The Last Word

Commonweal, Jan 30, 1998 by Edward T. Oakes

and have no wider validity than

that. This appears on the one hand

to be a thought about how things

really are, and on the other hand

to deny that we are capable of

such thoughts. Any claim as radical

and universal as that would

have to be supported by a powerful

argument, but the claim itself

seems to leave us without the

capacity for such arguments. Or

is the judgment supposed to apply

to itself? I believe that would leave

us without the possibility of thinking

anything at all.

To put it schematically, the claim

"Everything is subjective" must be

nonsense, for it would itself have

to be either subjective or objective.

But it can't be objective, since in

that case it would be false if true.

And it can't be subjective, because

then it would not rule out any objective

claim, including the claim

that it is objectively false. There

may be some subjectivists, perhaps

styling themselves as pragmatists,

who present subjectivism as applying

even to itself. But then it

does not call for a reply, since it is

just a report of what the subjectivist

finds it agreeable to say. If he

also invites us to join him, we need

not offer any reason for declining,

since he has offered us no reason

to accept.

Objections of this kind are as

old as the hills, but they seem to

require constant repetition.

Indeed, they go back as far as Plato's dialogue "The Sophist," and far from being the sophomore's tu quoque retort, the paradox on which the refutation of relativism rests is the very pathos and essence of being human: we are an enigmatic puddle of flesh that can encompass the whole. The reader who is reminded of Pascal at this point will be very close to Nagel's essential thesis: "How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the contingent capacities of a biological species," Nagel asks, "whose very existence appears to be radically accidental, should have access to universally valid methods of objective thought?"

I myself happen to think this standard conundrum is not as telling as it is often taken to be. Nonetheless, the question alerts us to the basic tension between reason's universality and evolution's ad hoc strategies. But if Darwin and Nagel are both right (and that at least is my own working assumption), then there must be a way of reconciling them, which perhaps Daniel C. Dennett has done in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea when he says:

Suppose SETI [search for extra-terrestrial

intelligence] struck it rich,

and established communication

with intelligent beings on another

planet. We would not be surprised

to find that they understood and

used the same arithmetic that we

do. Why not? Because arithmetic

is right. The point is clearly not restricted

to arithmetic, but to all

"necessary truths" -- what philosophers

since Plato have called a priori

knowledge.... It has often been

pointed out that Plato's curious theory

of reincarnation and reminiscence,

which he offers as an explanation

of the source of our a

priori knowledge, bears a striking

resemblance to Darwin's theory,

and this resemblance is particularly