Thomas Nagel - Mortal questions (1979)

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The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

Thomas Nagel
Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.

Thomas Nagel
Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

Thomas Nagel
If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Thomas Nagel
To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

Thomas Nagel
Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

Thomas Nagel
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.

Thomas Nagel
The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

Thomas Nagel
Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

Thomas Nagel
Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

Thomas Nagel
Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

Thomas Nagel
Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

Thomas Nagel
If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

Thomas Nagel
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel