The Unity of Being
Part II Section 12
[220]
Section 12
Value
Thesis: Value is essentially social, a matter of co-enjoyment, willed and felt as such. Valuation, therefore, is always and in principle objective as well as subjective, — the value enjoyed belongs, as such or as enjoyed value, not simply to any one subject enjoying it. There is a transitive identification of one’s own self-realization or pleasure with that of another, in all experience of value. Valuation, therefore, is capable of accounting for the unity of subject and object, or for the immediacy yet objectivity of consciousness or awareness in general. There is always an other directly involved and thus solipsism or subjectivism is avoided, in so far as consciousness is viewed as a realization of values. On the other hand the inclusion of an object known in awareness, in or within the life of that awareness, an element in its unity of self-meaning, is not denied, and hence knowledge is not destroyed by a futile externality of object to the knowledge or awareness of it, logically a contradictory view of knowing, as has been argued.
In the second place, the view of consciousness as a realization of value will be defended as all-inclusive, as accounting for all functions of mind, and all qualities of objects known.
[221] The problems of the unity in multiplicity of knowledge and of reality, and the conceivability of the Monistic view of Being will thus receive, as it is hoped, comprehensive illumination from the nature of the value-experience, or — for us — of experience, as self-understood.
Argument 1. Thesis: Value not a shorthand term for a peculiar neutrally describable complex.
The point has already been discussed in more than one connection. We propose the following summarizing statement.
If a reality is adequately knowable in neutral terms, without reference to value-concepts, as such, it is clear that to know this reality to be valuable is to know nothing whatever about it, — except at most that the word value is applied to it. The difference between the presence and the absence of the good, as against the neutral, is a matter purely of words. It is as true to conceive the world as merely an organization of neutral entities or materials, as it is to consider it as inclusive of something not merely factual but good. It is perfectly manifest that to be good becomes thus, over and above mere neutral existence, wholly a matter of terms. He who says that life is empty of worth, but admits the fact that it is characterized by organisms composed of various neutral entities,in spatial relations to an environment of such entities, is open, on the neutralist [222] view, to the sole objection that the word “worth” as anything above such factual existence and wiggling or shuffling of relations, is without meaning anyhow. And thus it stands clear that instead of believing that life is good, we should be content to say that it moves: instead of saying we desire the good, should more modestly proclaim that we approach or run toward it, — as, though in less complicated and intricate fashion, the rivers tend toward the sea. As with the objectivist view of mind, the view really implies its opposite. If one relation of correlated movements identically is one type of good, the human, must not any correlation or grouping of changes, constitute some other sort of good? The identification of fact and value in one case carries logically all cases with it or contradicts itself in principle. And, in the second place, of the two equated terms, “neutrally constituted complex” and “value,” the second is the one whose specific meaning is the more important. For we do not need to know all about our organism in order to continue to live and to philosophize. But once convince us that “value” is but a word for the fact that there are entities or processes in certain relations to each other, and life and thought become important only in the sense that the word “importance” or “good” is pronounced, as a set of sounds, or written as a group of marks, in connection with the words “life” and “thought.” The complex called life is that complex. Is it good? — well, it is such a complex, what [223] further answer do you wish? We reply: an answer to the question asked, which was — not, is the complex the complex — but is it good, important, capable of attaining supreme well-being or satisfaction. This question has simply not been answered, and the attempt to suppress it by definition seems but an ingenious refinement of utter unreason.
Argument 2. Value not a merely subjective element or activity of pleasure. (By subjective is here meant, confined to the given subject experiencing the value).
The locus of value is admittedly in the direction of pleasure. The neutralist view derives its plausibility from the classification of pleasure as merely one peculiar arrangement of neutral elements. But the evident absurdity of value quite divorced from pleasure or enjoyed happiness, is indicative of the conclusion that it is not because pleasure is a mode of neutral being of a certain neutrally conceivable character, that it is good — but because it is pleasure or pleasing. Analysis from the neutral point of view reveals not a shred of connection between a thing and its value. If pleasure is essential to the good it is as viewed from another angle than that of pure objectivism — as something more, from any true point of view, than merely a set of entities or facts or neutral processes. The angle is rather that from which it is clear that pleasure is simply not thought as it is unless it is thought as in essential [224] relation to will, — not once more — to will, as a set of movements, — but as will; and pleasure remains itself only as conceived in an intrinsic relation to will or mind in its unity. Pleasure as satisfaction is good inasmuch as it cannot be thought without desiring it, that is without spontaneously affirming its goodness. This relation to desire is the essence of pleasure. Only while we retain the more than objective point of view, i.e., while we conceive the aspects involved in terms of their relations to the whole of mind as essentially qualifying their nature through and through, and therefore while we are unable to conceive the whole as but the parts in relation, do we consider pleasure as in any sort of genuine relation to value.1
Retaining, then, this whole point of view, from which will and its seeking characterizes all, rather than the factual endeavoring to characterize will and the good, we are relieved from the inconsistency of a good as essentially satisfaction of desire, which yet when seen by that desire in its real aspect is discovered to be but a combination of changes, (of which one aspect is itself) and from the contradiction of a satisfaction in organic processes which satisfaction is just the processes themselves. We no longer seek the good of change in just the change or movement, how-[225]ever intricate and steady in direction, themselves.
