The View from Nowhere

Nagel's central claim is that the tension between the subjective and objective points of view is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching every aspect of human life . He rejects the view that philosophical problems can be resolved by adopting a purely objective standpoint. Excessive objectification, he argues, has been a malady of recent analytic philosophy, leading to implausible forms of reductionism in the philosophy of mind and elsewhere . The solution is not to inhibit the objectifying impulse but to insist that it learn to live alongside the internal perspectives that cannot be either discarded or objectified. Reconciliation between the two standpoints, Nagel concludes, is not always possible .

Nagel examines three questions in the philosophy of mind: whether the mind itself can be objectively understood; how a physical entity can give rise to something with a point of view and mental capacities; and how it can be the case that the world is not centerless, that one of its persons can be me . The outcome of these chapters is not resolution but clarification of the fact that we are 'both inside and outside the world' . Nagel's treatment extends the critique he had developed in 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?'—that subjective experience resists objective capture—into a systematic account of why the mind-body problem remains intractable when approached from either standpoint alone.

The View from Nowhere is the elaboration of a project Nagel outlined in an essay in Mortal Questions (1979), which argued that we are moored in our particular points of view yet impelled to transcend them, and that the coexistence of conflicting standpoints is an irreducible fact of life . The earlier essay sketched the programme; the 1986 book executes it across metaphysics of mind, epistemology, free will, and ethics . A reviewer in The Journal of Religion described the book as 'a brilliantly subtle and sensitive attempt to expose the demands of subjectivity and objectivity, while arguing for the special attractions of the latter' . The relationship is thus one of development and systematization rather than revision.

Reception was strongly positive. P. F. Strawson, writing in The New Republic, praised Nagel for combining qualities rarely found together: intellectually ambitious aims achieved through 'the unqualified repudiation of cherished views held by many of Nagel's more or less eminent contemporaries,' while engaging with precisely the doubts and anxieties the reflective nonprofessional may feel . Charles Taylor in the Times Literary Supplement called it 'remarkable,' praising discussions that 'reach a level of originality and illumination that opens genuinely new avenues of philosophical thought' . Jonathan Glover in The New York Review of Books described it as an original book, accessible to any educated reader, that will make readers question many of their deepest beliefs .

A critical notice argues that Nagel runs two distinct conceptions of objectivity together in a way that unsettles many of the book's main conclusions. The 'Hegelian conception' involves stepping back from our view of the world to a new conception about the relation between that view and the world so viewed. The 'absolute conception' requires eliminating from our view of the world any element that can be seen as a product of one's own perspective. If one tries to combine these two conceptions, the result is likely to be unstable . This criticism targets the book's central methodological framework rather than any particular application, suggesting that the tension Nagel diagnoses may also infect his proposed way of managing it.

The View from Nowhere was published by Oxford University Press in New York in 1986 . The first edition was a hardcover of xi, 244 pages . A paperback edition followed on February 9, 1989 . The book has been translated into multiple languages, including French (Le point de vue de nulle part, Éditions de l'Éclat, 1993), German (Der Blick von nirgendwo, Suhrkamp, 1992), and Japanese (どこでもないところからの眺め, 春秋社, 2009) . The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as Nagel's 'systematic and comprehensive treatment of the fundamental philosophical issues in terms of the essential duality between objective and subjective points of view' .