Thomas Nagel

Right now, somewhere in the dark, a bat is flying through a forest at speed, dodging branches, snatching moths out of the air. It does this almost blind. Instead of seeing, it shrieks — dozens of high-pitched cries per second, far above the range of your hearing — and reads the returning echoes so precisely that it can tell a moth from a falling leaf, judge its distance, its size, its direction, its texture.

Science can tell you essentially everything about how this works. The frequencies, the ear anatomy, the neural circuitry, the evolutionary history. Suppose you learned all of it — every fact, down to the last neuron.

Now answer a different question: what is it like to be that bat? What does echolocation feel like from the inside? Not what it would be like for you to hang upside down and eat insects — that's just you in a bat costume. What is it like for the bat?

You can't do it. Your imagination extrapolates from your own case, and your case is the wrong shape. And here is the unsettling part: no amount of additional objective information seems to close the gap. The bat's experience is a fact about the world — there is definitely something it is like to be a bat — yet it is a fact that slips through the net of every third-person description we can construct.

That thought experiment comes from a 1974 paper, twelve pages long, that became perhaps the most assigned philosophy article of the past half century. Its author, Thomas Nagel, has spent a career mapping the same fault line in different territories — mind, ethics, politics, the meaning of life. On one side: the world described from no particular point of view, the world of science. On the other: the world as lived from here, from inside a particular creature's skin. Nagel's life work has been to show that we need both, that neither can swallow the other, and that pretending the gap has closed is the deepest mistake a modern thinker can make.

The Life

Thomas Nagel was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on July 4, 1937 — not because his family was Yugoslav, but because they were passing through. His parents were German Jewish refugees in flight from Hitler's Europe, and Belgrade was a waypoint. He crossed the Atlantic as an infant, arriving in the United States in 1939, and grew up in and around New York City — an American childhood built on a European escape.

His formation ran through three great universities. At Cornell he took his degree in 1958 in a department steeped in the later Wittgenstein (chapter 208). Then Oxford, where he earned the BPhil at Corpus Christi College amid the ordinary-language rigor of J. L. Austin's circle. Then Harvard, where his doctoral supervisor was a not-yet-famous John Rawls (chapter 253), still years from publishing A Theory of Justice. The dissertation Nagel wrote under Rawls grew into his first book, The Possibility of Altruism (1970) — the Rawls era's work of moral psychology, arguing that reasons to care about others are built into practical reason itself.

The career that followed traces a clean arc: Berkeley from 1963, Princeton from 1966, and then, in 1980, New York University, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. At NYU he held a double appointment in philosophy and law, and it was there that he co-taught, with Ronald Dworkin (chapter 274), the Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy — the seminar we met in Dworkin's chapter, where the world's leading thinkers came to present papers and were courteously taken apart for hours. The testimonies repeat themselves, and they bear repeating with a smile: generations of participants called it simply the best seminar in the world. Dworkin supplied the theatrical brilliance; Nagel supplied something quieter — the precisely aimed question that found the exact joint where an argument creaked.

That division of labor fits the man. Where Dworkin was flamboyant, Nagel's reputation is for modesty and precision — a philosopher whose prose contains no wasted motion, and whose influence spread as much through essays as through treatises. For decades he has been the essayist's essayist, reviewing and arguing in The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, translating the hardest technical debates into prose an intelligent outsider can follow. His major books are mostly gatherings of essays; even his big systematic work, The View from Nowhere (1986), reads like a sequence of perfectly cut short arguments.

Nagel retired from NYU in 2016 and remains, as of this writing, University Professor Emeritus — in his late eighties and still publishing, most recently a 2023 collection, Analytic Philosophy and Human Life. He is one of the few figures in this book whose story is still being written by its subject.

The Big Ideas

What is it like to be a bat? — the question. Start with the paper itself, because it deserves to be taught whole. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) opens with a blunt claim: consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem genuinely hard, and most scientific theories of mind quietly ignore it. What does Nagel mean by consciousness? Not intelligence, not self-awareness, not the ability to report on your states. He means something more basic: an organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism — some subjective character to its experience, a way the world shows up for it. Philosophers now call this the subjective character of experience, and the "what it is like" phrase, which Nagel made canonical, is how the field still points at it.

The bat is chosen deliberately. A dog's experience is close enough to ours that we fool ourselves into thinking we can imagine it. Bat sonar is alien — a sense we simply do not have. That alienness exposes the machinery of our imagination: trying to imagine being a bat, all we can do is imagine ourselves modified — webbed arms, poor vision, nights in an attic. We extrapolate from our own case, and the extrapolation fails precisely where it matters. Yet the bat's experience is perfectly real. There are facts about what it is like to be a bat; we just cannot grasp them from where we stand.

The argument — why objectivity goes blind here. Now comes the step that made the paper immortal. Think about how scientific explanation normally works. Science succeeds by a repeated maneuver: it discards appearance in favor of reality. Heat feels a certain way to us, but science sets the feeling aside and identifies heat with molecular motion. Lightning looks a certain way; science sets the look aside and identifies it with electrical discharge. Reduction — explaining a familiar thing as really being some underlying physical process — works by moving away from any particular point of view, toward a description true from every vantage point and dependent on none. That movement toward greater objectivity is the engine of three centuries of scientific triumph.

But now try running the same maneuver on consciousness, and watch it jam. The thing to be explained is the appearance — the way experience seems from the inside. You cannot set aside how the experience seems and study the underlying reality, because in this one case the seeming is the reality. Peel away the point of view and there is nothing left to explain. A complete physical and functional description of the bat's brain — every neuron, every firing pattern, every behavioral capacity — would still be a description from outside, available equally to any observer, and would therefore leave out the one thing that makes the bat conscious: what its experience is like for it.

Notice what Nagel did not conclude. He did not claim to have proven physicalism — the view that everything, minds included, is ultimately physical — false. His conclusion is stranger and more humble: physicalism may well be true, but we currently have no conception of how it could be true. We possess the word "physicalism" the way an ancient Greek possessed the words "matter is energy" — as a formula whose truth we cannot yet understand. Nagel has suggested that our science of mind is at something like the pre-Socratic stage: groping, pre-paradigm, awaiting concepts not yet invented. That is not dualism — he does not posit a second, ghostly substance alongside matter, in the manner of Descartes (chapter 127), who founded the modern problem of subjectivity. It is a position of principled ignorance, and it takes a particular kind of nerve to hold it in an age that expects science to be nearly finished.

The paper spawned an industry. Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment about Mary — the scientist who knows every physical fact about color while living in a black-and-white room, yet seems to learn something new when she first sees red — is a direct descendant. So are David Chalmers's "zombies" (imaginable beings physically identical to us but with no inner experience) and his phrase "the hard problem of consciousness," of which Nagel's paper is the acknowledged grandfather. When Jaegwon Kim (chapter 279) ended his rigorous life's work by conceding that qualia — the felt qualities of experience — are the residue physicalism cannot quite absorb, he was paying the bat its due. Physicalists have fought back, and the replies deserve their one-line hearings: the ability hypothesis says Mary and the bat-imaginer lack not facts but skills — know-how rather than knowledge-that; the phenomenal concepts strategy says the gap lies not in reality but in our two incommensurable ways of conceiving one reality. Readers can judge whether these close the gap or redescribe it. And waiting seven chapters ahead is Daniel Dennett (chapter 288), who will argue that the whole "what it is like" framing is a seductive illusion — the great denier, sharpening his knives.

The view from nowhere — the career's architecture. The bat paper is a special case of a framework Nagel spent a decade generalizing, and the 1986 book that states it has one of philosophy's great titles: The View from Nowhere. The idea is this. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for stepping back. You experience the world from your own perspective; but you can also step back and form a conception of the world that includes you as just one item in it — one creature among billions, one vantage point among many. Then you can step back from that conception, and correct it, and step back again. Each step is a rung on a ladder of self-transcendence, and climbing it is what we call becoming more objective: forming a view less and less dependent on the particulars of who and where you are. The limit of the process would be a view from no particular standpoint at all — the view from nowhere.

Nagel's twist is double. First, objectivity is a method, not a guaranteed destination — a direction of travel, not a metaphysical vantage we ever occupy. Second, and crucially, the ascent never completes. However far you climb, the perspectival facts — what the world is like from here, for you, for the bat — remain real and remain uncaptured. The view from nowhere and the view from here are both indispensable and neither can be reduced to the other. Most of the deepest philosophical problems, Nagel argues, are collisions between the two standpoints — a diagnosis with an ancestor in Kant (chapter 155), who also split our self-conception into two standpoints and lived with the tension.

Watch the framework work. Free will: from the inside, your choices are open and yours; step far enough back and you appear as an organism whose doings are fixed by prior causes — and from that outer standpoint, agency itself seems to dissolve, leaving nothing to hold responsible. Nagel, unlike his near-contemporary P. F. Strawson (chapter 249), does not think our reactive attitudes settle the matter; where Strawson found peace in the practices of blame and gratitude, Nagel finds a genuine antinomy — a conflict of standpoints that no theory has resolved, and honesty requires saying so. The meaning of life: in his early essay "The Absurd," Nagel re-analyzes the problem Camus (chapter 243) made famous. Life feels absurd, Nagel argues, not because the universe is hostile or silent, but because we ourselves can always take the outside view — see our loves, projects, and panics as the strivings of one small mammal — while remaining unable to stop caring from the inside. The absurd is the collision of standpoints within one creature. And where Camus prescribed heroic defiance — Sisyphus shaking his fist — Nagel drily suggests defiance is melodramatic. If nothing matters from the cosmic standpoint, then that doesn't matter either. Better to return to our lives with irony: full engagement, accompanied by a smile at ourselves.

Then there is death — a classic exchange reaching back 2,300 years. Epicurus (chapter 30) argued that death cannot harm you: where death is, you are not; a harm with no subject to suffer it is no harm at all. Nagel's essay "Death" answers with the deprivation account: death is bad not because of anything it feels like — it feels like nothing — but because of what it takes away: the goods, experiences, and possibilities the person would otherwise have had. A life cut off at thirty is a misfortune measured by the decades it subtracts, even though no one is there to feel the subtraction. Whether a harm requires a subject to experience it remains one of philosophy's live wires, and Nagel's essay is where the modern discussion begins.

The two standpoints in ethics and politics. Nagel's moral philosophy runs the same architecture through practical life. The Possibility of Altruism argued that just as prudence requires you to treat your future self's interests as reasons now, consistency requires you to treat other people's interests as reasons too — the impersonal standpoint has practical grip on us; reasons are not private property. Out of this grew his most influential ethical machinery: the distinction between agent-neutral reasons (reasons anyone has — that suffering is bad gives everyone reason to prevent it) and agent-relative reasons (reasons that belong to someone in particular — your child, your promise, the special wrongness of what you do with your own hands). Deontology — the view that some acts are forbidden even when they would produce better outcomes — lives in that second category, and Nagel's Vietnam-era essay "War and Massacre" defended absolutist restraints in warfare: some things may not be done to people even for victory, a line of argument that made him the analytic heir of Anscombe's (chapter 248) fierce wartime absolutism.

In politics, Equality and Partiality (1991) turns the two standpoints into a theory of the modern predicament. From the impersonal standpoint, every person matters equally, and equality makes an urgent claim on us; from the personal standpoint, your own life, family, and projects legitimately matter more to you. Both standpoints are legitimate; a decent society must answer to both; and Nagel's audit of utopian schemes concludes, with characteristic honesty, that no existing arrangement — including the theory of his teacher Rawls — fully reconciles them. The obstacle to a just world, he insists, is not merely bad institutions. It is us — the partiality wired into each of the creatures any institution must govern.

One more piece of the ethics belongs to a famous pair. In 1976, Nagel and Bernard Williams (chapter 265) each delivered a paper under the same title, jointly coining the term moral luck: the scandal that we morally judge people for things beyond their control, though control was supposed to be the precondition of judgment. Williams's half we met in his chapter. Nagel's half contributed the taxonomy the literature still uses — four kinds of moral luck: constitutive (the temperament you were dealt), circumstantial (the situations you happen to face — the ordinary German of 1933 versus his cousin in Argentina), causal (how you were antecedently determined), and resultant (how your acts turn out — the drunk driver who kills versus the identical one who gets home). Trace the logic of control to the end, Nagel shows, and the responsible self shrinks toward a point — the two standpoints colliding again, this time in the courtroom of everyday blame.

Mind and Cosmos — the late provocation. In 2012, at seventy-five, Nagel published a short book with a subtitle built to detonate: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Its thesis: the reductive program — explaining everything, minds included, by physics plus undirected evolution — fails not once but three times: it cannot account for consciousness, for the reliability of our reasoning, or for objective value. In its place Nagel floated a deliberately heterodox speculation: a teleological naturalism — the idea that nature might contain built-in tendencies toward the emergence of mind and value, direction without a director, teleology without God. He was explicit on both flanks: he is an atheist who finds theism unbelievable, and a doubter who finds materialism incomplete; the book refuses both.

The storm was ferocious. Scientists and fellow philosophers rebuked the book as scientifically underinformed; one magazine crowned it the "most despised science book" of the year; the pile-on made "heretic" headlines. A minority defended it as asking questions the orthodoxy had learned not to hear. Intelligent-design advocates tried to claim him, and he refused the embrace, restating his position exactly: no designer, no miracles — an atheist's teleology or nothing. Whether the book is a late misstep or an early signal, this chapter follows Nagel's own practice: state the argument, map the reception, and decline to pretend the matter is settled.

The legacy. It is already immense. The bat paper is a charter document of consciousness studies, on virtually every introductory syllabus; the hard-problem industry and today's revival of panpsychism — the view that mind is a fundamental ingredient of nature — work in the space Nagel cleared when he made subjectivity respectable again. The moral and political essays are standard points of departure; the late essays on public reason and religion extend the two-standpoints project to faith in a liberal state. And the style is itself a legacy: clarity about obscurity — lucid prose about exactly those things that resist being made clear. With Williams, Nagel forms the era's pair of honest doubters, philosophers who thought the discipline's highest duty was to refuse fake solutions.

Before & After

Backward, Nagel's debts read like a roll call of this book. From Epicurus (chapter 30) he took the oldest consolation about death and gave it the strongest modern answer. From Descartes (chapter 127) he inherited the problem itself — the first-person mind that will not dissolve into the third-person world. From Kant (chapter 155) came the deep template: one creature, two standpoints, and philosophy as the management of their conflict. The Wittgenstein (chapter 208) of Cornell's classrooms hangs over the bat paper as a warning shadow — the private-language argument's doubt that inner experience can even be talked about — a doubt Nagel absorbed and defied. Camus (chapter 243) posed the absurd; Nagel re-derived it and swapped defiance for irony. Anscombe (chapter 248) drew the absolutist line in wartime ethics; "War and Massacre" is its analytic continuation. Strawson (chapter 249) answered determinism with our reactive attitudes; Nagel insisted the antinomy stays open. Rawls (chapter 253) trained him and set the egalitarian standard that Equality and Partiality both honors and audits. Williams (chapter 265) shared the moral-luck coinage; Dworkin (chapter 274) shared the seminar room for a quarter century; Kim (chapter 279) certified, from the physicalist side, the residue the bat left behind. Even the hinge from the last chapter holds: where Badiou (chapter 280), born the same year, built a vast system on mathematics and the event, his exact contemporary built almost no system at all — only essays, each guarding a gap.

Forward, the bat paper set the agenda for a generation: Jackson's Mary, Chalmers's hard problem, the panpsychist revival that treats Mind and Cosmos as a fellow traveler, and the moral-luck literature that now fills library shelves. Above all it set up a collision. Daniel Dennett (chapter 288) will argue that Nagel's "what it is like" is precisely the illusion a science of mind must explain away — the great denial to Nagel's great insistence, and one of the defining feuds of contemporary philosophy. But first, chronology hands us a different debate: Nagel's Harvard classmate-in-spirit at Princeton and fellow student of the Rawls era — Robert Nozick (chapter 282), whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia answered Rawls with the minimal state and gave libertarianism its philosophical monument.

Why It Still Matters

Open any current argument about artificial intelligence and you are inside Nagel's paper. When engineers and ethicists ask whether a large language model could be conscious — whether there is something it is like to be the system, or only brilliant outputs with nobody home — they are asking the bat question, in silicon. Nagel's warning cuts both ways: behavior and function, however sophisticated, are objective descriptions, and objective descriptions are exactly what left the bat's inner life out. Every serious framework for "AI welfare" now being drafted inherits that problem.

The bat itself has become a moral argument. Modern animal-welfare science — the octopus clauses in animal-protection laws, the debates over fish pain and insect farming — turns on which creatures have a point of view, because "what it is like" is where moral standing begins. Meanwhile, in neuroscience's glossiest precincts, brain-scan studies promise to decode thoughts and emotions; Nagel supplies the standing caution that a complete map of the circuitry is still a view from outside.

His ethics is just as current. "War and Massacre" reads like a commentary on drone warfare: are there things that may not be done to a person even to win? Equality and Partiality names the tension inside every affluent reader who believes in global equality from the impersonal standpoint and pays for private tutoring from the personal one. Moral luck runs the criminal-justice system daily: two identical reckless drivers, one dead pedestrian, two wildly different sentences. And for a generation talked at by both hustle culture and cosmic nihilism, Nagel's irony may be the most usable stance on offer: take your life seriously, and hold a smile at the seriousness — both standpoints, neither denied.

Over to You

Death feels like nothing, forever. Epicurus says that means it can't be bad for you; Nagel says it robs you of everything you would have had. Whose argument actually moves you — and does your answer change how you'd want to live?

If nothing we do will matter in a million years, Nagel notes, then it also doesn't matter that nothing will matter. Is his irony a genuine solution to the absurd, or a sophisticated way of changing the subject?

Two identical drunk drivers; one hits a child, one doesn't. If you'd punish them differently — and almost everyone would — what exactly are you punishing?

Could any future science convince you that there is something it is like to be a machine? What evidence would even count?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions — the essay collection containing "Death," "The Absurd," "Moral Luck," "War and Massacre," and the bat paper itself; each is short, and each is a masterclass.

A modern way in: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness — a diver-philosopher's pursuit of "what it is like" in a creature even stranger than the bat.

The thread forward: From the student of Rawls who audited equality, we turn to the colleague who attacked it head-on — Robert Nozick, whose minimal state and libertarian challenge meet us in the next chapter.