Our capacity to conceptually distance ourselves from the immediacy of our position in the world—to detach from the subjective processes and forms of life that ground our involvement within the world—confers upon us a degree of self-consciousness that is quite remarkable. At the very same time, this growth of self-consciousness has hollowed the world of meaning and produced a form of consciousness more disconnected from the source of its own life than ever before. Objective expanse has produced a split in the self whose agitation is felt in the nihilism and discontent of the age.
Thomas Nagel’s 1986 book “The View From Nowhere” offers a compelling diagnosis of a fundamental conflict or split in the life and thought of beings like us, and the possibility, at least in some instances, of reconciliation. See a detailed breakdown of Nagel’s book here.
Ultimately, however, Nagel’s philosophical vision succumbs to the very same ambition toward objective expanse that he elsewhere criticizes. As long as outer ascent to more objective realms remains disconnected from the sources of life that sustain it, the objective views we attain will only serve to further alienate us from ourselves. What is currently needed is not a journey outward; but rather, a journey inward, a descent into worlds of mystery and magic. It is only in the descent into the depths of psychic life that the sources of life which sustain us can be reconnected to.
In “The View From Nowhere”, Thomas Nagel offers a compelling vision of the task of philosophy as the attempt to reconcile two different—and often conflicting—standpoints that beings like us are capable of taking. Philosophical problems—the mind-body problem, the problem of skepticism, determinism and freedom of the will, etc.—arise due to a clash or conflict between two fundamental conceptions. When we view the world from our own point of view, from a first-personal perspective, we see and apprehend the world as it appears to us, through the particular subjective determinations of our senses, culture, and forms of life. Our grasp of the world is attained through a particular place within that world; however, we are also able to detach from this subjective standpoint and view the world from the outside, from a third-personal or objective point of view.
When we detach in this way, we leave behind the particular modes of justification and living that ground our involvement in the world from our first-personal perspective, from our place within the world—we expand outwards encompassing more and more of reality in our objective conception of it. The world, and the subjective perspectives that we’ve left behind, become the object of a more universal gaze, a view sub specie aeternitatis, which attempts to grasp the world from no particular place at all, from no particular location in the world, a view from nowhere that any rational and numerate being would also in principle be capable of taking. For Nagel, this is the most exciting and interesting thing about beings like us, but the journey out into more objective realms doesn’t come without its risks or dangers.
The problem is that this more detached view arises out of the subjectively determined view it is attempting to leave behind; but, we ourselves can only attain the detached view from a place within the world, and thus an internal tension between the two conceptions or standpoints arises. The subjective conditions out of which the more objective view arises really do exist, but the objective view gains its status only by leaving those subjective conditions behind. If the subjective conditions out of which the objective view arises exist; however, then the objective view will run the risk of mistakenly taking itself to be a complete view of the world when in fact it isn’t. It runs the risk of hastily and falsely reducing the world of appearances to mere appearances. Nagel writes,
…there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint, however much it may extend our understanding beyond the point from which we started. A great deal is essentially connected to particular point of view, or type of point of view, and the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reduction or to outright denial that certainly patently real phenomena exist at all.
The View From Nowhere, p. 7
Once the backward step has been taken and the subjective point of view is left behind, a new burden is placed on the more objective conception to, if not integrate, at least acknowledge, the view that it has left behind as a view that actually exists within the world. The philosopher, according to Nagel, ought to be sensitive to this tension. The task then becomes one of setting out to integrate the two uneasily related conceptions. If integration isn’t possible, we must simply recognize that thought and life are split in that way. “A part from the chance that his kind of tension will generate something new, it is best to be aware of the way in which life and thought are split, if that is how things are” (p. 6).
Here is what Nagel thinks is going on when we take a more or less objective view of the world.
We start with our particular subjective view of the world, the way the world appears to us (POV1), the relation (R) that (POV1) stands in to the world, and of course, the world that is disclosed through that point of view (W1). To understand an event or state of affairs objectively, we detach from our initial view of the world (POV1) and form a new conception of the world (POV2) which has that original view and its relation to the world as its object. We’ve managed to place ourselves in the world that is to be understood. We now view ourselves from the outside.
