Satan as teacher: the view from nowhere vs. the moral sense

Abstract

To what extent should teachers promote the view from nowhere as an ideal to strive for in education? To address this question, I will use Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger as an example, illustrating the stakes involved when the view from nowhere is taken to be an attainable educational ideal. I will begin this essay by offering a description of Thomas Nagel’s view from nowhere. Having done this, I will return to Twain’s story, providing some further examples of how access to the view from nowhere comes to influence the educational process in different ways. I will then connect the educational question raised by Twain’s story to two radically different versions of the exemplar found in the works of Benedict de Spinoza: the philosopher and the prophet. These figures will help illustrate how the striving for philosophical truth can sometimes be educationally inapt, as education always needs to account for humans being human, all too human.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• Thomas Nagel
• Mark Twain
• the view from nowhere
• the moral sense

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is important to note that because the character of Satan is an angel he is placed somewhere in between humans and God. This is noteworthy because it means that Satan seems to inhabit both worlds so to speak. As we will see later, this is what, arguably, leads to a false dichotomy between the view from nowhere (which in the case of Satan is not as disinterested as it claims to be) and the moral sense (which is dismissed by Satan, yet seems to haunt him at the same time). This false dichotomy will be interrogated further below.

2. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pressing me on this point.

3. Throughout this paper, ‘ordinary humans’ and ‘ordinary people’ are used interchangeably. These terms are not intended to be belittling or derogatory. They are simply used to describe all people who are less-than-fully rational and, as such, they represent a counter-position to the figure of Satan in Twain’s novella and the true philosopher in Spinoza’s work. As we will see, these figures are characterized by a fully rational understanding of the world and as such they are more-than-human, albeit sufficiently human to be related to and recognized as having some human traits and as being a ‘self’ in the world.

4. Qualifying the philosopher with the word true here is important as Spinoza is not referring to so-called professional philosophers or people who are involved with philosophy at the university in some capacity or other. These people are often just as irrational and motivated by passions as any other people. Instead, what he is referring to, is the kind of person who lives guided by reason and who, presumably, enjoys an understanding similar in vain to that of Satan in Twain’s story.

5. For a more developed discussion of how Spinoza’s exemplarism differs from the admiration–emulation model of Linda Zagzebski, see Dahlbeck (2021a).

6. I tend to think of Twain’s Satan as an enhanced version of a human being as he communicates freely with humans. This is clearly where his own parallel to the elephant and the spider (rendered above) fails. Presumably, one of the main reasons for why the elephant is utterly indifferent to the fate of the spider is that they do not share any meaningful way of communicating with one another.

7. Nigel Tubbs poses a similar rhetorical question occasioned by a reflection on the educational significance of Plato’s allegory of the cave: ‘If education is enlightening, unsettling and potentially destructive, is it right to teach for this? Is it right to teach for the shadows or to prepare the path out of the Cave?’ (2005, 67).