Thomas Nagel on The Absurd

Life, as we all know, is a full-time job.  We spend an awful lot of energy on various actions, dispositions, and committments.  But how can this energy be justified?  Thomas Nagel, in an influential paper, argued that our lives are in from a certain perspective absurd.  This is because we, as human beings, are capable of taking a perspective on our own activities which makes them look arbitrary:

...humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves... they can view [their committments] sub specie aternitatis-- and the view is at once sobering and comical.

This ability reveals that our ultimate values cannot be justified.  We realize that 

the whole system of justification, which controls our choices... rests on responses and habits that we never question and that we would not know how to defend without circularity.

The absurdity of our lives lies in the fact that we so passionately and consistently pursue things that we know we cannot justify.

Now, when you do philosophy for long enough, you start to retain personal "red flags", little warning-signs that alert you to the presence of a questionable argument you've seen before.  The idea of a purely "objective" viewpoint from which a person could evaluate the entirety of their evaluative system is, for me, just such a red flag.  It signals that a bad philosophical conclusion is about to follow.

Like Christine Korsgaard did 25 years later, Nagel is playing a trick on us using the idea of reflection.  It is abundantly clear that human beings can evaluate particular desires, commitments and dispositions that they may have.  We cannot, however, infer from this that they posess the extraordinary ability to occupy the godlike standpoint from which they can reflect on the totality of their evaluative system.

Now, there are times in our lives when we must make very important decisions, decisions which require us to evaluate our deepest committments.  Yet, that we can evaluate them shows that we are still using some "baseline" set of values.  What sense can possibly be given to an evaluative standpoint that lies outside our evaluative standpoint?

Nagel anticipated this objection, and tried to respond:

It may be objected that the standpoint from which these doubts are supposed to be felt does not exist- that if we take the recommended backward step we will land on thin air, without any basis for judgment about the natural responses we are supposed to be surveying... But this objection misconceives the nature of the backward step. It is not supposed to give us an understanding of what is really important, so that we see by contrast that our lives are insignificant. We never, in the course of these reflections, abandon the ordinary standards that guide our lives. We merely observe them in operation, and recognize that if they are called into question we can justify them only by reference to themselves, uselessly.

Here, Nagel's undeniable eloquence is masking a whole lot of confusion.  We learn that the "purely objective" perspective is not evaluative, and (Nagel admits), cannot deliver any evaluative conclusions about our deepest committments.  Instead, we are just observing them.

But, hold on: what can it possibly mean to say that you are observing the totality of your deepest committments "in operation"?  How can a committment be "in operation" without the agent's acceptance of the values that guide it?  A committment in operation is manifested in an agent with no questions about its value: that's just what it means to commit.  How can an an agent's evaluative standard be "in operation" while the agent mysteriously remains objectively detached from it?  The standpoint remains elusive.

Nagel tries to clarify the idea in the final sentence above: perhaps the problem is that we cannot justify our deepest committments in a noncircular fashion.  Yet, as we've just seen, we cannot occupy the standpoint from which we could justify them in the first place.  So the term "noncircular" is irrelevant, as are all terms which attempt to describe the proper kind of justification for our entire subjective evaluative system.  You might as well say that a square circle would look best if it were teal.

The problem is that the claim about life's "absurdity" is an evaluative one, and therefore it logically cannot be reached from a standpoint that ex hypothesi excludes, suspends or otherwise disables all of our evaluative ideas.  Either we can use our values, or we can't.  If we can, life looks perfectly meaningful.  If we can't, then we can't call life "absurd".

I do agree with Nagel that thinking about one's life in "cosmic" or "detached" terms can be troubling, and provoke a sense of absurdity that is difficult to describe.  Yet, I think that we feel this way because we cling, covertly, to the fantasy that there is a standpoint from which we could magically evaluate all of our values. The only absurdity here is the the standpoint itself, and life begins to look pretty meaningful once we abandon it.