Let’s consider an example. Stubbing your toe hurts. Almost immediately you feel the sensation of pain. But what do we see when we detach from the particular point of view from which we are experiencing the sensation of pain and view the situation from the outside? When viewed from the outside the pain is not strictly speaking your sensation of pain. From the outside, when you stub your toe, you’re slamming a bundle of special nerve endings with a force equal to two to three times your body weight on a tiny surface area so that the force can’t spread out and remains concentrated in that area. That is the pain from the more objective view. In taking the objective stance, we’ve detached from the particular and subjectively determined view from which we first experienced the sensation of pain and understood it from no particular point of view at all, from an objective view that leaves sensations, and other subjective determinations, behind.
This may all seem obvious so far, but it is this move to detach from the way in which the world appears to us which leads to many of the problems of philosophy, according to Nagel. How, for instance, is our objective conception of the physical world to account for the subjective mental processes out of which it arises? How are the claims of an objective morality to integrate the subjectively determined motivations and desires of people leading their own individual lives? Reconciling the objective view with the subjective conditions it has left behind is “…the most fundamental issue about morality, knowledge, freedom, the self, and the relation of mind to the physical world” (3).
The capacity to step outside ourselves and comprehend more and more of the world objectively is a special mark of beings like us—and also any other being who possess such capacities—but as already noted, it doesn’t come without its dangers. The ambition to encompass the world in our specifically objective understanding of it runs serval risks. The dangers that Nagel focuses on in particular are the dangers of excessive impersonality, false objectification, and insoluble subjective-objective conflicts (p. 86). We run this risk of excessive impersonality when we take ourselves to be nothing but the being who views the world from this impersonal stance, when we over-identify with the point of view revealed to us in our objective capacities, insulating ourselves from our personal and empirical lives. It is important to remember, according to Nagel, that one is both the impersonal self, capable of objective reflection, and the particular being with an empirical perspective bound up in the world. Nagel writes, “objective advance produces a split in the self, and as it gradually widens, the problems of integration between the two standpoints becomes severe…” (p. 86, emphasis added).
The next danger is that of false objectification. In our drive to encompass more and more of the world in our objective conception of it, we may be tempted to take successful objective expanse in one area and apply it to an area in which such objectification will not work. Contemporary philosophy is rife with such examples, according to Nagel. The power of the objective conception of the physical world, for instance, which physics employs with such success, has been so tempting as a means for explaining other phenomena that it is often applied to areas in which it doesn’t belong. The application of the conception of physical objectivity to the mind, accordingly to Nagel, has resulted in an overarching tendency towards false reduction. The various species of physicalism: behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, etc., are the result.
In thinking that our conception of physical objectivity can also explain consciousness, we loose sight of the irreducibly subject character of mental processes and events and their place within the world. The allure of the conception of physical objectivity—the scope of understanding gained by detaching from the particular subjective mental processes through which the world appears to us—has led to a widespread tendency to ignore the point of view from which it begins. Subjective mental processes, according to Nagel, are real constitutive features of the world which a conception of physical objectivity cannot alone account for. Nagel proposes to introduce a conception of mental objectivity to account for this, a conception of objectivity applied to the mental as opposed to the physical. He then argues for a dual aspect theory as a way to integrate these uneasily related points of view. See chapters two and three of “The View From Nowhere” for Nagel’s solution to this problem.
Finally, the ambition to journey further outwards into new objective worlds comes with the danger of insoluble splits between objective and subjective views. It will always be the task of the more objective view to reintegrate the more subjective view out of which it arose; however, reintegration won’t always be achievable, and when it is not, Nagel thinks we need to admit as much. For instance, Nagel views the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as a genuine a priori discovery, a real objective advance in knowledge (p. 87). It is an example of an objective advance, however, that also allows us to reintegrate the more subjective view form which it arose. The sensory qualities of objects are perceptible by us because of the effects that the primary qualities have on our perceptual capacities. The more objective view explains and is compatible with the way things appear subjectively.
In other cases, however, the views are bound to remain incompatible. For instance, when we detach from our ordinary beliefs and begin interrogating the grounds of those beliefs from the outside, we find it impossible to appeal to any further ground of justification for believing what we do. Chains of justification leave off in life, and from the outside it may look like knowledge is impossible. The impossibility of knowledge, however, is fundamentally incompatible with our ordinary way of being in the world, with the way things appear to us from our perspective. Try as we might we can’t come to believe that knowledge is impossible while at the same time continuing to go on believing. There is an insoluble conflict between the two conceptions. Nagel writes, “the objective standpoint here produces a split in the self which will not go away, and we either alternate between views or develop a form of double vision” (88). Developing “double vision” is Nagel’s solution in instances likes this, cultivating the capacity to hold incompatible views in mind is, at least in some areas, necessary for beings like us.
