Why "The View from Everywhere?"
Hi everyone,
I decided to update the ‘about’ page of my substack this week. Because it’s now its own read-worthy mini-essay, I pasted it below. Enjoy, if I may command you.
—Garrett
Hi, I’m Garrett. Welcome to my substack, where I endeavor to assume “the view from everywhere” to write poetry, philosophy, occasional short fiction, and commentary on society and culture.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a book called, The View from Nowhere. Somehow I got wind of its thesis and felt inspired by the evocative title to coin an obverse phrase encapsulating a philosophical rebuttal. (Caveat lector: because I haven’t engaged with Nagel directly, I may be tilting at a straw man.) According to Nagel, or at least according to whichever emissary of his I read, it is impossible to assume the view from nowhere, a bias‐free vantage point from which all who make judgments would ideally stand.
I reply, “okay, sure. But isn’t it possible to approach this ideal, even if we can never reach it? Couldn’t we—a large, ideologically diverse community—approximate impartiality by weighting each member’s partial perspective according to its merits, then adding them up? Metaphorically, in piecing together a view from as many standpoints as possible—from nearly everywhere—couldn’t we hold a mirror up to nowhere?
“Hmm…Yes, I think you have a point there,” readily concedes the Nagel of my imagination.
The View from Everywhere is thus my metaphor for viewpoint diversity as a cumulative check against bias. I think this check applies, not just to science and the domain of facts more broadly, but also to ethics, legislation, and the domain of prescription generally. Some may look down on something; some may look up to it; some from the left; some from the right. Although all perspectives are neither created equal nor cultivated equally, and should therefore not be weighted the same, only after considering them can we determine which ought to be weighted more or less. So if we, for example, indulge our tribalist impulses to exclude rival viewpoints from consideration, we may invite systematic error into our judgment.
The possibility of approximating the view from nowhere with the view from everywhere drives me to read across the spectrum of ideology, even if the impossibility of truly seeing from anywhere other than where I am should chasten the ambition of any conclusions I commit to writing. I invite everyone to read me in the spirit that I (try to) read everyone else: epistemic circumspection.
Bio
I’m a graduate student in philosophy at Heidelberg University. I also take online graduate-level classes in statistics and data science. If I had to name my primary philosophical interest, it would be rational thinking (which for me encompasses all of epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and decision theory). Yet my interests are broad. I aspire to read the Western canon of literature in der Originalsprache, excluding Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other famous Russian-language authors (because German’s four grammatical cases are hard enough). I’m also an avid consumer of pop-sci books, The New Yorker, and any beautiful writers whom I disagree with.