The Last Word

Commonweal, Jan 30, 1998 by Edward T. Oakes

The Last Word Thomas Nagel Oxford University Press, $18, 147 pp.

One of the most startling--indeed, downright revolutionary--statements ever made by Thomas Aquinas can be found in his Commentary on Job. At this point in the commentary (Job 13:3), Job has had enough of his sermonizing, know-it-all "friends" and exclaims: "Enough! Silence! God is my disputant, not you. I mean to lodge my complaint, not with mortal flesh, but with the Almighty." In his comment Thomas gets to wondering whether such peremptory boldness is seemly: A disputation between God and a frail mortal seems unbefitting because of the vast disparity between the two parties. But then Thomas, answering his own objection, goes on to say: "It should be remembered that truth does not vary according to persons; when a human being says something true he is invincible, irrespective of the one with whom he may be disputing."

When I first read this passage, it hit me like a thunderclap, for in essence Thomas is saying that truth trumps God. Not in the sense, of course, that God is subordinate to truth, since for Thomas God is obviously identical with the truth; but certainly in our relationship with God, whenever our image of God is discrepant with our view of the truth, the truth takes precedence. Or, to use Thomas Nagel's term, truth must always have "the last word."

I have ever since used this passage whenever I meet devout Catholics afflicted with great suffering and who feel burdened by their image of God, afraid to remonstrate with the Almighty. But now comes Professor Nagel's fascinating, even brilliant, book to point out the passage's relevance to the world of post-modern philosophy.

Indeed, with the exception of Nagel and a few other isolated voices, it would be hard to conceive of a culture more at variance with Thomas Aquinas's view of truth than our own. Under the influence of Nietzsche and his epigones, the view has become almost dogma that "truth" is but the subjective outlook of each individual, and that any normative truth is merely an imposition of the dominant view. Thus, Stanley Fish claimed recently in a debate with Richard John Neuhaus in First Things that the rules of arithmetic had no more general validity from culture to culture than the rules of baseball or driving on the right side of the road. Nagel, however, relying on the arguments of philosophers Saul Kripke and Ronald Dworkin, insists that "classical logic [cannot] be qualified in any way, it [is] simply correct," and "the only response to alternatives such as quantum logic, for example, [is] to argue against them from within classical logic." And in any case, "the skeptics all rely on it in their own thinking."

Perhaps it is the sheer lucidity of Nagel's prose that alerts the reader to the boldness of his thesis. In any event, the author adopts a decidedly take-no-prisoners approach, explicitly opposing his position to all those trends in contemporary epistemology that mark what Willard Van Orman Quine, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam (somewhat dubiously, in my opinion), Bernard Williams, Richard Rorty, and (in the standard reading) Ludwig Wittgenstein all have in common. At one point, Nagel makes bold to show his true colors by averring: "If this description sounds Cartesian or even Platonic, that is no accident."

It would be a mistake, however, to regard the book as simply one overlong, easy pot shot against the Nietzschean irrationalists. Nagel fully admits the initial plausibility of the position taken up by the postmodern pragmatists, who seem unable to attribute to reason any ultimate validity except as an evolutionary strategy of pragmatic success. Perception, after all, is inherently perspectival; and if one follows Aquinas--and all the empiricists after him--in holding that every act of knowledge begins in the senses, it becomes deeply puzzling how one might justify reason's claims to universal validity. For as Nagel says: "The essential characteristic of reason is its generality.... To reason is to think systematically in ways anyone looking over my shoulder ought to be able to recognize as correct.... To be rational we have to take responsibility for our thoughts while [paradoxically] denying that they are just expressions of our point of view."

These formulations make clear how daring the Platonic/Cartesian venture is in today's climate, for if there is any consensus in our post-Darwinian times, it is that we are fundamentally biological beings--and how can such vulnerable, pathetic, mortal flesh make such preposterous claims to universality? To which Nagel can only reply: because to claim the opposite is also to make a rational (that is, universally valid) claim. The following quote might seem rather long, but considering how long it took Plato to make the same point, it is admirably concise:

Suppose, to take an extreme example,

we are asked to believe

that our logical and mathematical

and empirical reasoning manifest

historically contingent and

culturally local habits of thought