July 15, 2003

View from nowhere

Ellen Goodman is one of my favorite columnists.

She wrote a piece recently about how one’s biography affects one’s opinions, either as ballast or as barrier or perhaps both. She had the U S Supreme Court in mind and how peculiarly this notion works there among the justices.

She wrote that, for a long time, people believed that the best opinions on every subject were the products of a “detached intellect,” what philosopher Thomas Nagel described as the “view from nowhere.”

Now, I’m impressionable. I’ve been accused of only believing the last thing I’ve read or heard. That makes me touchy. Is the name Out of Nowhere simply a cute stab at humble objectivity or a prideful try at preempting God with some latter-day, ex nihilo, junior-grade?

Frankly, I don’t know what my subconscious is up to. But I do remember a seminary professor’s comment when I apologized for taking issue with a point made in the great William Temple’s Nature, Man, and God. He said, “Denson, on you, humility is unbecoming.”

That said, Out of Nowhere is always out of somewhere, most often from my heavy-handed biographical bias, and thus, grossly misnamed… something like when we speak of The Faith, as if there is no other, or of Holy Orders, as if Baptism doesn’t really matter all that much.

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