoning the view that people
have control over their actions would lead, in one way Or another, to humanity's demise.
Convinced that we do not differ in kind from other animals that inhabit the earth, we
would get along just ﬁne. To be sure, our self-preservation instinct would make sure of
that. And in a world in which we admit that people do not have any control over their
acts, wrongdoing would not run rampant. Wrongdoing, small or great, would still have
negative consequences for the wrongdoer. Dangerous criminals, for example, would still
be “locked up”—that is, quarantined—so as to be sure they do not harm again, although
the pretense for “locking up” these people would be gone, as well as any other actions
supporting this pretense.

However, even if it were the case that we would suffer as the result of changing
our libertarian ways, even if there were some utilitarian sense in blaming and punishing

wrongdoers as we do, that would not undo the nonsense of the pretense, at least from a

186

deontological perspective. From such a perspective, the wrongdoer gets treated unjustly,
no matter what the consequences of the treatment, if the treatment reﬂects the view that
the wrongdoer had control over his act when in fact he did not. Even if we were
convinced that the Erewhonian dealing with the sick, such as how that consumptive was
dealt with, was necessary to preserve the peace and prosperity of Erewhon, we would still
throw up our arms and exclaim, “Absurd!” A world in which people blame a man for
being consumptive, make him feel the ailment is his fault, and imprison him for it is—plain
and simple—an absurd world. Likewise, the discrepancy between pretension and reality in

our world is indeed conspicuous. Our human world is absurd.

Conclusion

And so, I think, would begin the defense of the Erewhon Argument. I emphasize
‘begin,’ for certainly what I have written in the previous section amounts to little more
than an outline. Both the objections and the responses to the objections need to be honed
and developed. And no doubt other objections need to be addressed. Having said that, I
do believe this outline of a defense points to a credible full-ﬂedged defense of the Erewhon
Argument. At the very least, I think that just as the four arguments for absurdity that
Nagel criticizes warrant further investigation, so does this one—and that perhaps is the
best place to leave the issue of the argument's plausibility for the purposes of this
dissertation.

I think it may be appropriate to bring my examination of Nagel's thoughts and
ideas on absurdity to a close by stating a certain connection between the Erewhon
Argument and Nagel that goes beyond what I have already said. What I have already said
is that the argument nicely ﬁts Nagel's general schema of human absurdity: a conspicuous
discrepancy between pretension and reality. Above and beyond this, however, it seems
Nagel himself unintentionally comes close to giving the Erewhon Argument. One of the

main clashes between the subjective perspective and the objective perspective that he

187

describes in “Subjective and Objective” is between the view that we have control over our
actions (a view of the subjective perspective) and the view that we do not have control
over our actions (a view of the objective perspective). While Nagel stops short of stating
that in this case the subjective view is mistaken, he does confess: “I do not ﬁnd the
concept of agent causation intelligible. . . Moreover, his position seems to be that this
particular subjective perspective is a deeply human one (just as is its objective counterpart)
and one here to stay, indicating that the discrepancy is both universal and inescapable. *

And, ﬁnally, Nagel gives the impression that this discrepancy is conspicuous:

 

When we view actions, our own or others', merely as part of the general course of
events, it seems impossible to attribute them to individuals in a way that makes
sense of the attitudes we take toward someone we regard as the source of an
action. Certain attitudes toward the agent, rather that just about him, lose their
footing. If an individual is destructive enough we may think it would be better if
he did not exist; but if he is just a disastrous part of the world, blame directed at
him or guilt he directs at himself makes no sense, however causally or
indeterrninistically complex his behavior and motives are. '7

Therefore, I think Nagel goes beyond giving us the form of the Erewhon
Argument; he actually provides some of its content. Does this, then, mean the argument
represents yet a ﬁfth doctrine of his? I do not believe so. Construing it as such would be
going too far. However, I do not think we would be going too far in calling the Erewhon
Argument a Nagelian argument. And if upon ﬁirther examination the argument does turn

out to be formidable, credit, I think, should go to him.

 

l7Nagel. Mortal Questions, 198—99. Emphasis mine.

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