But our problem is as to the nature of pleasure. We offer the following propositions.
1. The axiom of Indefinability we herewith contradict (Section 4 (d)) and call for a definition of pleasure.
2. Pleasure must, we have seen, be defined as a satisfaction of the will. But what does the will desire or seek? If we reply, its own pleasure, then pleasure becomes merely: that which is attained by that which seeks pleasure.2 Our definition thus is so far of little use.
3. If the will seeks situations, not pleasure, but seeks the situations because they yield it pleasure, we then observe that the will has no motive to seek the situations except that which arises in connection with their pleasure-giving power. Then two questions arise:
(a) Can the will really seek something merely because the something will give itself pleasure, without despoiling or impoverishing the pleasure so attained? This is the ethical problem known as the hedonistic paradox. If a thing is good to me only because I expect pleasure from it, I become so intent on the pleasure that I fail to bestow real and adequate interest upon the thing. I do not “lose” myself in the thing, and so recover myself. Our whole life, in all its profoundest understandings, cries out against such a view.
(b) There is no reason apparent for the connection [226] between a situation and its bestowal of pleasure. If the situation is said to cause the pleasure, the criticism may be made that a cause is scarcely such for science until we are conceptually able to follow cause into effect, and view the latter as a state of the former.3 Now if the object valued is not itself inwardly of value, there is no such connection between my pleasure in it and the object.
4. The pleasure in the object cannot be simply its furthering of my purposes — of, say, biological adjustment. For the real question is, what is the value of adjustment, why do we take pleasure in that? If the reply is, there is no reply, we however insist: (a) The cause is not understood in its connection with the effect and (b) we are still seeking a definition of pleasure, which we have not found as yet because the definition in terms of will proved to introduce the further question of the nature of desire and its real object. Until we have discovered what the object of striving is, we cannot employ volition as a satisfactory interpreter of pleasure. If desire or volition is directed toward adaptation, where does pleasure come in?4 And if toward pleasure, how can it really be directed upon the adaptation.
[227]
5. The only account of the bond between desire and its object, — which, psychology has fairly well come to agree, is not simply the pleasurable satisfaction of that desire (the longing for the attainment of the fulfillment of the longing for —, etc.), — the only account capable of supplying an explanation in the spirit of science, or in terms of conceptually related elements, is an account which regards the object as essentially of the same nature as the value realized in the enjoyment of the object. Holding that pleasure in the object is a sense that the object is good — not merely because it gives pleasure, reducing the explanation to tautology, but because it is good in fundamentally the same sense that the pleasure is good, we can give a genuine account of the rise and of the nature of pleasure and of the good. We can say that the power of a situation to please is its intrinsic worth or embodiment of value, and at the same time we can regard this value as of a common nature with the value of the pleasure to which it gives rise thus preserving the consistency of the value-concept.
Is this a barren circularity of definition — pleasure is the sense of something in the object of the nature of pleasure? Our reply is:
(a) It is an empirical fact that many at least of our greatest pleasures are pleasures in pleasures, a rejoicing in the enjoyment of others. A healthy mind, not absorbed in any purpose in conflict with the well-being of his fellows, can scarcely view the pleasures of his neigh-[228]bor, of a child, or even of a dog, without rejoicing or himself deriving pleasure therefrom. Likewise do the sufferings of others enter into our consciousness, in general, only at the cost of becoming, in some measure at least, our own pain.
(b) The very conception of pleasure as essentially good, is a pleasure, is an assent of the will which makes the conception of the pleasant and the good inseparable, in some degree at least, from each other. If the conception of pleasure is inevitably of it as good, and if the sense of something as good is pleasant, is a pleasure, then clearly the mere awareness of pleasure or enjoyment must essentially be an affair of pleasure or of joy.5 Thus we can be sure that even if all pleasure is not pleasure in pleasure, yet certainly the apprehension of pleasure in principle is pleasure.
