Thomas Nagel’s “view from outside language”.
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)’, ‘Thomas Nagel on Good and Bad Philosophy (Part Three)’ and ‘Thomas Nagel on Wittgenstein and Other Deflationary Philosophers (Part Four)’.
[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.]
Bad Language and Naturalism
According to Thomas Nagel, if we stress the importance of language (which is contingent), we’re in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology, morality and philosophy too. And it’s that stress which “leads to relativism”. What we should want, instead, are things that are objective, absolute, eternal, necessary and certain. What Nagel is after, therefore, is (in a strong sense) something distinctly non-human — or at least non-social. More prosaically, he wants something that’s non-naturalistic. For Nagel, this includes his “mind-independent concepts”. (Just as for Husserl it was the “essences” which remained after the nonformal had been bracketed. For Brentano it was mentality (i.e., intentionality) itself. For Tractarian Wittgenstein it was his “logical objects”. For Kant it was his a priori concepts and categories. For Plato it was his Forms. Etc.)
Again, according to Nagel, language is a mere contingent phenomenon. What we require is the (to use his own words) “logic of thought” instead. That is,
“[] the system of concepts that makes thought possible and to which any language [] must conform”.
Clearly, this also squares fairly well with Gottlob Frege’s notion of what he called a “common stock of thoughts” .
Platonism and Language
Nagel makes the mistake (if tacit) of jumping from the idea that
1) no particular language is necessary for reasoning and the expression of concepts.
to the conclusion that
2) no language at all is necessary for reasoning and the expression of concepts.
This is analogous to the belief that if the same proposition can be expressed in different natural language or sentential formulations, then it must be independent of all such formulations.
At an obvious level, how would reasoning and the use of concepts be expressed without some form of (admittedly) contingent language? (Would it be like rotating a mental image within the mind?) So perhaps Nagel is talking about logical reasoning. However, even if logical reasoning isn’t itself linguistic, then it’s often (or always) embedded within a linguistic context and the result of linguistic reasonings. Even modus ponens will be so embedded in language. And even if we take the variables or letter names as self-referential, we would still be doing so from some linguistic position.
So perhaps Nagel’s point is that not all reasoning is linguistic reasoning. Yet even if modus ponens has some kind of (non-spatiotemporal) Fregean or platonic existence, then acts of reasoning would still need to apply modus ponens occur within various linguistic contexts.
This isn’t a commitment to any kind of (as it’s called) psychologism about logical reasoning. It’s psychologistic about only the reasoning itself.
For example, modus ponens may well have existence before minds. However, that wouldn’t help Nagel’s Platonic position. In any case, even if the letter names and variables are taken as non-referring, we still have the languages of logic. We can say that the logical schemes or forms (or their individual parts) refer to abstract objects. So these (possible) abstract objects may indeed be mind-independent even though the languages or minds which grasp them most certainly aren’t.
Nagel also seems to be taking the (non-naturalistic) position on concepts in which universals are concepts or concepts are universals. The picture he paints of concepts seems to suggest that they’re non-spatiotemporal universals or Forms. More than that: Nagel is a conceptual realist. That is, Nagel’s concepts are mind-independent; though common to many (or literally all) minds. It’s hard to be clear, however, about all this because Nagel rarely goes into the minutiae when it comes to his positions on concepts and the rest.
And it’s not just “concepts” (or Fregean Thoughts) that are non-natural; reason is too.
Nagel on Reason
Nagel was explicit about his anti-naturalistic position when he also wrote:
“We cannot account for reason by means of a naturalistic description of the practices of language [] reasoning [does not] admit of naturalistic or psychological or sociological analysis.”
In other words, Nagel seems to believe that reason is indeed ahistorical. It’s the matrix within which every rational human being must work, whether it’s the mother who’s cleaning toilets at New York University or someone who’s been a professor for forty years. So if the cleaner or Continental philosopher or anti-realist is fundamentally at odds with the The Philosopher — Nagel, it’s because he’s misused his ahistorical matrix — his reason. (In this sense, Nagel is a thoroughbred Kantian despite his realist criticisms of Kant’s transcendental idealism.)
Nagel also quotes the American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1839–1914) who said that reason has nothing to do with “how we think”. Nagel elaborates by saying that if
“we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions”.
Of course this doesn’t take into account where the propositions (some think that these can be “mind-independent” too — as stated earlier) come from in the first place. Even if the entailments, inferences and other relations between propositions are indeed necessary and timeless, most of what we actually think about has empirical content. (As Wittgenstein himself once said, it’s what is left after we’ve got the logic out of the way that’s important.)
Conclusion: Transcendent Philosophy
Many philosophers sympathetic to Nagel would say that the claim that Nagel is trying to dispense with language is simply not on. It’s the position of a straw-man. Nagel, they may say, is simply arguing that there are “concepts” and modes of reasoning which come before — or at least ground — all languages. Then they may go on to say:
Of course Nagel believes that everything (even his own philosophy) needs to be articulated in some language or other.
Put in this way, Nagel opponents may have fewer problems with his position However, Nagel is saying much more than all that.
Perhaps if I compare two quotes from other philosophers it may help matters.
So take Nicolas P. White’s following words:
“[W]e have, in our ability to apprehend [the] Forms, an avenue to knowledge of them which is independent of language.”
Now compare them with Nagel’s assertion that there is a “view from outside of language”.
So let’s get to the primary source of all these views: the Master himself, Plato. In his book Phaedo, Plato wrote:
“[H]e attains to the purest knowledge of them [the Forms] who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each [form] [].”
A “view from outside language” isn’t something I’ve personally experienced. Having said that, it’s hard to even imagine what it could even be like. The apprehension of “Forms” which would be “independent of language” would indeed be strange. That’s primarily because the Forms (the Platonic Forms at least) were the invention of language — that is, Plato’s language. This isn’t to say (a la John Searle’s critique of Derrida) that Forms are “nothing but text” or anything like that. Instead, someone who’d never read Plato (or his surrogates) would never have any idea what Platonic Forms are. It’s language and mind that brings us to the Forms, even if they’re not literal fictions themselves. Even Plato himself would have been brought to the Forms by language and his mind, whatever form his mystical relation to the Forms actually took. And even if there were some kind non-linguistic and non-causal mystical (or intuitive) confrontation with the Forms, it would still have been largely language and mind which took Plato toward them. (This is similar to the New York Zen Buddhist who attempts to “annihilate thought” or “discursive reasoning” during and after much thought and discursive reasoning.)
The positions above are either explicit or implicit on almost every page of Thomas Nagel’s book, The Last Word.
