The Ambition of Transcendence

Abstract

Thomas Nagel calls for philosophy to acknowledge an ‘ambition of transcendence’. It is necessary, he says, ‘to combine the recognition of our contingency, our finitude, and our containment in the world with an ambition of transcendence, however limited may be our success in attaining it. The right attitude in philosophy is to accept aims that we can achieve only fractionally and imperfectly, and cannot be sure of achieving even to that extent.’ We are called to rise above the particular, historical, cultural, and physical, ‘to reach a position as independent as possible of who we are and where we started’. The whole idea of philosophy, as Nagel understands it, is the pure desire for objectivity, the desire to transcend every ‘particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole’, bringing ‘one’s beliefs, one’s actions, and one’s values more under the influence of an impersonal standpoint’. Nagel evokes a Neoplatonic image of the soul ascending through celestial spheres toward the Absolute — toward a god’s-eye view from nowhere. ‘We may think of reality as a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach gradually from the contingencies of the self.’ ‘What really happens’, Nagel thinks, ‘in the pursuit of objectivity is that a certain element of the self, the impersonal or objective self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one’s creaturelv point of view, is allowed to predominate.