What Does It All Mean?

You want I should tell you what it all means, now that I finished the book? So, if I did, you could then say, "That's it? Why should I care?" Or "What does it mean that that's what it all means?" In other words, a meaning found in a book is just a meaning found in a book. That's not a fault of the book, though. Nagel gives this very argument.

I'll admit I went into this less naive than the intended audience. It was written for people who never asked these questions in the first place. I couldn't tell you whether one of those people would find this book a wake-up call to the examined life. The fact that they picked it up in the first place would mean they were already primed for it. This, by the way, is the core of what I call the Goodread's Paradox: the distortion in ratings caused by the fact that readers aren't reviewing at random but are evaluating just those books toward which they are already disposed to find interesting. Someone picking up Nagel and expecting a romantic comedy would give it only 1 star.

And, indeed, my only real complaint about the book is that Nagel doesn't sufficiently question what he is reading into to his observations. Yes, he treats the topics of solipsism and materialism but he doesn't ask whether those topics themselves reflect a bias that could, if not be escaped, at least be seen as an inescapable bias for him (though perhaps not for someone else with different inescapable biases) and whether the self is just that, a bias, which keeps one from a "view from nowhere" (a book of his I promise to return to.)