(c) If the apprehension of pleasure essentially is pleasure, this is a fact without rational explanation unless the converse is true — that pleasure is essentially and always the apprehension of pleasure, or pleasure in pleasure. The entire fact of genuine interest in others is here seeking explanation. Once admit that pleasure may be other than social or shared, that pure selfishness can be enjoyable, and the enjoyableness of unselfishness is a fact without any intelligible relation to such a view of pleasure. And we are left without any principle of mediation or arbitration between selfish and unselfish delights; except the concep-[229]tion of the greatest amount of delight to be gleaned in both ways; while if this is made the real object of the will, we have the hedonistic paradox of the relative unpleasantness of pleasure pursued for its own sake. Or if some principle outside that of pleasure, some Imperative be called in, we leave unresolved the conflict between pleasure and duty — and declare the right to be scarcely a matter of the emotions at all, as did Kant. The result is an open gulf between concrete desires and abstract right which destroys the effective harmony of the mind and is to be contrasted with the wiser command: to love God and thy neighbor as thyself, — a contrast in which it appears that the gulf between desire and the “ought” is, in fact, not a genuine and ultimate disparity, but that duty may become one with desire and that the highest duty is to orient one’s desires correctly. This orientation becomes tyrannical and impracticable, unless it means an essential realization of desire, unless desire can see the right as its own real meaning and true fulfillment. Now if unselfishness is merely one area of desire or of pleasure, and the right but a partial realization of the soul, then allegiance to the right and zeal for unselfishness meet in principle with a limit beyond which they cannot be called to go. How far unselfish joys overbalance selfish becomes an empirical and relative question, and therefore the motive for a fully generous point of view remains insufficient and uncertain.
[230] Thus both the fact of there being any unselfish delights, and the degree to which they should be cultivated and given the right of way, remain opaque to our understanding; unless we recognize in the value-experience an essential and inalienable principle of sociality or harmony of wills. If we are able to make this recognition, the fact of unselfish tendencies is wholly explicable, and the motive for encouraging them is rendered clear. It is simply, that the very essence of well-being is then regarded as to be sought in the sharing of interests and in the mutual trans-identification or loyalty of purposes.6
(d) On the other hand, the existence of selfish tendencies is regarded as the capacity of the subject to seek for itself the enjoyments of unselfishness with main emphasis upon the enjoyments, not upon their unselfish basis or meaning. One can seek to win the applause of people rather than to render them service, but the pleasure of the applause involves an element of sociality, of genuine unselfishness, nonetheless. The man may know he is a traitor, but while the applause of his country rings in his ears he allows himself to be warmed into at least a toying with the conception of himself as a hero.
[231] If he does not and is wholly disillusioned, the pleasure is lacking.
Again the desires and pleasures of sex may be viewed as an instinctive or inherited apprehension of the value of the propagation of the race. This value is not in the mere brute maintenance of the species. It is in the whole plan and harmony of life, with its enjoyments, passed on from generation to generation. The pleasures in question are, then, on the view under defense, a sense of the value of the whole life-scheme, as a process preserved through time and allowing for experiences of joy and happiness to others than merely oneself. They are, therefore, not essentially self-enclosed or selfish in their reference. However, they may perfectly well be pursued selfishly, for their own sake and not in the light of their meaning as an inherited, instinctive interest in the racial good. One may seek to experience an interest without seeking to ally oneself actively in the service of its object. Thus the sensualist may like good-fellowship and in some measure strive to attain the joys of affectionate, friendly, and even superficially loyal intercourse. But he is thinking above all of the joys that will accompany this mode of existence, while only his more intuitive and unexplicit consciousness retains a genuine, and in some degree ineradicable other-interest, without which the whole process would descend to insipidity.
[232] We therefore find no conflict between the view of all value as essentially objective as well as subjective, unselfish as well as, perhaps, in its degree, selfish; and the fact of wickedness and selfishness.
(e) The definition of pleasure as always referring to a further instance of itself is thus so far from a mere circularity or tautology in any sense of futility or barrenness, as to prove itself able to explain and illuminate fundamental facts and problems of ethics and psychology.
(f) Moreover in explaining the bond between the value of the object and of the experience appreciating it, as one of substantial identity of nature, we are no more committing a tautology than is science in explaining the interactions of chemicals in terms of identical qualities in each. If pleasure or enjoyment is irreducible to concepts neutral to value, then the only kind of reality whose interaction with pleasure we can understand is a reality substantially similar to pleasure itself. In explaining the consciously realized value afforded the subject, in terms of a similar process of realization in the object, we provide the sole conceivable explanation of this relation.
