Thomas Nagel’s Platonic attack on Ludwig Wittgenstein and other “shallow” (i.e., non-transcendent) philosophers.
Skip the following square-bracketed introduction if you’ve already read my ‘Thomas Nagel as Philosopher-Priest and New Mysterian (Part One)’, ‘Thomas Nagel on Darwinian Imperialism, Naturalism and Mind (Part Two)’ and ‘Thomas Nagel on Good and Bad Philosophy (Part Three)’.
[This essay was written quite some time ago. The style is somewhat rhetorical, literary and (as it were) psychologistic. That said, I still agree with much of its philosophical content. Indeed many analytic philosophers would probably regard this essay as one long ad hominem against the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-). Sure; there is an element of the ad hominem in the following. Yet hopefully it will be shown that there’s more to the essay than that. In fact I chose to write in a rhetorical style partly in response to the clear and prevalent rhetoric and “psychologising” I found in Thomas Nagel’s own book, The Last Word.]
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Thomas Nagel on the Late Wittgenstein
It is the “spiritually degenerate” position of (as it’s often put) the late Wittgenstein which particularly irks the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-).
But firstly, let’s take Nagel’s more general position on philosophy.
Nagel believes that what he calls “deflationary philosophers” are (or were) going “against the philosophical impulse itself”. So just as Noam Chomsky argued that there is a “language faculty” (or “module”) in the brain, so Nagel argues that there’s a (of course he doesn’t put it this way) philosophy faculty there too. More than that: a faculty (a philosophy machine in the mind) with a fixed stock of ahistorical and acultural questions, issues and concepts which make up the a priori of all philosophical thought from the Philosophy Department of New York University to the council estates of Bradford. According to Nagel, such philosophical givens are what “spring eternal from the human heart”.
Nagel also makes it clear he sees these deflationary philosophers (the one who don’t share his Platonic vision) as being spiritually degenerate. What’s more, they are (or were) making philosophy what he calls “shallow”. Basically, it’s the old not-really-philosophy accusation again (traditionally aimed at many philosophers from Descartes to Derrida). Indeed Nagel stated that Wittgenstein, Rorty, Sellars, Putnam, et al were all “sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its problems”. There is, of course, an element of truth in Nagel’s statement — at least when it comes to Wittgenstein and Rorty. And it’s also ironic that one of his targets, Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), also expressed his own problem with what he too called “deflationary” philosophers. (He mainly had Richard Rorty in mind.) In Putnam’s own words:
“There is an excitement in the air. And if I react to Professor Rorty’s book (1979) with a certain sharpness, it is because one more ‘deflationary’ book, one more book telling is that the deep questions aren’t deep and the whole enterprise was a mistake, is just what we don’t need right now.”
So we have Nagel accusing Putnam of being a “deflationary” philosopher and Putnam himself accusing other philosophers of exactly the same philosophical sin.
If we return to Wittgenstein.
Nagel puts forward what he sees as the main late-Wittgensteinian claim here:
“[I]t makes sense to say that someone is or is not using a concept correctly only against the background of the possibility of agreement and identifiable disagreement in judgments employing the concept [].”
So what’s wrong with that?
In other words, in which other way would the correctness of concept use be judged? By an individual philosopher himself and that philosopher alone? Would such a philosopher thereby be creating some kind of philosophical (as it were) private language?
So, on this Nagelian view, our contingent concepts need to match up with Platonic Forms or with Fregean (or Nagelian) concepts. And, if they mirror such Forms, then our concepts are the correct ones. And they must now be used correctly because they match up.
Clearly these Nagelian concepts share a lot with the ostensible abstract propositions which are then clothed with natural-language sentences. However, so the argument goes, no (abstract) proposition gains its identity from its natural-language expressions. Instead, we simply express the pre-existing proposition. Only in that sense can we (as it were) tell the truth about such a proposition.
It’s also worth noting that Nagel believes that it’s the late Wittgenstein (rather than, say, Nagel’s — to use his own words — “usual suspects” such as Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault) who (to use his own word again) “endangers” philosophy. This makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind that many analytic philosophers have claimed Wittgenstein as one of them. Therefore Wittgenstein is more directly responsible for the fact that the cancer of what Nagel calls “linguistic idealism” has spread to the Analytic Philosophy Department than any other philosopher.
Thus it’s philosophical transcendence that’s at threat because (according to Nagel) Wittgenstein’s position
“depends on a position so radical that it [] undermines the weaker transcendent pretensions of even the least philosophical of thoughts” .
Incidentally, the English philosopher Michael Dummett (1925 -2011) similarly stressed meaning and the invariants of language (see here) . And perhaps that was why Dummett also believed that if we fully took on board the positions advanced in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), then we’d be denied a systematic theory of meaning. (See Dummett’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics’.)
Now a few more words on Nagel’s broader vision.
Bad Language
Nagel believes that there’s no question that what he calls the “obsession” with language has “contributed to the devaluation of reason”.
Nagel doesn’t mince his words here. He also states that this emphasis on language has resulted in “decadence”.
All this clearly shows that Nagel believes that language shouldn’t be boss. Perhaps more than that (in the style of Plato ): Nagel believes that language is a hindrance to pure thought. (See Part Five where I analyse this claim.)
Nagel wants to see the world with what he calls an “unclouded eye”. He also wants concepts and even reasonings to be utterly free — per impossible — from language. In other words, philosophers would be giving up what he calls “the ambition of transcendence” if they weren’t sceptical — just like him — about language. Thus, to ignore Nagel’s own last words on philosophy would be to be held in the chains of something as contingent as language.
As hinted at, Nagel’s distaste for language has parallels with Plato’s distaste for the senses. Thus Plato escaped from the senses and ascended into the world of abstract and eternal Forms. Nagel, on the other hand, would like to get free from language in order to inhabit the (or his) View from Nowhere.
Who knows, perhaps Thomas Nagel already lives in Nowhere.
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