Vichara 3: We believe there should be certain entities or processes for their own sake
... rendering us unable to let go of deep-seated ripples of a vitality that ...
In the first dispatch, I had written that "we find it salient to think in terms of some things or some state of affairs ... having merit," via the example of the sentiment expressed by Elon Musk in an interview about being "optimistic about the future". Whatever that might specifically entail, I'd written, we find that sentiment to make sense, at least—our natural inclination is to think that there could be better or worse possibilities for the future.
Today, in terms of the more precise terms we put things in last time, I want to shed some really bright light on this sentiment that we have about value. In that introduction, I'd also pointed to the modern temperament, tending toward nihilism, that doesn't truly or with full intensity simply believe in things for their unironic, sheer goodness. While I think that this sort of (anti-)spirit hasn't conquered us entirely, I do think we live in a society of sufficient cynicism where it may be helpful to show how we do indeed consider certain things to be genuinely valuable—whether or not they truly are, which is separate question, reserved for later—in a way that transcends our individual selves.
Let us start with the general case of the sentiment Musk was expressing there: Most of us don't want the world to end. Understand "world ending" however you want: Collapse of civilization and return to the stone age for humans, widespread breakdown of the Earth's ecosphere leading to the Earth becoming inhospitable for much of its complex flora and fauna, or some freak astronomic catastrophic event, like a giant asteroid or comet crashing into the Earth and destroying lots of things all over again.
Whatever it is, we'd prefer for world/Earth to keep going. We consider something good about its continued existence, and something bad, to the point we may consider them "catastrophes", about the kinds of events that could get in the way of that. Most of us would also prefer there to be a world that is of a yet-undefined value, even if we didn't benefit from it in any way that feels personal for us: For example, if given a choice between there being, in a thousand years, a) a rich, flourishing civilization of human and posthuman agents existing in sync with a rich, flourishing biosphere as a whole and b) all this having been destroyed or faded away in some way, most of us wouldn't be neutral about this. There seems to be something just good, regardless of our own direct experience of it, about the objective existence of a world of some quality. We believe there should be civilization/world/Earth—basically, some complex assemblage of matter, energy and qualia—for the sake of that entity or process itself.
That sentiment affirming the existence of the world is closely tied to another murmur many of us are (barely) aware of somewhere deep in our psyches: Does society exist for anything greater than us, or rather, anything greater than us being happy? Is there something that all of this—where "this" here specifically means the collective human enterprise—is amounting to? Or is it just infrastructure for each of us to get our kicks and have a good time? Most of the time, conditioned as we are in this world, we are happy to go about society without thinking too much about whether it can be for some higher purpose—we assume that it's not for any higher purpose. But for many of us, that leaves a void in our existence, where our spirit, try as hard as we may to ignore it, intransigently even if subtly keeps gnawing at us, rendering us unable to let go of deep-seated ripples of a vitality that wills that the human enterprise be for something truly great.
The above two cases—that of the world continuing to exist and society being for something greater than individual utility—are ways in which we tentatively or semi-consciously tend to posit objective value in or of reality at a scale larger than our organismic existence. There are also cases that have to do just with "individual" existence. The previous case, that of whether the society can be for something more than all of us just being happy as individuals, points directly to one way in which things are framed at the latter scale: Is there anything more to life than pleasure? When we think something is worth doing, is it only ever because it scratches some itch, or for the supposed good feeling of doing/experiencing it? We asked whether we, with all our collective material and energetic accoutrement, can exist for something greater. This is effectively the same question, but we can ask it differently: Whether you or I or any given human organism can exist for something greater.
If there is a subtle gnaw that we feel about whether society can or should be for something greater, then it's more of a vehement gash that we go around feeling about whether our individual existence can be for something greater. Much of our psychosocial fatigue and sickness can be explained through the energy we expend and the lengths we go to for the sake of keeping our attention averted from that pain. We come to understand that in mass, industrial society (and even more in post-industrial society), we don't have a unique purpose or destiny, and we just can't accept that. We aren't quite sure at an intellectual level, as good moderns, whether it is possible for us, or anything, to matter. But our spirit is sure that it wants to keep fighting the mind. Whether or not the spirit is right, this is at least one particularly clear way in which we find it at least salient to wonder about things in terms of objective, ultimate value, in the deep-seated will to live an existence in which we “matter”, we are positing precisely objective, ultimate value: We want the individual, ego-self to exist for a higher end that is truly so.
To stay on the existential theme, this cognition positing genuine value can also be seen in a simple phenomenological fact: Most of us want to wake up again tomorrow. Most of us, at least those under a certain age (and quite possibly most of us regardless of our age), don't want to die just yet. Why is that? There are two kinds of possibilities: For some pleasant or desirable experiences that we haven't had our fill of yet, or for some higher cause, some greater, objective good that we believe that our existence can be of service to.
Some of us may think that it's to experience those desirable, pleasant things that we want to experience that we want to continue to exist. But I'm not so sure about that. We will be looking at how there isn't anything of genuine value to pleasant experience in-and-by-itself, but hopefully it is already apparent to some readers that that isn't why we want tomorrow to occur for us. We want to exist, and continue to exist, because we sense that something of value that is genuinely so, i.e., is in-itself, objectively valuable, could come of our existence. We sense we can create or care for real value, and in doing so, we believe there are things that matter regardless of whether they make for pleasant feelings or not. That is what we still, at a deep, truthful level, affirm, and what we will to exist for.
