ネーゲル Mortal Questions （1979） 序文

Mortal Questions (Canto)

Philosophy covers an immense range of topics, but part of its concern has always been with mortal life: how to understand it and how to live it. These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment. Such problems must be attacked by a philosophical method that aims at personal as well as theoretical understanding, and seeks to combine the two by incorporating theoretical results into the framework of self-knowledge. This involves risk. Large, relevant questions too easily evoke large, wet answers.

　Every theoretical field faces a contest between extravagance and repression, imagination and rigor, expansiveness and precision. Fleeing from the excesses of the one, it is easy to fall into the excesses of the other. Attachment to the grand style can produce an impatience with demands for rigor and may lead to a tolerance for the unintelligible. Since the defects of a tradition trend to reflect its virtues, the problem in analytic philosophy has been the reverse. It is not exactly correct to say that Anglo-American philosophy avoids the big questions. For one thing, there are no problems deeper or more important than those in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language that lie at the center of the field. For another, the analytic establishment has been quite hospitable to recent attempts to explore unfamiliar territory. Nevertheless, the fear of nonsense has had a powerful inhibiting effect. Long after the demise of Logical Positivism, analytic philosophers have tended to proceed with caution and to load themselves with the latest technical equipment.

　It is understandable that an attachment to certain standards and methods should lead to a concentration on problems amenable to those methods. This can be a perfectly rational strategic choice. But it is often accompanied by a tendency to define the legitimate questions in terms of the available methods of solution. This habit appears not only in academic subjects but also in discussion of political and social questions - where it goes under the name of Realism or Pragmatism. It insures comfort of a sort - one is saved from the possibility that one may be ignoring real and important problems - but it is insane in any field, and especially in philosophy. Interesting things happen when new methods and their appropriate atandards have to be developed to deal with questions that cannot be posed in terms of the already existing procedures of inquiry. Sometimes the questions cannot be fully understood until the methods have been developed. It is important to try to avoid making claims that are vague, obscure, or unfounded, and to maintain high standards of evidence and argument. But other values are also important, some of which make it difficult to keep things neat.

　My own philosophical sympathies and antipathies are easily stated. I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuitions over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true: on the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it false. Given a knockdown argument for an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there is probably something wrong with the argument that one cannot detect - though it is also possible that the source of the intuition has been misidentified. If arguments or systematic theoretical considerations lead to results that seem intuitively not to make sense, or if a neat solution to a problem does not remove the conviction that the problem is still there, or if a demonstration that some question is unreal leaves us still wanting to ask it, then something is wrong with the argument and more work needs to be done. Often the problem has to be reformulated, because an adequate answer to the original formulation fails to make the sense of the problem disappear. It is always reasonable in philosophy to have great respect for the intuitive sense of an unsolved problem, because in philosophy our methods are always themselves in question, and this is one way of being prepared to abandon them at any point.

　What ties these views about philosophical practice together is the assumption that to create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.

　Of course belief is often controlled by the will; it can even be coerced. The obvious examples are political and religious. But the captive mind is found in subtler forms in purely intellectual contexts. One of its strongest motives is the simple hunger for belief itself. Sufferers from this condition find it difficult to tolerate having no opinion for any length of time on a subject that interests them. Thy may change their opinions easily, when there is an alternative that can be adopted without discomfort, but they do not like to be in a condition of suspended judgment.

　This can express itself in different ways, all of them well represented in the subject. One is an attachment to systematic theories that produce conclusions about everything. Another is the penchant for clearcut dichotomies that force a choice between the right alternative and the wrong one. Another is the disposition to adopt a view because all the other views one can think of on the topic have been refuted. Only an intemperate appetite for belief will motivate its adoption on such grounds. As a last resort, those who are uncomfortable without convictions but who also cannot manage to figure out what is true may escape by deciding that there is no right or wrong in the area of dispute, so that we need not decide what to believe, but can simply decide to say what we like so long as it is consistent, or else float above the battle of deluded theoretical opponents, observant but detached.

　Superficiality is as hard to avoid in philosophy as it is anywhere else. It is too easy to reach solutions that fail to do justice to the difficulty of the problems. All one can do is try to maintain a desire for answers, a tolerance for long periods without any, an unwillingness to brush aside unexplained intuitions, and an adherence to reasonable standards of clear expression and cogent argument.

　It may be that some philosophical problems have no solutions. I suspect this is true of the deepest and oldest of them. They show us the limits of our understanding. In that case such insight as we can achieve depends on maintaining a strong grasp of the problem instead of abandoning it, and coming to understand the failure of each new attempt at a solution, and of earlier attempts. (That is why we study the works of philosophers like Plato and Berkeley, whose views are accepted by no one.) Unsolvable problems are not for that reason unreal.

　These essays have both internal and external sources. Disparate as they are, they are held together by an interest in the point of view of individual human life and the problem of its relation to more impersonal conceptions of reality. This problem, which receives a general discussion in chapter 14, arises across the board in philosophy, from ethics to metaphysics. The same concern with the place of subjectivity in an objective world motimates the essays on philosophy of mind, on the absurd, on moral luck, and others. It has been at the center of my interests since I began to think about philosophy, determining the problems I work on and the kind of understanding I want to reach.

　Some of these essays were written while the United States was engaged in a criminal war, criminally conducted. This produced a heightened sense of the absurdity of my theoretical pursuits. Citizenship is a surprisingly strong bond, even for those of us whose patriotic feelings are weak. We read the newspaper every day with rage and horror, and it was different from reading about the crimes of another country. Those feelings led to the growth in the late 1960s of serious professional work by philosophers on public issues.

　But a different kind of absurdity attaches to the production of philosophical criticism of public policy. Moral judgement and moral theory certainly apply to public questions, but they are notably ineffective.

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