To deny that experience and object interact in the experience of value is to deny that the experience is really valuing the object. We have a “parallelism,” which is unable to give any intelligible account of how the mental process means or is aware of the non-mental.
[233] In any case we should still not escape the inversion of a rejoicing in an object which is not at all an implication that the object is good or possesses any quality rendering the enjoyment appropriate or accountable.
Argument 3. Thesis: Aesthetic experience is not a mere subjective reaction but implies worth in the object in substantially the same sense as the experience itself possesses worth.
Santayana admits that in aesthetic experience there is a seeming perception of pleasure in the object. The sun, when we behold it, seems an intensely joyous living activity. No sensitive mind but observes this. The word of the Hebrew singer: “Rejoices as a bridegroom” is genuine introspection with a decorative elaboration. Wordworth’s: “The moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare” is a similar more subtle report of sheer though delicate analysis of experience.
Pleasure is obviously felt in the sound of a merry voice, the song of a bird, or the movements of a face. In these cases objectivity is hardly questioned. The points where it is questioned are therefore no illustration of a universal rule, unless it is the rule that only organic beings represent any inner life or genuine value. But this is the great point at issue, usually in the main assumed as more or less obvious by subjectivists. To an unspoiled and sensitive appreciation of life the reverse is in fact [234] profoundly obvious or manifest.
Our points are as follows:
1. Variations in value-judgments are poor proofs of the idea that no objective value is the object of the judgments. Admittedly appreciation of aesthetic values involves exceedingly high and delicate insight. It would be strange if judgments did not vary widely.7 Moreover few people give their powers of disinterested contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment any chance of large development — their lives being too busy and often too occupied with certain specific purposes for which nature is a mere framework or forgotten background.
2. Value is not a thing either present or absent — at least on the objective view of it — but a thing present in degree and kind. Men may not agree on the prettiness of a face; but the important fact is that every face is pretty — compared to a stone or an ink-well. And every face reveals value. Some grace or harmony of feeling goes with every beauty of countenance. The harmony may not be moral or [235] spiritual.8 But some unusual capacity for delight, some exceptional sensitiveness to the richness and joy of life,9 is the possession by inheritance of the “beauty” and is the reason for her power to charm. Such is, at any rate, a personal belief on the matter.
In any case, disagreements about beauty imply no more logically the absence of objective worth than they do, rather, differences in the degree and kind of worth considered satisfying or worthy of special commendation, by each man. The second inference is at least as rational, and it would again be incredible if such differences did not exist. On our view nothing is wholly unbeautiful, and therefore things singled out for the term beauty are those affording a special degree of satisfaction, which is therefore noticed as such.
Even ugliness, as Bosanquet says, is impossible except as a conflict of elements possessing appeal — as in a discord of notes on an instrument. Ugliness as absolute absence of beauty is only conceivable as realized in a world of uniform blackness (even a gray day has its charm) — in short a visual world in which vision could not occur, a blank nonentity.
[236] Arguments about beauty, then, show only that the objective values involved are various in degree, the standard of noteworthy beauty being relative to other objects of a similar sort in mind (as in comparing landscapes), and to the sensitiveness and insight of the individual; and finally, they do indicate no doubt that we have no adequate comprehension of the full meaning of the value-glimpses we derive from our experience of nature. The moon may not be a goddess, and does not even look like a goddess. Such a view is an interpretation. On the other hand, the sense of calm delight which in vision, carefully reported, is actually identical, in our perception, with the shimmering glow of the moon, may very well be a faint but genuine breaking through into our experience of a real experience not our own but represented to us as in part at least the moon, — just as the agony of a dog penetrates our perception in the hearing of his whine, or the ecstatic delight of the oriole, in the sensation of his song.
All colors may be viewed as in essence valuations; occupying, however, in most cases such a slight degree of energy of thought and will, representing therefore such a minute fraction either of the satisfaction enjoyed at the moment or of that which is conceived as constituting a notable happiness or pleasure, that the name of value or satisfaction is not applied to it, even upon reflection. But it seems not incredible that what cannot be recognized [237] as fulfilling the concept “satisfaction” or “value” or “enjoyment” is judged as not an instance of such meanings merely because the typical enjoyments or values are realizations of so much more of our selves that a mere scarcely noted color value appears quite another thing. Moreover, in the case of intense and bright colors, the relation (of satisfaction) to the will becomes not only plausible but even apparent. A flashing red or yellow is as obviously, for introspected experience, a tiny thrill of pleasure, as each of the notes of the harp (as actual features in consciousness).
