Introduction to "Excerpt from Thomas Nagel's The Last Word"

"WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?" Thomas Nagel's famous question ¹ points to a problem that has exercised him repeatedly: how should we reconcile attempts to view the world impersonally and objectively, on the one hand, with (on the other hand) attempts to view it from a particular, subjective perspective? In The Last Word—the book from which our text is excerpted—Nagel defends universal reason against relativists and subjectivists, and argues that public discourse presupposes a commitment to objective reason. But he does not ignore the subjective point of view: the last word in disputes about objective validity must, he argues, lie in thoughts that cannot be regarded from the outside as mere psychological dispositions.

Nagel is most definitely not a theist. "I hope there is no God!" he tells us in the text we reprint. But theists will applaud his celebration of universal reason, and agree with him that "If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it." ² Nagel has more in common with theists than a commitment to universal, objective reason: he bucks the trend in contemporary philosophy of mind, criticizing the reductive materialism that is popular these days among atheistic philosophers. Nagel travels so far with the theists that he finds himself, in the last chapter of The Last Word, offering what he calls "reassurance" to atheists alarmed by what they see as religious undertones in his thinking. That is the section of the book on which we focus.

Why would an atheist be troubled by Nagel's work? Because he is willing to confront serious shortcomings in materialistic accounts of the mystery of consciousness—which includes both the mystery of "bat consciousness," and the mystery of human consciousness. At the lowest level, our conscious states are sensations: the pleasurable feeling of sunlight on the skin, the dull ache of muscles after physical labor, the perception of reds and pinks in a glorious sunset—all are instances of consciousness. At a higher level, we think about abstract mathematical theorems, musical compositions, and religious concepts; these, too, are instances of consciousness. Scientists, of course, have long sought physicalistic explanations of all these phenomena. They attempt to explain the emergence of consciousness by appealing to Darwinist evolutionary biology. They attempt to explain the existence of consciousness by appealing to "identity theories" that posit one-to-one correlations—identities—between brain states and mental states. Nagel is dissatisfied with the scientists' results. But he is uneasy about his own dissatisfaction, worried that it may seem (to atheistic colleagues) to point in the direction of a religious explanation of consciousness. So, at the end of The Last Word, in the text we reprint here, Nagel seeks to allay the fears of the atheists.

Given Nagel's defense of universal reason in The Last Word, it is curious that his argument in our brief text is so difficult to pin down. All of our commentators complain about the elusiveness of his argument, and make their best guesses about the structure of his reasoning. Still, the commentators are no doubt heartened by their knowledge that Nagel will never say in rejoinder to an attempted reconstruction of his line of thought: "I don't believe in clarifying arguments by identifying premises and conclusion." Nagel is committed to the use of reason as a guide to truth; so, too, are those of us who here respond to Nagel. This common commitment has the potential to underwrite a broader agreement about the universe than obtains at the moment between Nagel and the theists.