Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas NagelRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote discusses the conflict between subjective and objective perspectives in understanding reality.
Thomas Nagel highlights the tension between how we perceive the world subjectively and the objective accounts we strive for. He suggests that our understanding is limited if we only rely on objective viewpoints, while subjective impressions may hold truths that objective measures cannot capture. This interplay raises questions about the completeness of objective knowledge and the potential pitfalls of dismissing subjective experiences as mere illusions.
Themes
SubjectiveObjectiveRealityPerceptionKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophy class discussing the nature of reality.
More from Thomas Nagel
All quotes →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.
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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.
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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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.
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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.
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