The Last Word.

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

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

striking from our current vantage

point. Darwin himself famously

noted the resemblance in a remark

in one of his notebooks. Commenting

on the claim that Plato thought

our "necessary ideas" arise from

the pre-existence of the soul, Darwin

wrote: "read monkeys for preexistence."

Now whatever else Darwin or Dennett meant by these remarks, if one takes Nagel's arguments seriously, they clearly imply that the long-presumed conflict between Darwinism and Idealism has been misconceived. At one point in his Origin of Species, Darwin calls his book "one long argument," and if Nagel is at all correct about what is entailed in any argumentation, then Darwin is, however unbeknownst to himself, riding into the evolutionary town, Shane-like, on the Platonic pony.

Nagel's book also makes clear, once again contra Nietzsche, how deeply embedded in Idealist rationality is morality. Taking a cue from Ronald Dworkin, who holds (in Nagel's formulation) that "skeptical positions must themselves be understood as moral claims," Nagel shows how moral claims are not expressions of feeling, as the utilitarian emotivists hold, but rational claims with an inherent universal claim.

Nagel and Dworkin are signatories to the now-notorious amicus curiae "Philosophers' Brief" to the Supreme Court, which argued for a moral agnosticism about physician-assisted suicide, at least in the eyes of the Constitution. Claiming that choosing the manner and timing of one's own death is a "profoundly religious act," the six philosophers who signed the brief insisted that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment forbids any agency of government from interfering in or working against the decision of autonomous individuals freely and after due consideration to commit suicide.

My only point in raising the issue is simply to register my bafflement at the position Nagel presents in The Last Word with what he and Dworkin argue in the brief. How morality can--indeed must--be rationally generalizable and yet how society is forbidden to have its own "last word" is puzzling in the extreme. Nor is it enough to say that morality can have the last say but law cannot: yes, we can declare some things immoral but not illegal, like malicious gossip; but that hardly can hold for life issues like murder and assisted suicide, where law has a prima facie claim to rule, sanction, and forbid.

Here is where, I think, Thomas Aquinas can hold the key. I presume both Nagel and Dworkin would hold with Thomas 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." But they do not then, as Thomas does, go on and identify God with the truth tout court, and there is the rub. Both Plato and Descartes (and after them Leibnitz even more so) knew that rationalism must be founded in God or it will have no foundation at all, otherwise the lapse into irrationalism will be inevitable. In fact Nagel, as a professed atheist, gets rather nervous at the drift of his argument here, fully admitting its theistic implication but calling it "alarming":

The reason that I call this view

alarming is that it is hard to know

what world picture to associate it

with, and difficult to avoid the

suspicion that the picture will be

religious, or quasi-religious.

Rationalism has always had a

more religious flavor than empiricism.

Even without God, the

idea of a natural sympathy between

the deepest truths of nature

and the deepest layers of the

human mind ... makes us more at

home in the universe than is secularly

comfortable. The thought

that the relation between mind

and the world is something fundamental

makes many people in

this day and age nervous.

To his credit, however, Nagel admits that the atheist resistance to rationalism in secular culture is more an authority hang-up than a reasonable conclusion from the facts of the universe; he even avers: "I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life." These passages make me suspect that any rationalism that tries to resist Thomas's identification of God with the truth will ultimately fail.

As the example of Nietzsche himself proves. What Nietzsche illustrates so amply is that without a foundation in God, rationalism will eventually collapse into a cult of irrationality. Alone among the legions of postmodern perspectivists, he saw. One can certainly appreciate Nagel's daring effort to defend rationalism; one further salutes his lucidity of style and admires his wit (at one point he calls postmodernism "theoretical chic"). But the bizarre catalogue of errors that constitutes the "Philosophers' Brief" points to a disturbing lacuna in Nagel's whole effort: No God, no reason; no pain, no gain. Or as Nietzsche himself put it in The Gay Science, in a passage rarely quoted by his postmodern grandchildren: "Even we godless antimetaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith thousands of years old, the Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato: that God is the truth, that truth is divine." Exactly.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is associate professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum). He is currently working on a book on evolutionary theory.