I’ve been reading Thomas Nagel’s masterful The View from Nowhere with the Nottingham Philosophy Reading Group of which I’m a long-distance member. One of Nagel’s central distinctions is between the “subjective self” and the “objective self.” The subjective self is the me that thinks and feels and looks out at the world, immersed in my moment-by-moment experience. The objective self is “me” as I see myself when I realize that I’m just one tiny part of the world—small and transient. It’s that second perspective that Nagel calls “the view from nowhere.”
Rather than taking this distinction for granted, Nagel finds it remarkable. And he insists that the one can’t be reduced to the other. To be fully engrossed in our subjective experience is to exclude (for the moment) a neutral, “third person” view of ourselves in the world. On the other hand, the objective perspective can never fully account for our subjective experience. This has been called (by David Chalmers) the “hard problem” of consciousness: The subjectivity of the subject, the fact that we actually think and feel and have experiences. It’s the one aspect of consciousness that resists, for example, a neuroscientific explanation. For Nagel, there’s something incommensurable about our subjective and objective viewpoints.
What interests me here is the theme of incommensurability itself. I’m finding myself intrigued by the question: How do we inhabit multiple discourses that overlap, but cannot be fully consolidated? A classic example is the incommensurability, so far as I understand it, of classical and quantum physics. But there are more everyday equivalents, as Nagel demonstrates. I’ll take up the theme in future posts.