3. We can now suggest how the bold view of all-definablism (some degree of description or characterization possible with all natures) can be illustrated in practice. As yellow is essentially a simple pleasurable thrill so red is a sense symbol or faint apprehension of a more passionate delight or joy. Green is a calmer and deeper affair — the noble sense of steady living activities in a fertile landscape. Blue, as in the sky, is a veritable expression — not of delight simply — but, as poets have felt — of serene and harmonious love. There is a sensible caress in a really disinterested and absorbed apprehension of the sky. It is expressive of supreme and radiant benignity, as Coleridge indicates.
[238]
“For this: she knows . . .
That saints will aid if men will call
For the blue sky bends over all.” (Christabell)
Black is, except as a contrast or as shiny and so reflective of light, purely negative in aesthetic value. It is also, from the physical standpoint, essentially of the nature of a negation, or of non-vision.
Whiteness is sometimes highly pleasing, as in sparkling snow, and a brilliant glow of light is an intense thrill of pleasure. Indeed to conceive a supreme joy, is for some of us, in part to experience of a visual image of radiance. The very word “radiance” suggests the community between the good and light.10
4. If, finally, one conceives a blind man’s fate, he may realize, by contrast, that the misfortune of the blind man is not merely that he cannot get about, apprehend, and deal with objects readily, but that the joyousness and marvel of color as such is cut off from him. Any color, unless it involved a painful (and so a quality not neutral to value) conflict of colors, would be recognized as better than nothing. This dull expanse of dirt seems aesthetically neutral? — let some one cut off your vision an instant, and leave you a blank, no other ideas or objects of interest being conceived added, and the loss of value, the shrinking of the sense and satisfaction of living stands in clear [239] light.11
Plato’s idea of the sun as an embodiment and revelation of the good is thus no mere metaphor to us —, or, one would say, to any poet or artist.
5. Auditory, taste, and olfactory elements of experience, are also in many cases obviously at one with pleasures. As one cannot by any analysis separate the pleasantness of the smell of the rose, from the smell, so one cannot imagine the note of a bird as that sound and yet without value-meaning. One can imagine being so absorbed as not to note the meaning clearly; but attention and clearness result in the inevitable self-insistence of the meaning as the very essence of the sound or smell.
Thus the principle of continuity aids us here. If one sound can identically be a value-element or meaning, why not all sounds? If a beautiful shade of blue cannot be conceived as that shade and yet without its beauty, (the ugliness introduced by conflict with other colors is not an ugliness of the color itself: — and is still a value-character) then surely the beauty of the shade is the shade, of its essence, and any other shade should have its own degree and type of beauty. The inseparability of [240] the sweetness of the violin sound from the sound (the experiential, not the inferred object), for another example, proves that a certain sweetness and a certain sound in a particular case are one and identical. The inference is that any type of sound is a certain value-experience.12
The view, then, that in aesthetic experience the pleasure and the given objective elements are separable, seems both an undemonstrated and inconsistent, or an empirically false account. In experience of music, of faces, and voices, we certainly experience as objective value which is objective (i.e., the feeling of composer, and of player in so far as he really plays). Many of us are sure that many colors, sounds, and odors are in an identity incapable of conceptual dissolution, with their beauty. (In the question, how then do we speak of the latter as a separate aspect? — we reply: because, e.g., the color as “blueness” is identified by a word, not by a qualitative description. Located in this fashion, to analyze the color as essentially an element of experienced-value, is simply to realize to ourselves, in terms of explicit concepts, the relation of the datum tagged as blue to our will, a relation that is of its essence but not therefore necessarily explicitly seen as such, except upon reflection).13
[241] If data sometimes thus essentially are bits of our self-realization, it seems impossible to suppose that data, as such,can ever be without this principle.
5. What more or less a will can do than to realize its purposes and to behold the relations of things to its own interests, is, moreover, hard to be conceived. We must however consider the idea that there is therefore at least a degree of subjectivity in all experience and thus a degree of illusion. The sun may not be good, but only useful and pleasing to us, as men.14
The argument of the present “Outline” depends only upon the following conceptions in this regard:
(a) Whether colors, for example, really reveal the worth of things, the point is that, on the view defended, all elements of actual or imagined experience as such, are value-elements. Therefore, if we get any objectivity at all, perceptually or conceptually (since to think is but to extend and relate the matter of perception) we get it in terms of value.15
(b) Science, being a matter of relations between elements, primarily, is not affected by the valuational nature of the latter. But the veracity of the aesthetic aspect of experience is dependable as, at any rate, the only glimpse we get of concrete reality, and therefore as in principle significant at least of the universality of value-qualities (since a consciousness of objects merely as they are [242] not seems to us an unthinkable conception) — Cf. Section 11 page 214.
