Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

You also had to be careful about silverware and dishes, never mixing up the dairy with the meat. It had been poor Jesse’s fate to have mixed some Bosco into his milk with a teaspoon from the wrong drawer, and Bubbe’s wrath had been biblical. She had taken both boys out to the backyard and shown them how now she had to stick the spoon in the dirt to clean it. Dirt to clean? When they had asked their mother, she had answered in a way uncharacteristically terse: “If it seems crazy to you, you understand it perfectly.”

Cass could have asked his mother to review the brachas with him. She still knew everything, including Yiddish. But he could tell that she would rather he didn’t master his brachas too well.

Funny that he could still miss his bubbe, even though by now he understood a lot more about the personality disorder that had made her decide that Chaim was git -good-and the “little boy” who was his brother was nish git . She had died when Cass was a junior in college, but she had been banished from their lives long before then, with the full approval of BOIL.

When he came back after the interval that Aviva Landesmann had specified to him, she had something better to offer him than babka. It was The View from Nowhere , by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Cass thanked Aviva much more than she was probably used to being thanked and went off to his carrel, three flights below ground level in the Lipschitz Library.

The basic idea in The View from Nowhere is that we humans have the unique capacity to detach ourselves from our own particular point of view, achieving degrees of objectivity, all the way up to and including the view of how things are in themselves, from no particular viewpoint at all. This is what Nagel calls the View from Nowhere, and he analyzes all sorts of philosophical problems by showing how they arise out of the clash of the subjective point of view with the View from Nowhere.

The View from Nowhere was hard going, but Cass kept plugging along, at first motivated simply by his burning desire to get to the bottom of Gideon Raven’s gnomic message. But then Cass got to a section that made him forget all about gleaning any clues to his afternoon’s ordeal.

BEING SOMEONE

One acute problem of subjectivity remains even after points of view and subjective experience are admitted to the real world-after the world is conceded to be full of people with minds, having thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that cannot be completely subdued by the physical conception of objectivity. The general admission still leaves us with an unsolved problem of particular subjectivity. The world so conceived, though extremely various in the types of things and perspectives it contains, is still centerless. It contains us all, and none of us occupies a metaphysically privileged position. Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself.

What kind of fact is that? What kind of fact is it-if it is a fact-that I am Thomas Nagel? How can I be a particular person?

Cass only realized he had been holding his breath when he let it out. Here was the bedtime metaphysics that used to exercise him to the point of hyperventilation being described with precision by a prominent philosopher. (Thomas Nagel sounded prominent from the book jacket.) Cass here, Jesse there . The ritual used to send him hurtling so far outside himself that, night after night, he had become frightened that he might never find his way back in again, might never be able to take for granted that he was who he was. Cass had never hoped to find another person who could understand the strange state he used to induce in himself, and he had certainly never guessed that it might be shared by a philosopher.

It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person . From this point of view it can appear that “I am TN,” insofar as it is true, is not an identity but a subject-predicate proposition. Unless you have had this thought yourself, it will probably seem obscure, but I hope to make it clearer.

He became so caught up in The View from Nowhere , the dense mass of its distinctions parting for him like the sea, that he forgot the whole point of why he was reading it.

He wasn’t sure whether Professor Klapper would approve of Thomas Nagel. The style of The View from Nowhere was of the sort to send Jonas Elijah Klapper fleeing for protection from “the talismanic attachment of certain philosophers to logic. No thinker worth our contemplation is going to be held back by the Law of Non-Contradiction, which I do not recall being ratified with my approval.”

Cass heard the gong of the ten-minute warning and crash-landed back into Cass here . He thought he understood the reason why Gideon Raven had tossed him a spitball commending The View from Nowhere . It was precisely so that what had happened to him over the course of the last few hours would happen. Somehow or other, maybe even because Gideon Raven had gone through a similar baptism by fire, he’d known the right salve. Nothing but extra-strength objectivity could help.

Cass emerged from his narrow cell a minute or two before the library was going to close at midnight. The rows of carrels lining the walls down here in the bowels of the library were disgorging a thin stream of pale and brooding graduate students. Just a few carrels down from Cass was Gideon Raven, sliding his door shut behind him, giving the combination lock an extra, paranoid twist.

Raven spotted him and came over, taking the book out of Cass’s hand and reading the title with raised eyebrows.

“Might as well just walk over there together” is what he said as he handed Nagel back to Cass.

“The View from Nowhere,” it turned out, referred to a working-class bar in downtown Weedham that had a certain cachet with the graduate students. Its given name, at least as it was represented on the dimmed blue neon sign that had given out a long time ago, was “The View,” for no discernible reason, since it was just a dive on one of the side streets off moribund Maudlin Street, a wooden shanty no different from any on the decaying block. Some student wag had dubbed it “The View from Nowhere,” and the name had stuck among the cognoscenti.

There was a slight rain falling as they descended the steep hill that led out of the Frankfurter campus and headed into the down-at-the-heels center of Weedham, the sidewalk glinting whenever they passed a streetlight.

Cass had never spoken with Gideon before, and so he was surprised at the confidential tone that Gideon assumed from the very beginning, as if they had already gotten over the preliminaries.

“Lizzie, that’s my wife, is giving me hell. She didn’t want to move to Weedham. She hates it here. It’s hard enough for her to be the wife of a permanent graduate student, but at least in Manhattan she had the museums and movie theaters and her friends from Barnard. Here pretty much all she has is me. She works at the Edna and Edgar Lipschitz Library, but that’s not as exciting as it sounds.”

Cass had never before been the recipient of marital confidences, and he had no idea how to respond. It was the kind of mature activity he hadn’t imagined for himself. It must mean he was getting on in years, that he could be walking side by side with someone who was not only married but unhappily married.

“Yeah, I can see that” is all that he managed.