GE Morton wrote
I admit I've not read Kierkegaard, and have only a vague idea of the thrust of his philosophy (he is a traveler on what I consider a rather sterile philosophical sidetrack with little explanatory power or value). But I'm not sure just what (based on your claim above), or who, he is criticizing. Descartes? Kant? Neither of them ignore the "actualities" of personal experience. Indeed, those personal experiences are what all of philosophy strives to explain, and what drives individuals into "grander schemes." (The thread in the forum on Arendt and totalitarianism deals with those issues).
Reminds me of Wittgenstein who petitioned to be sent to the front lines in the war. He wanted to face death. He was a big van of Kierkegaard and he realized that the human existence was, somehow, deeply important, and he wanted to understand this. The Good, he wrote, was divinity, and this was one of a very few times he talked about ethics and value. His Lecture on Ethics mostly followed the Tractatus affirming that value, ethics, existence had to be passed over in silence, for one cannot talk about what is given simpliciter, and this iwhere my reference to Kierkegaard is to the point: The "pure intuitive givenness" of the world is unspeakable. This is played out carefully and at length in certain strains of phenomenology, but ethics, certainly a historical an largely invented complex institution, finds its essential meaning here, in the essential givenness of things, about which there is very little (if anything, says Witt) to say, for one shouldn't try to "speak" the world. So terrible headaches and delicious apples, or whatever---of course, again, you may actually hate apples and desire headaches, but this is not what is being argued about here at all: It is the liking or hating anything at all, the hating-something AS hating and the objective condition that is there, being hated. The two are one? Yes, I say; hating an apple possesses a bit of language habit that issues directly from the "hating experience" itself. One cannot hate, outside of a verbal abstraction, without some existential counterpart to the judgment, and it is this existential counterpart that is at the center of my thinking.
Er, no. I said it is not possible to isolate value from a valuer. A valuer must exist for there to be any values. Of what or whose factual existence are you speaking there?
But this is obviously true. Just as a storm in the sky needs, say, converging weather systems to occur, the value of a "beautiful" day needs a valuing agency. But you want to say that episodes of valuing are somehow factually different from those of the weather. You seem to want to place value outside of factual existence (which, in a deeper analysis, which not being discussed here, is true. This discussion would require another context of thinking).
Yes indeed. If no one values a certain thing --- a rock, tree, or anything else --- then it has no value. Any proposition asserting such a value would be non-cognitive (it has no determinable truth value).
You mean non cognitive in the trivial sense, that if there is nothing there to think about, then thinking-about-it is absurd. But I would want to reword this: it is not that the rock or tree therefore has no value, for even when there is a valuing agency there to value the tree, it is not the tree, but simply that value has been brought into existence (and here, again, I am suspending other issues to talk like this). The contingency of the value on the tree, its properties, is a descriptive part of the value, but this contingency is independent of the tree that sits there. In plain physicalist talk, you could localize the value in the brain-agency, if you will, but this changes nothing, just as nothing would effect this argument if it were truly powerful aliens causing the weather to change. The matter here goes to the
existence of the storm, the value, and so forth. Value simply IS, and the contingencies of it being there are simply assumed, as we assume causality itself (another qualified notion).
That is easy: "It is raining" has publicly-verifiable truth conditions. "X has value V" does not (though "X has value V to P" might).
But a headache is not publicaly verifiable. Certainly, one can observe correlation between the brain activity and headaches, but so what. Public verifiability is hardly what confirms the existence of a headache.
But that is a rather eclectic construal of "context."
In THIS discussion, I am being rather mundane. Things, facts, affairs, do not emerge ex nihilo.
No, it is not. Nor do I know of any modern philosopher who would so claim (well, perhaps some "naïve realists").
I don't think you want to go down this rabbit hole. It's just that such a premise draws new lines of basic assumptions. If not a mirror, then a dark mirror? But a brain is none of this.
Of course it is. Who disagrees with that? (we're speaking of "pointing out" via speech here, of course --- one can also communicate quite a bit by physically pointing, silently).
Then the pointing, the language symbol, or the physical direction, is received interpretatively. It is not as if our sounds and gestures actually "bear" some condition of the world apart from these. This "apart from" takes the discussion of value into a very difference place, a move toward accepting a world that is always already an interpretative synthesis of what is said, and so forth, and what is there, existing in one's perceptual field. The talk, if you will, cannot be abstracted from the world as the world (unless conceived analytically, as we might with Kant's pure reason: there is no pure reason; such an idea is just a descriptive abstraction. Not is there any pure value. Value-in-the-world is a feature, a non-natural property, G E Moore calls it, of what is there, some nameless original unity).
Nope. Some external things may give rise to affective responses (confirmable by third parties via behaviors and perhaps neural tracings), but whether they are pleasurable or not is a judgment, and subjective. For some people, the taste of cilantro is pleasurable. For others it tastes like soap, nasty, unpleasant. (There is actually a specific gene responsible for this).
Yes, but see the above. My pain IS pain apart from what others think, feel and say about headaches. The objective conditions that converge here, in this head, such that pain is registered as pain, is no different than a storm occurring at its particular locality under converging conditions of its own.
Those are three separate propositions ("It is raining in Cincinnati," "It is raining in Paris," "It is raining somewhere." They have different truth conditions. All are objective. (An objective proposition is one which has publicly-verifiable truth conditions). "It is raining" simpliciter (no time or place specified or implied by context) is also non-cognitive. It says nothing.
This kind of thinking subordinates the world of actual encounters to what is in public totality. Note the absurdity that steps forward: One's being, say, scalded by boiling water is thereby reducible to the totality's standard's. The event of the headache is subordinated to the interpretative values of the culture, reducing the world to an ontology of talk, so to speak. But this is analytically absurd, for the "ache" is not a public phenomenon as an ache, and it is not the condition of public access to the ache that makes the absurdity, for we can conceive of all subjectivity to be public and the absurdity would still stand. No, it is the simple understanding that the painful event is not reducible to language and culture. It is taken up, certainly, in countless contexts, but these contexts of interpretation stand apart from (qualitatively apart, as Kierkegaard put it) the actuality, and the actuality is the very Real that is the existential grounding of the contextualizing at all. That is, no actuality, then no language agreement in socially objectivity about the world!
The actuality of our experiences are the foundation for any subsequent public thinking. You do stand close to Heidegger on this, but if you follow him on this, you will find yourself far and away from familiar thinking.
No, the value is not "there," if you mean, "in the porkchop." It acquires no value until someone tastes it and deems it "good." Until then that value does not exist. The pork chop, salted or unsalted, is just a bunch of chemicals. No analysis will reveal any component or ingredient answering to "value."
No. This is elementary: "Until then that value does not exist" says, if course, it does exist afterward. But you want to insist that value experiences are always contingent. First, you will have to show that other things are NOT contingent in order to set value apart from the "facts" of the world. Can't be done, you agree. But then you have to show how one set of contingencies is, for a headache or a being in love, say, disqualifying for objectivity vis a vis things that you want to say are truly objective, the ordinary facts of the world like the sun being larger and the moon, and the like.
Yes, it does. "Good" means, "I (or someone) likes it." "Bad" means, "I (or someone) dislikes it."
Of course. But this liking is not a fact? Like the suspension properties of a bridge? Per the above, it is senseless to think not.
True, we didn't invent pain. What we did invent are terms for expressing our opinion of it.
Yes. But it you should know what stands there clear as a bell: we invented the terms but not the pain. Exactly a point I have been driving at!
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