The View from Here

Abstract

Abstract This book is a study of the retrospective point of view, and of the attitudes that emerge when we look back from it on our lives. The leading idea is that this standpoint is shaped fundamentally by our present attachments—to persons, to the projects that imbue our lives with meaning, and to life itself. Attachments of these kinds commit us to affirming the necessary conditions of their objects. The result is that regret can be inaccessible to us when we look back on events and circumstances that were unjustified or otherwise lamentable. The book explores these themes in a range of examples. One case is young girl’s child, where a teenage girl makes the unfortunate decision to conceive a child and is unable later to regret it on account of her love for the child she has brought into the world. Another involves Bernard Williams’s Gauguin, who abandons his family to paint in Tahiti and then finds that his project prevents him from regretting what he did. The book offers a new interpretation of these (and similar) cases. A different situation involves the “bourgeois predicament,” where we are committed to affirming regrettable social inequalities, insofar as they made it possible for us to engage in the expensive activities that give our lives meaning. Generalizing from such situations, the book ends by defending the view that our attachments inevitably commit us to affirming historical conditions that we cannot possibly regard as worthy of being affirmed—a modest form of nihilism.

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