Argument 4. Thesis: The view of knowledge as essentially possessed of an aesthetic capacity solves the fundamental problem of Knowledge.
On such a view, we can avoid the Berkeleyan subjectivism, and yet retain the insight it somewhat confusedly involved. We define a perceived object, not as an idea or mere element of the subject, nor yet as simply outside the subject, in no genuine relation of inclusion within his knowledge. But we regard such an object as at once an element within the meaning whole of the perceiving mind, and nonetheless still itself as an object. The idealistic argument does not really rest upon the notion that the human subject creates his object. But that he finds it to have meaning or value for him in terms of the self-significance of his conscious life, and that if this self-significance is to reveal the quality of the object, the object must have its nature in comparable terms. The self-meaning of mind is ultimate to mind and not definable objectively. For to reach any objective thing is only to translate it into that subjective realm and language of self-meaning. The inconsistencies of any other interpretation have been urged in the previous section.
The common element, then, between the object as value-element in a mind, and as objective apart from that [243] mind can only be in terms of an ultimate Valuation or Self-significance realizing an identical phase of itself in both the mind and the object.
The supposed fallacy of denying the creativity of the finite mind, yet urging that of the infinite mind, in regard to the object, is thus met as follows.16 The finite subject creates in this way namely, that in identifying himself with the value of the object (to the Ultimate Mind) he makes it a value for him and so creates a new value, that of his experience. Thus mind is shown to be creative — namely, of value. On the other hand, the object’s own value, while independent of the finite valuation, yet since it is, as we hold, necessarily of the same nature as that valuation if (on a score of grounds) knowledge is to be possible, this objective value must depend upon a similar principle of creative interest as that which is essential to the finite value-experience. Inasmuch, in short, as the value realized by the subject, which is to represent the quality of the object, is essentially of the nature of self-realization or enjoyment the value of the object therefore must relate ultimately to a universal and standard Valuation including both the subject’s and the object’s values and comparing them in its own ultimate or Self-relative terms.
Put in a slightly different manner. The object bears a meaning in the subjects mind, — a meaning essentially relative to that mind as a self-qualifying, self-realizing [244] sphere of awareness. This relativity would destroy knowledge unless it were ultimately a relativity not merely to the finite mind as finite, but as the partial apprehension of the Infinite or perfect Consciousness. In that case there may be an element of our meaning belonging to the One Mind, not merely registered there in reference to our experience, but in other references or experiences, and therefore quite objective in so far as we are concerned.
The “object” then becomes an element of value-experience which can be appropriated by the human subject and become a part of his significant consciousness, but is not peculiarly his. Perhaps the Personalist account is correct, and each value-element attaches to some finite personality as its peculiar and full possession, shared by other subjects only in part by way of incomplete apprehension in perception. Or perhaps value-elements in nature are differentiations of the Divine Life, not fully owned by any finite being. But the essential points for valuational Monism are these:
(a) In our identifying ourselves with a value, in its coming to be so for us, we are occupying in some degree at least the point of view toward it of that Being whose realization in its own life of the value in question is that value. In accepting it as satisfying in a certain manner to ourselves we are enabling it to become to us what it is to its sustaining Ground, and thus its being for us [245] is so far one with its ultimate or objective reality.
It is to be observed, finally, that on a mere pluralism of minds, each mind becomes shut in to itself. For each renders all reality in terms of its own self-being, and, since this involves no standard or universal Self-Reality, publicity or identity of meaning from mind to mind is scarcely conceivable. It is only so if each mind is regarded as wholly relative or dependent upon and inclusive of every other. We append therefore a note upon the view of Dr. McTaggart, which is substantially such a conception.
[246]
Note on McTaggart’s Doctrine of The Absolute.
In the metaphysics of Dr. McTaggart, the view is offered, of a One which is essentially a harmony of perfect love enjoyed by the many. Love, it is declared is the Absolute Being, but love is differentiated into the many who share, each for himself, in the love of all for all. The problem is of course how Love is thus an identical Reality in all the beings enjoying it. Each must be held to love with the same love as is felt by all the others.
