Thomas Nagel’s book, Concealment & Exposure
and Other Essays, adds little new to his body of work, but it does display
his talents to maximum advantage, showing him to be a subtle thinker and an
outstanding writer.

The book is divided into three parts: a first part
discusses the distinction between public and private, especially in relation to
sexuality; a second part pursues debates within egalitarian liberalism and
includes two notable essays on the "political liberalism" of John
Rawls; and a third part, which seems a little "tacked on" vis-à-vis
the rest of the book, deals with (among other topics) the mind/body problem,
rationality, and relativism.

Public and Private.  The centerpiece of the book is the title essay, originally
published in 1998 in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs.  The context for the essay is the sex scandal
involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, or rather the rapt attentiveness of
the news media and the general public in the United States to every detail of
their sexual interactions that emerged into full public view as the scandal
unfolded.  "Everyone knows,"
according to the book’s opening sentence, "that something has gone wrong
in the United States with the conventions of privacy" (3).  But what, exactly, has gone
wrong? 

Nagel offers a diagnosis and a prescription.  The diagnosis hinges on his interpretation
of the social and psychological function of privacy norms.  The first thing we need to notice, he
suggests, is "the sheer chaotic, tropical luxuriance of the inner
life" of persons as such, and of persons in their sexual aspect in
particular (4).  When we see this, we
will see too that it is simply impossible for us to fashion viable routines of
interpersonal interaction unless our modes of public self-presentation are
radically curtailed, such that a vast range of our thoughts, desires, and
impulses are screened out, either through our own reticence, secrecy, or
restraint on the one hand, or through the tactful non-acknowledgement of
certain actualities or possibilities on the part of our interaction partners on
the other hand.  A gap, therefore, must
open up between our unruly and largely unpresentable inner life and our
"exposed public self," which is partly a fictive construct, but
"over which we have enough control to be able to identify with it, at
least in part" (4).  "The
possibility of combining civilized interpersonal relations with a relatively
free inner life" relies on collective acceptance of boundaries between
public matters and private matters: "between what invites attention and a
collective response and what remains individual and may be ignored" (7).  I cannot do justice, here, to the subtlety
of his reflections on the psycho-social dynamics of this public/private
dichotomy, but "Concealment and Exposure" is full of astute
observations of how people negotiate the hazardous terrain of taboo subjects,
potentially tactless revelations, and politely unvoiced opinions and urges.

Nagel wants to remind us that such restraint is very
different from dishonesty: the norms of non-disclosure are themselves publicly
understood and shared, indeed enforced by communities of people (although, of
course, such norms vary depending on the context, the social group, the
cultural community, etc.).  Indeed,
respect for such boundaries is itself an important virtue.  Were these norms widely disregarded, we
would quickly confront threats from two directions: first, we would see
"disruptive" material spilling over from our inner lives into public
arenas, continually generating bitter conflicts, hurt feelings, and awkward
silences; and second, we would find our inner world subject to the oppressive
oversight of the "panoptical" gaze of public opinion and collective
nosiness.

And this is exactly what we see happening, on Nagel’s
account, in the popular culture and political journalism of the United States:
we are overburdened with disruptive information about private matters, and the
realm of privacy itself is invaded by too much scrutiny and public
commentary.  He goes on to offer an
alternative formulation of what is, in essence, the same point: "American
political culture is in a condition of generalized adolescent panic with regard
to sex, brought on by a sudden overthrow of puritanism without a concomitant
development of worldliness" (45).

What is to be done about this state of affairs?  Nagel’s prescription is, as he puts it,
"conservative" (25), precisely in its insistence on clinging to a
beleaguered principle of traditional liberalism.  What is needed, he thinks, is a restoration of the disciplined
restraint by which public bodies and the public political culture are not
allowed to intrude upon or regulate or promote any of the private thoughts,
opinions and preferences of individual citizens.  "Best would be a regime of private freedom combined with
public or collective neutrality" (25).

In his defense and elaboration of this public
neutrality principle (in both Parts One and Two of the book) Nagel articulates
with admirable clarity "one of the things that people hate about
liberalism" (22): its insistence that a society’s public institutions and
its political culture, and even (in his view) its establishment of etiquette
norms, should refrain from any active attempts to dispel (for example) racist,
sexist or anti-Semitic opinions and passions. 
Engagement in such efforts, which he calls communitarianism, is
antithetical to the liberal project: "No one should be in control of the
culture, and the persistence of private racism, sexism, homophobia, religious
and ethnic bigotry, sexual puritanism, and other such private pleasures should
not provoke liberals to demand constant public affirmation of the opposite values"
(26).  His case for liberalism thus has
the virtue that it helps to explain why so many of those who value social
justice find the liberal approach to securing it to be fatally flawed: in the
name of public neutrality it consigns to the "private" and hence
protected realm the fascist’s revulsion toward immigrants and Jews, the
corporate executive’s callous greed and contempt for his impoverished
neighbors, and the sexist employer’s demeaning and hostile attitudes toward his
female employees.  "True liberals,"
as Nagel says elsewhere in the book, "are reluctant to interfere even with
anti-liberal cultures in their midst" (134).  Nagel declines to sugarcoat either liberalism’s commitments, or
its repudiation of certain sorts of commitment.

