Thomas Nagel is an Unsuspecting Buddhist

In this chapter, Nagel sets out to explain who – or what – is the ‘I’ in the statement “I am Thomas Nagel [1].” I believe that, by the end of this chapter, he has adequately done so because of the distinction made between the experiences of the first person subject and the act of being objectively conscious of the universe. I will be assuming the work of Hume was correct in disproving the existence of a self-as, and the origins of it, respectively:

“The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects”

– (Hume: 259).

Hume is here unpacking the nature of personal identity and how we come to believe it to be a stable identity over time. In other words, he is saying that identity does not bind our perceptions; rather, it is a series of associations made in the imagination. We never really see a connection among things, but invent one, thus making identity not a uniter of perceptions, but a quality ascribed to them in contemplation.

My goal in this paper is to, by taking Hume’s conclusion for granted, explain and expand upon Nagel’s conception of self to answer the question, “what is ‘I’?” Nagel is not here defending the existence of a self as an identity, he is reframing the traditional conception of identity as who you are, or that which you possess. Thus, my thesis is that Nagel has unexpectedly advocated for the Buddhist idea of the non-existence of a self[2]. No-self not only compliments Nagel’s idea, but it is the only conclusion of it. This is so because what is really meant by the term is that there is no personal self. One common and misunderstood reading of ‘no-self’ is that it merely says: the self, as an ascribed identity to a spatiotemporal entity, does not exist. But what is actually meant by the term is that there is, in reality, no subjective individual self. It is an illusion and there is only an objective self: or that which vicariously apprehends the world through the life of a person. A point conceded by Nagel:

“As it happens, I ordinarily view the world from a certain vantage point, […], the daily life of TN as a kind of window. But the experiences and the perspective of TN with which I am directly presented are not the point of the view of the true self, for the true self has no point of view and includes in its conception of the centerless world TN and his perspective among the contents of that world”

- (Nagel 62).

In other words, the true self is the objective self that sees from the point of view of TN, or PB, or whomever. Thus, PB is not the objective self in character as PB. ‘PB’ is an indexical assigned to the spatiotemporal being for the ease of day-to-day life. Moreover, a correct use of the utterance “I am PB”, by PB, is not an identity. It is, as Nagel tells us, a subject-predicate proposition (Nagel: 55). In other words, if “I” is the subject of the proposition and “PB” the predicate, then “I am PB,” says “PB” of “I.” In the same way, “the car is a Honda” says “Honda” of “car.” Thus, as ‘Honda’ is a quality of the car, ‘PB’ is a quality of I. This is the important point where semantics reveals the nature of identity: ‘I’ is the conscious subject and ‘PB’ is a denotation given to the conscious subject, however ‘I’ is not ‘PB’ and ‘PB’ is not ‘I’. They merely happen to coincide at the time of PB being both alive and given a name. This is the confusion that Nagel claims to have seen through: the bad habit of coming to refer to the nexus of subjective and objective as ‘myself,’ which arises through the intimate comingling of ‘I’ and ‘PB.’ This is further evidenced by the fact that ‘I’ is also not ‘TN’, nor is ‘I’, truly, any other possible denotation, past, present, or future. The objective conscious subject is always everyone at every time, or else it neither conscious nor subject. For the sake of clarity, we as a civilization have simply come to label every instance of the conscious subject because the world would be rather difficult to navigate if every person shared the same name.

It is now clear that the objective and subjective selves exist concurrently in every respect, but are not the same thing. The locus of ‘I’ and ‘PB’ is the point of singularity where the subjective and objective selves meet. I understand the convergence of objectivity and subjectivity, as Nagel presents it, to be a parallel to the convergence of monism[3] and dualism[4]. What I mean by this is that, in light of Nagel’s explication, the phrase “I am PB” expresses both selves: ‘I’ is the indivisible and omnipresent constant of mere conscious existence, and ‘PB’ is the illusion of being something other than this omnipresence – ‘PB’ and ‘TN’ are faces on an infinite sided die and ‘I’ is the die itself.

A problem arises however, because how can two ideas in direct contradiction to each other both be true? If 1 = 1 and 2 = 2, how can it possibly ever be the case that 1 = 2? This confusion is based on a misconstrual of the kind of ‘things’ the two selves or the two doctrines are. This concern is remedied once the realization is made that they are not two distinct things that interact, or even two independent abstractions. They are not entity 1 and entity 2. Rather, they are two ways of interacting with the world – method 1 and method 2. Being non-discrete methods, it is well within the realm of possibility for them to exist concurrently. Thus, as Nagel has reached an objective conception of the world from his subjective point of view, so too can a monistic view of the world be reached from a dualist point of view. Although one bleeds into the other, they can be separated. Nagel tells us how the objective self, ‘I’, is abstracted from the subjective self, ‘TN’:

“By treating the individual experiences of that person as data for the construction of an objective picture. I throw TN into the world as a thing that interacts with the rest of it, and ask what the world must be like from no point of view in order to appear to him as it does from his point of view. […], I try to do with his perspective on the world what I could do if information [… were], not pumped directly into my sensorium but known from the outside. […]. It is the perspectiveless subject that constructs a centerless conception of the world by casting all perspectives into the content of the world. ”

–      (Nagel: 62)

In other words, the objective self uses TN’s (or any) point of view as an experimental subject to gain knowledge of itself. The objective self, manifest as TN, asks about itself as TN while withholding investment in the subjects’ appraisal of their own experience. Thus, the objective and subjective selves have been separated with respect to perspective.

Nagel continually speaks of being thrown into the world by the perspectiveless subject. But the world not only contains TN, and PB, and Hondas – it contains everything, including the perspectiveless subject. I will reiterate that the perspectiveless subject must exist because it, ultimately, is the mere act of being. Furthermore, if it is true that the perspectiveless subject lacks perspective, then it must be something that is not or does not have a perspective. But how? Everything has perspective. Even my chair has the perspective of inanimate matter. I see only three ways for the objective self to truly be perspectiveless: (1) it is outside the world and thus outside the context of ‘perspective’, but if it is not in the world then it does not exist, so this cannot be true; (2) it is nothing with a perspective, but everything has perspective so this leads to same problematic outcome of nonexistence; (3) the perspectiveless subject is everything – the objective self is every perspective – it is the prism through which white light is broken into a rainbow.

We are now ready to answer the question “what is ‘I’?” ‘I’ is not a perspective, it is every perspective, and thus, existence itself. Which makes TN, PB, a Honda, and my chair, apertures through which the universe inquires about itself.

Bibliography

[1]

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford Press. Print (pp. 251 – 263).

[2]

Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Print      (pp. 54 – 66).

[1] For brevity, this will be shortened to TN. Further, when speaking in the first person as is required by this topic, use of the term “PB” will refer to Paul Bokserman – the author of this work.

[2] The term “non-existence of a self” will henceforth be abbreviated to “no-self.”

[3] Monism: the doctrine that the universe is a single entity and separation is an illusion (synonymous with Nagel’s objective conception of the world which contains TN).

[4] Dualism: the doctrine that everything must conceptually exist in parts – for example, if something has a front, it must have back (synonymous with Nagel’s conception of the creature TN).