Now love is a manner of relation. It is real only as there are beings so related. Dr. McTaggart’s many are real only by virtue of their relation, and the relation derives its whole reality from them. Thus we derive their reality from a source which proves equally to demand it from them. On the genuinely Monistic view we do indeed derive the reality of the particular finite beings from their relation to the One, but we do not regard the reality of the latter as merely its relation to just those finite beings. For a different collection of such beings might, for all we know, do as well. This type of Monism appears, then, as more consistent in itself than the description of the reality of things as their possession of a relation to each other, and the definition of the things as essentially objects — of — this relation, with at the same time the definition of the relation as essentially the relation — between-these-objects. We cannot conceive a relation as differentiated, in [247] short, in terms of its own nature, into the objects at both of its ends. Only love taken as a genuinely single or self-identical Unique Personal Life can be conceived, to our thinking, as a plausible ground of a plurality of things, the all-reflecting register of their being. For here we have Being, not simply as a relation or attitude or enjoyment, but as a Being sustaining this relation and possessing the enjoyment. For such a Being to eternally express itself in the creation and preservation of objects of love becomes then a quite consistent conception — so far as our inquiry has thus far revealed
Argument 5. Thesis: Value as essentially a willed and felt sharing of satisfaction; as in principle some degree at least of an attitude and sense of love; solves in the fullest measure attainable the problem of Being as a concrete Universal or One-in-Many.
The point has been stressed in the Introduction. If to be is to be of value, and the valuable is the loved, then all being is conceivable as dependent upon a universal Beneficent Interest or Love. Our value cannot be merely our self-enjoyment as a purely self-relative or internally qualified affair. For then we become shut in ourselves and isolated in thought from all things and all things to us become mere objects-of-our interest. And thus the social, unselfish, or objective character inherent in valuation suffers contradiction. Secondly, we do not fully qualify our own self-enjoyment because we do not fully possess ourselves; our self-[248]realization is only partially carried out or inwardly illuminated. We do not fully realize what we are, or fully apprehend or enjoy the nature and meaning of our own valuations. Hence we are a contradiction of the unqualified view of mind as essentially what it is to itself, an essentially self-discerned, or as essentially a will engaged in expressing and satisfying itself. We are neither fully self-known nor capable of unlimited satisfaction of our desires. We do not even fully know the latter.17
Thus what we are appears to be relative to a standard not simply ourselves as self-qualifying and enjoying, but a standard which is fully itself to itself, and thus is the measure and register of its own and of our inferior reality.
Our sense of our value-experience as real is on the Monistic View we are outlining the sense of it as of value to an all-discerning Interest, which is possessed of fully realized perfection of value; or, it is the sense of ourselves as the objects of a perfect love. To be an object of love is certainly to be of worth, and if all worth is thus in the end relative to a single Love, we escape merely private, incommunicable or wholly disparate worth; and likewise the inconsistency of an experience in part essentially what it is to itself, and yet in part not wholly transparent to itself nor all its capacities fully enjoyed. The finite experience being always thought as on one aspect, a manifestation or element of the Supreme Experience, finds thus [249] from the finite side its incomplete, yet in principle essential self-relativity accounted for.
The effect of this view upon the conception of Unity in diversity, already discussed in the Introduction, is thus apparent. The Love which fully identifies itself with our fortunes, and registers them in its own consciousness, proves also essential to the conception of our being and nature. Monism is thus bestowed with a concrete and empirically intelligible interpretation.
Argument 6: The Problem of Evil. This forbidding and Haupt-Problem confronting a Perfectionist Monism cannot be dealt with in brief space, except by way of mere suggestion. In any case, all thought upon the subject is inadequate and fragmentary, when confronted with the empirical facts. Yet, if we can not be said to solve the problem, we can perhaps make it clear that a denial of the possibility of a consistency between the facts of evil and the view of Perfectionism cannot be made out as manifestly sound.
1. First, and above all, if we view the Supreme Good as conceivable only as a perfect Benevolence, — inasmuch as our word good seems to mean nothing if not a shared good or an interest in another, — such a Benevolence calls for objects of its regard. These objects, on our view of the good, are sufficient only if they are or include persons, capable [250] of genuine partnership with the Divine.