Right and Wrong.  The liberal principles in terms of which Nagel discusses the
public/private distinction in the first part of the book are formulated at a
higher level of generality in the second part of the book, which contains two
clear and very sympathetic overviews of Rawls’ theory of justice, and a series
of other chapters on egalitarian justice theory and contractualist moral
theory.  These chapters mainly consist
of book reviews for publications like the London Review of Books and the
Times Literary Supplement, so much of their content consists of eloquent
and sympathetic presentations of key arguments from recent books by leading
contemporary moral and political philosophers like Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Raz,
G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon. 

Reality.  The third part of the book compiles a series of occasional pieces
about, among other topics, Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, the infamous Sokal
Affair, and (in a longer, exploratory paper on "The Psychophysical
Nexus") the mind-body problem.  In
his reviews of books by Rorty and Sokal, Nagel upholds the fashionable but
implausible idea that science is on the defensive in the modern university:
threatened by an onslaught of relativism and, to borrow one of Nagel’s
characteristic phrases, "a lot of left-wing cant." 

He sums up Rorty’s stance clearly enough: "that
all experience is shaped by language, that language is contingently formed by
history, and that therefore everything we think should be accompanied by a
large dose of historicist self-consciousness or irony.  The idea that our beliefs…could be in any
strong sense objectively true or false should simply be abandoned"
(160).  Such views, he thinks, are
dangerous as well as incoherent.  Nagel
regards the "postmodernist" science studies project, parodied by
Sokal’s hoax-article published in Social Text, as committed to a similar
point of view, and hence as similarly disreputable.  In "The Sleep of Reason," a review of the book by Sokal
and Jean Bricmont elaborating on the idea of the original hoax, Nagel indulges
in a polemic, not only against "postmodernist" science studies, but
against "postmodernism" in general. 
It is a striking feature of this polemic that he explains what he takes
to be the views of "postmodernists" mainly by discussing two
decidedly unpostmodernist analytic philosophers, Thomas Kuhn and Paul
Feyerabend.  Occasionally he ascribes
some claim or other to postmodernists, like "there is nothing outside the
text," but he shows little sign of understanding the meaning that remarks
like that have in the work of someone like Jacques Derrida (the source of that
particular aphorism).  Even worse, he
seems to want to encourage the conclusion that the Sokal Affair tells us
something, not only about the specific intellectuals (mostly literary theorists
and clinical psychoanalysts) implicated in the Affair itself or the subsequent
Sokal/Bricmont book, but also about the wider range of figures that find
themselves labeled as "postmodernists" or
"poststructuralists."  Think
of Michel Foucault, say, or Jacques Derrida.  Physicists Sokal and Bricmont acknowledge their lack of adequate
expertise to assess the work of these figures, neither of whom indulged in
embarrassing or superficial flirtation with the jargon of theoretical physics.  But Nagel seems intent on exploiting the
Sokal Affair as a propaganda tool in some kind of culture war.  Unlike Sokal and Bricmont, Nagel’s target is
not people of any ideological stripe who are guilty of pretentious intellectual
incompetence.  His target is rather
those whom he calls "the new relativists," guilty of reinterpreting
claims to "objectivity" as nothing but "a mask for the exercise
of power," a critical project which, in Nagel’s view, serves as "a
natural vehicle for the expression of class hatred" (174).  But this is a political dispute, and the
Sokal Affair — a cautionary tale about what happens when literary critics and
psychoanalysts misappropriate technical terms from contemporary physics — is
ill-suited to shed light on either the moral or the methodological questions it
poses.

In contrast to this foray into unfamiliar territory,
the paper on the "Psycho-physical nexus" is far more serious, due in
large measure to the fact that here he is thoroughly familiar with the relevant
literature.

Of course, few readers will make the mistake of
turning to Nagel for insight into recent French philosophy.   On the other hand, where we really do
expect first-rate philosophy from him — in the philosophy of mind or moral and
political philosophy — Nagel does not disappoint, offering reader eloquent and
insightful treatments of key issues in contemporary philosophy, engaging for
specialists, yet accessible to intelligent and interested general readers.

©
2005 Stephen D’Arcy

Stephen D’Arcy, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of
Philosophy at Huron University College, in London, Ontario, Canada

Categories: Philosophical