The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

Thomas Nagel

Categorized in : World Passion Maelstrom

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Thomas Nagel

atheist religious god

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

inspirational life believe

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

Thomas Nagel

childhood growing-up philosophy

We are an episode between two oblivions.

Thomas Nagel

oblivion episodes two

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

Thomas Nagel

manifestation characteristics interesting

Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Thomas Nagel

waking wake-up becoming

Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.

Thomas Nagel

materialism conscious world

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?

Thomas Nagel

bats animal funny

Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

Thomas Nagel

intellectual humility temptation

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

psychology conceited may

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

Thomas Nagel

meaningless-life absurd may

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Thomas Nagel

expansion wake-up world

Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.

Thomas Nagel

belief-in-god universe belief

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

Thomas Nagel

alternatives example together

Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.

Thomas Nagel

commit murder imagination

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

Thomas Nagel

psychology branches action

Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.

Thomas Nagel

recognition empathy reality

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

ifs-and consciousness states

Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.

Thomas Nagel

elements form world

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

may giving world