Nagel offers a powerful philosophical vision. In our capacity to detach from the subjectively determined perspectives through which the world appears to us, and place them in the world that has now become the object of our thought, we in some sense are able to climb over our own heads and view ourselves from the outside in. But this detached objectivity is not the only type of objectivity there is. Climbing over our own heads is a route to one form of objectivity, a detached form, but there is yet another route that we can travel along, a route that does not take us further outward and away from our subjectively determined view of the world; but rather, a route which leads inward, that carries us along its dark and ambiguous currents into the depths of our own being.
In these dark depths worlds of mystery and magic open up, vistas of intelligent life whose operation governs the movement of the world of appearances in much the same way that plate tectonics govern the fundamental geological formations of the Earth’s lithosphere. While Nagel finds new worlds in his journey outwards into more objective realms, a less travelled route—taken by the most intrepid of sojourners—opens up inwardly, disclosing dimensions of psychic life whose influence and character can only accurately be described as objective. The sense that we give to this objectivity of the inner world, however, is not easily articulated, but I think it must be acknowledged by any sincere philosophical investigation into the nature of things. What I offer here can only be a general sketch of this alternative road that so few have acknowledged, let alone travelled upon.
We begin in the same place as the detached conception, with the way things appear to us from our subjective point of view. The first step on the journey inward is also the same as the journey outward: to notice that the contents of our thoughts and impression are to a large extent determined by our own subjective capacities, but this is where the similarity to the outward journey ends. From here, we take cognizance of the fact that for any appearance there is someone; or rather, something to whom the appearance appears. This is to notice a perpetual awareness both behind and in every conscious state. It is to notice that appearances arise and fade away, or transform into the next sequence of appearances, within this vast depth of awareness.
When such an inward view is taken up appearances take on a kind of contingency. What is there is there as the appearance that it is, but any other appearance could have taken its place—both the traffic jam and the trip to the park on a sunny day are contents floating in the vastness of this awareness, like clouds through the sky. This generates an attitude of indifference toward the appearances. Even if we can’t get behind them entirely, the indifference we feel towards their contents begins to reveal the chains of habituation and association that have to a large extent fixed them as the contents of our lives. To recognize the radical contingency of the content of the impressions is already in some sense to disrupt the normal unconsciousness which sustains and supports them. When attention is united to inner awareness the contingency of the appearances is viscerally felt, offering up a choice as to how the appearance should be related to, the attitude through which the appearance should be engaged. This could range anywhere from remaining calm and centered in a traffic jam to facing torture and execution with equanimity and grace. The latter obviously being more difficult to attain, and likely only attainable by rare and select individuals.
From here, the malleability of the appearances only increases. If an appearance can be determined in this way, it can also begin to establish new chains of habituation and association through its downstream effect on future chains of impressions. The calmness maintained during the traffic jam carries over into the next sequence of appearances, generating a kind of karmic cascade. Not only do the appearances then appear as contingent, they also appear—to a greater or lesser degree—as malleable. The connections between them and the sequences they initiate are fluid, sustained by a deeper and more primordial level of awareness.
If we then withdraw from the contents of appearances even further, focusing on this primordial awareness itself, whole new dimensions of being emerge. Suddenly, there is no need of focus because the objective ego has submerged into the vastness that supports it. Here the outer world of impressions and thoughts fades away and an inner world of images and symbols emerges. This is a domain of mystery and magic, where images, symbols, and even awareness itself express an intelligence and life of its own. It is difficult to say anything about this dimension of things at all since here the norms that govern our ordinary thought and talk about the world begin to break down, leaving only experience as our guide, and even that turns out to be something quite different from what we normally take it to be. The nocturnal episodes recorded in Carl Jung’s Liver Novus can be referred to as an example.
Once a view of the world has be taken up from the inside, the next question becomes how to reintegrate that view back into the view of our everyday lives. In the depths, one didn’t detach from the appearances; but rather, travelled behind and into them, finding that appearances are upheld and sustained by a primordial intelligence and awareness. Appearances are then invested with a numinous glow. A quality of the depths is carried back to the appearances, a quality of inwardness now shines through them. One views the world not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Appearances are seen, not as substantial realities in their own right, but as signs or symbols of an inner world of mystery and magic.
It is hard to know how deep this awareness might go, whether or not there is any limit. Nonetheless, as the inward journey is taken a new appreciation and understanding of the world of appearances is gained. One has invested the outward appearance with its inner reality closing the gap between the appearance and the depth, a gap perpetuated and sustained by the journey outward, which insists that the only way to achieve the ideal of progress is to get away from the reality which supports the world we are attempting to understand. The reality revealed, the world disclosed through the inner journey, is an objective world. It can be discovered and experienced by anyone with the willingness and courage to do so. The possibility of other non-human beings accessing and moving within these depths is a real one. Whole worlds await discovery. The insistence that the only way to achieve objectivity is by detaching ourselves from the source of life that sustains us has resulted in a catastrophic relationship to the world. We have the power to call down the stars, but we don’t even know who we are or how to control our habitual and unconscious responses to the environment.
There are, however, interesting parallels between the outward and inward journey; and, if Jung is correct, we might also expect the presence of an enantiodromia, a process by which the descent inwards transforms into outer ascent, and outer ascent transforms into a journey into the deep. That is currently beyond the scope of this essay and for the time it will suffice to note some of the parallels between the two routes. Take for instance Nagel’s description of his rationalist epistemology. He begins with the image of Neurath’s ship, but then suggests that
…if we wish to depict the great objective advances on which real progress depends, we need a different image. Though we may incorporate parts of the original ship in the new one we are about to create, we call up out of ourselves most of the materials from which we will construct it. The place which we occupy for this purpose may be one we could not have reached except on the old ship, but it is really in a new world, and in some sense, I believe, what we find in it is already there. Each of us is a microcosm, and in detaching progressively from our point of view and forming a succession of higher views of ourselves in the world, we are occupying a territory that already exists: taking possession of a latent objective realm, so to speak.
The View From Nowhere, p. 82-3
The image of the outward journey that he presents here sounds quite hermetic, and if it were not for the fact that the view he proposes is ultimately emptied of all the nutrients of the depths which would actually sustain it and give it life, it would be admirable. Having drunk from the living water of the interior world, Nagel’s vision feels more like an empty vessel—or a leaky sieve. We try to hold reality within it but as soon as it enters it dissipates.
There is one more comparison to draw between Nagel’s outward journey to more objective worlds and the inward journey that I have described here, and this is in regard to Nagel’s realism. For Nagel, the world is more than can be grasped in thought, and an important insight into our own lives is that there are points of view and aspects of the world that we will likely never be able to comprehend; concepts that we could never grasp, even if some other being with a constitution radically different from our own could. What we can think and speak about is likely only a fraction of what actually is. Nagel writes,
Any conception of the world must include some acknowledgment of its own incompleteness: at a minimum it will admit the existence of things or events we don’t know about now. The issue is only how far beyond our actual conception of the world we should admit that the world may extend. I claim that it may contain not only what we don’t know and can’t yet conceive, but also what we never could conceive—and that this acknowledgment of the likelihood of its own limits should be built into our conception of reality. This amounts to a strong form of antihumanism: the world is not our world, even potentially. It may be partly or largely incomprehensible to us not just because we lack the time or technical capacity to acquire a full understanding of it, but because of our nature.
The View From Nowhere, p.108
This decentered view of the world is suggested when we detach from the way the world appears to us. I will likely never know what scrambled eggs taste like to a cockroach, yet such a point of view does in fact exist (p. 25). There is no telling how far our ignorance may reach, what worlds and concepts will forever remain unavailable to us. For there to be points of view, concepts, whole worlds of which one could in principle never know about or grasp, encourages a receptivity to and humility in the face of the world we find ourselves within.
Such a view, I believe, is also recommended by the inward journey, and possibly represents a point of convergence on the both the inward and outward paths, for there are depths to the psyche that we never be able to reach given the particular form in which beings such as us are currently incarnated. The inward journey seems to extend indefinitely, no amount of inward travel capable of exhausting its depths. Maintaining an awareness of this inexhaustible depth allows us to remain receptive to the world encountered on the journey inward, receptive to the worlds of mystery and magic, to listen and to be guided by that which is in some sense forever beyond our reach, but which draws us deeper into the creative springs of life from which the world of appearances arises. To acknowledge this realism about the inner world is simply to point to something beyond which we can say anything about, but whose recognition is nonetheless fundamental.