This same point can also be found in the case inverse to hope for the future, i.e., regret for the past. If you happen to be one of the many people alive today who isn't quite satisfied with how some period of the past has been for you, ask yourself whether you'd consider those months or years to have been worth it if a) there was more pleasure in them, or b) there was more purpose, or some greater value to the world beyond you that you could have done better or been allowed better to contribute to, regardless of the pleasure or pain you got from it. In almost all cases, I'd bet, if people really seriously inquired into the question and looked into themselves, the answer will be the latter.
We can make out more scenarios in which the question (or answer) of non-instrumental, intrinsic value comes up that are closely tied to the above two: Sometimes one may be struck by the brevity of life, and find oneself roused or panicked by the prospect of (not) doing something greater, something objectively valuable, with one's limited time in this existence. One may also, in a different mood, wonder about what one would devote one's existence to if one wasn't to get anything from it—i.e., if there was no personal reward or recognition to be derived from one's efforts. Whatever one may choose to do with such conditions defined would be for either the innate joy of doing it, or the objective value considered to be brought to fruition from doing it. We shall see at some point in the future how this specific kind of joy is both a) different from hollow pleasure, and b) inseparable from the product of the action that is so joyful. This and the prior sentiment about the brevity of life can be further expanded upon; I bring them up just to point to the many contexts in which we are stirred to posit ultimate, objective value.
However, for today, I want to focus on one more psychological tendency for today that shows how natural it is for us to feel and from there think in terms of and believe in objective value—that is the drive for improvement. Put simply, in many facets of life, we have a desire to improve, or to do things better. I am currently rereading Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald, which I had read 10 years ago. Sebald's work is interesting to me because of the way he approaches the dialectic of irony and earnestness, a dialectic which has been apparent to me for a long time as a critical issue for working out the disposition towards the world with which a better future could be attained today. As such, I had annotated the work quite voluminously ten years ago, and reading it again, I'm having new ideas on the same issues. I'm finding that the quality of what I'm seeing now is better than what I had put into words then. That has pleased me.
Why has it pleased me? Is it because of a subjective standard of what constitutes improvement? I don't think so. I think that there exist salient, objective standards for intellectual quality, and I would think that most people who have, while sober, listened to a friend propound a theory while high or drunk would agree.
Moreover, not only is it something meaningful for something to be better or worse (even for a standard specific to its domain), we also prefer it, experientially, when it's better. That is, we regard positively in some way—ranging from sober approval to delirious celebration—that which we rate highly. And we don't think that it's good or better because we feel good or better with respect to it; rather, our feeling is dependent on a perception that it is good or better. This is a critical distinction we'll be returning to often: I didn't think that I was having better ideas about Sebald's work because the new ones made me feel happy; rather, I felt happy because I found them to be, simply, more good. This distinction is all the more apparent when considering the drive for further improvement: I want my ideas to get even better, and my criterion for what I would consider better isn't what I would like—instead, I feel excited about what there could yet be because of what it itself would be; in other words, my default mode of relating to reality is one in which I consider there to be intrinsic, objective merit, or merit that is so regardless of my feelings about it.
But I am quite sure that it's not just me. Look within yourself, and see that there is a will, which seems rather innate, i.e., not a function of some kind of conditioning, which wants there to be that which is better, and which, somewhere deep down, wants to do better, contribute to making it come to be.
There is one more mode in which we have a natural tendency to ascribe objective value to entities. However, so central is it to where we are going in terms of the picture of what is overall important and good and holy, that its discussion must be reserved for the entirety of the next dispatch.
All of this said, to conclude, I'm now going to go back to the title—’We believe there should be certain entities or processes for their own sake'—and break it down. It may be redundant and it may be skipped, but I want to make sure that we're on the same page in terms of not just not understating certain points, but also not overstating them. If nothing else, these are breadcrumbs for myself So:
'We believe' - I qualify the matter like this for now because we haven't yet started to prove that things are indeed so. I've just made a case, for now, about certain contexts in which we have a sentiment toward objective value. That such a sentiment exists doesn't by itself mean that objective value itself exists.
'there should be' - In saying that we believe that this is what there should be, we mean that this is indeed what there should be, i.e., it would be legitimate for there to be action or movement towards its being. Or in other words, I'm not just playing an intellectual game. My claims here very much have normative implications, and the normative implications themselves are not made for the sake of navel-gazing—I think atoms, bits and connections between them should be worked upon to favor those entities and processes which are of or lend themselves to objective value.
'certain' - We don't find that everything has ultimate value. This is in fact a point that is very tricky once we get into the metaphysics of value, and I'll admit I haven't yet worked out the question of whether everything does equivalently bear the ontological attribute of value that we'll be getting into soon and whether we're just primed to see it in certain kinds of things/it manifests itself differently in certain phenomena, or whether it is indeed simply the case that certain things have (more of) it and certain others have (less of) it.
'entities or processes' - This is to draw attention to the fact that what has value isn't necessarily a "thing", but could be entities (reality in the form of being) that we don't consider "things", like other sentient beings, or processes (reality in the form of becoming). The distinction between being and becoming, and which is more fundamentally characteristic of reality, is an important topic in the history of philosophy, and I won't be getting into that here, so for now at least, I'm paying my dues to both. That said, there is a third possible term that I've not included that could go along with this dyad—connections—though it may be possible to see connections as entities or processes. At least, it won't hurt us significantly to not categorize connections separately for what we're trying to do here.
'for their own sake' - I won't repeat myself in depth here; the point again is that we are talking specifically about intrinsic, non-instrumental value.