There are of course obvious concerns for the view I have presented here, and anyone on the inward journey will soon enough find themselves grappling with them. The first is that if we treat the contents of the inner world as expressing a kind of intelligence, a life and objectivity of their own, how do we then distinguish between different kinds of inner happenings? Are all inner happenings equally objective on this view? Or are some inner happenings mere appearances that we can leave behind, such as the frustration experienced during a traffic jam, while others the expression of constitutive features of the world? Can we distinguish a genuine vision and encounter with the real in the inner depths from hallucination or a psychotic episode? In the outward ascent we at least have the guardrails of reason and science to keep us from going too far over into the abyss. But what sorts of guardrails exist on the journey inward?
While reason and science don’t seem to me to have prevented us from plunging headlong into the abyss, I do think there is a deeper question here, which I don’t know how to answer. It might be worth suggesting that maybe there is more truth in hallucination and psychotic episodes than is commonly supposed. Descartes, after all, finds the certainty of his own existence in the midst of a whirlpool of hallucinatory doubt. Hallucinations and psychotic episodes are of course far more confused and disordered than the view I have presented here, but maybe that is simply a failure of any attempt to try and explain the descent into the inner world accurately. The reality under investigation here may simply resist such attempts. There is a real sense that in the journey inward the guardrails are thrown out, that one is left to maneuver by a means that one doesn’t or can’t have complete access to. A new sense begins to develop by which one steers and is simultaneously steered. Maybe this is something akin to what Heraclitus meant by logos, not a strictly rational or conceptual grasp on things, but something more akin to mantic insight generated by the convergence of an intelligence far beyond our grasp with our own. The view here needs further development.
Another objection, one that commonly arises when the inward journey is mentioned, is that the outward journey has discovered new objective worlds that have revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos and ourselves. The dubious pursuits of mysticism and magic, have not. Furthermore, the reason the outward journey has been so effective while the inward journey has not is because the outward journey is grounded in what is real, while the inward journey is mixed up in illusion and falsehood. Those who follow the inward path are, to use a term by William James, “tender-minded,” with no stomach for reality.
The first response here is to bring in a line of criticism that Nagel too avails himself of, that one shouldn’t expect the same results from methods designed for different purposes. Detaching from appearances and placing ourselves in the world that is to be understood is one way of getting at what is, but it’s not the only way. As Nagel himself asserts, objective understanding of the world doesn’t exhaust everything about the world that can be understood. Forming a detached conception of the world is one way of understanding it, but not the only way, or even the best way. The view revealed in the journey inward is not a detachable view, one that we could either decide to continue to pursue or, like Hume, “dispel with three or four hours’ of amusement” by dining and playing backgammon with friends; rather, once the journey inward begins, there is no stopping it—it is an initiation. There is no choice about whether one is to continue to go forward or retreat back to safer ground, one is continually drawn deeper along its paths, even despite oneself. The view transforms our vision of the world. Nature herself resonates with new generative meanings that draw us deeper into her mysteries.
Another response to the objection, while not definitive, involves considering the social pressures and norms, grounded in the very real psychological motivations of individuals, that are involved in the production of knowledge. From a young age we are inculcated with an implicit respect for reason and science—understanding their efficacy and importance is not something we strain to grasp; rather, their truth and efficaciousness are assumed from the outset. We could very easily, however, imagine a culture in which the norms and social pressures involved in the production of knowledge were different. Such a world is depicted, for example, in Borges’s short story, The Lottery of Babylon, in which a shadowy corporation, called simply, “The Company” enforces a “sacred disorder”, perpetuating “an infinite game of chance” that would make our reliance on math, logic, and the laws that predict the regularity of nature seem nearly incomprehensible as measures of what is. Try as we might to get them to accept that some conclusion follows necessarily from a given set of premises, or that certain beliefs they hold commit them to a definite moral position, we would not be able to convince them. The strength of the social norms and pressures would be too great in the face of our attempts at conversion.
I think we find ourselves in much the same situation when suspicion about the inward path is aroused and its untrustworthiness taken as an obvious truth. We simply don’t have the kind of cultural infrastructure that would make these paths more readily available for those inclined to travel upon them. Often a person’s introduction to the inner world is chaotic and hallucinatory precisely because no stable cultural edifice provides the materials and support to make sense of it. But of course, technical procedures for travelling along these paths have been around for millennia, along with well document accounts of the terrain one might expect to encounter. The tools and resources have been ignored by the vast majority, and will likely continue to be ignored. We have no idea what worlds await discovery in the inner depths, and insisting that these depths don’t exist, or don’t provide a genuine and authentic route to the real, will only further agitate our already fractured selves that the journey outwards has wrought. To heal that wound one must go inward and rediscover the primal source of creative life within.
Liminal Matrices 
Leave a comment