Now this, again, if many philosophers are not profoundly deceived,requires that such persons be possessed with freedom or power of self-determination. For, indeed, what a person, a thinker, a chooser, could be if not in part the determiner and creator of his thoughts and choices, some of us at least are wholly incapable of conceiving. Psychological atomism can give no meaning to its alleged togetherness of the atoms as one sphere of consciousness, without implying more than atomism; in short, without really introducing the single self who unifies the elements in one consciousness, by having, and, as we would say by enjoying them. Now to enjoy is to actively accept and to sustain an attitude toward. And certainly to compare value elements, to evaluate them in comparison with each other, is essentially an act. All psychological terms imply an active self who feels, who thinks, who reasons, and who penetrates all its states as their sustaining and molding principle. In any case value as willed or chosen harmony, as genuine fellowship and intercourse, implies active agents who can be valued as the cause of certain effects, as the determining source of their deeds. Now if the One Being determined all completely, all alleged thinkers, agents, wills, are really nothing but manifestations of the One Will, and are simply the One, seen truly and fully. This consequence results in Royce’s system, so far as we can see, almost as clearly as in Mr. Bradley’s.
[251] On the social view of the Good, no such outcome can be thought as consistent with the meaning of good, or with the requirement of a genuine many in a genuine One-the-fulfillment of which alone can give consistency to the idea of either plurality or unity. Therefore, we hold it a contradiction to suppose a Perfect Being who determines all. God is the Absolute Power upholding things, but his power to control personal beings is absolute in the only non-contradictory sense of being able to determine them in part,or not to have created any given one at all — or, we suppose, to destroy anyone; but not in the sense of being able to make persons not persons or their acts not their acts at all, but merely the Divine acts. On this ground we conclude thatno Being could guarantee the actions of created beings or determine them to be always good.
2. It is not manifest that the values of supreme generosity, heroism, or self-giving love, or the dignity of steadfast loyalty under stress, are conceivable in an all-agreeable and all-harmonious world. Nor, on the other hand, that these values are of secondary importance and could be sacrificed and leave the world satisfying.
3. Many who urge that Existent Perfection renders ethical impulses and aspirations absurd, and struggle superfluous, and who appear to dislike a world in which struggle would. thus become empty; are by such manner of expressions revealing their sense of the value of existent imperfections.
[252] These Existent Perfections not only, as we have seen, do not prevent but even demand. For created beings in some sense are necessarily imperfect or finite, and their liability to possible error cannot be wholly controlled by the Creator and leave them existent as persons at all.
4. Since we declare the entire prevention of evil impossible on a social (to us the only possible or consistent) view of reality, we are not obliged to regard all evil as in its given amount essential to or wholly and in compensating degree useful to the good, and therefore the struggle against evil remains a significant reality. No judgment of man as to the value of suffering can relieve him from the duty of alleviating it in the lives of his fellows, or even of himself. For we cannot know that the evil we have would not better undergo vast diminution and that the gain would not be immense and real.
5. What is good, then, in the complete sense is then, for Perfectionism, the Perfect, the Divine — and not the world He sustains.
Indeed a perfect world may be unmeaning at the end. Every child born into the world may be an increase — or, it seems, must be, an increase in its value (if there is also conservation of personality) and to the process an end or limit may not be necessary. And we have already argued that the world cannot be but one Person, and if there are to be many, all cannot — on most analyses of metaphysical [253] problems — be perfect.
Freedom, choice, responsibility, chance of error — all belong, is our contention, to any world, as capable of being consistently thought.
With these mere leading ideas the topic must be closed — so far as the present study is concerned.
Conclusion. Our first endeavor in the present section was to state the, to us, conclusive refutation of all-objectivism in the Theory of Value. In the second place we maintained that an account of the nature of pleasure, and of its relation to valued or pleasing objects and situations, is only possible if we consent to regard all value-experience as essentially the experience of something as valuable, but of something not just the experience, intrinsically as of value. In addition, to retain the significance of “value” as thus applied we must suppose an identity of meaning between the value of the experience and of the object. The resultant view of valuation as a self-realizing process involved in the object as apart from us, and also as in us and our experience, prove capable of empirical strengthening on the score of the centrality of comradeship and self-transcending or unselfish interest, in the consciousness of value.
The evidence for the objectivity of aesthetic valuation also harmonizes with the nature of value as defined. We quote here from an article by Dashiell:
They (the valued aspects of experience) stand over [254] against us in a genuinely objective sense — threatening, appealing, coercing, attracting, repelling. They appear as good, ugly, bad, magnificent, wrong, beautiful, upright. In fact, they are just these: they are goods, uglies, bads, magnificents, wrongs, beautifuls, uprights. As such and only as such are they there at all. The original material of all human experience presents itself in this intimate and face to face manner.
Moreover, if this be true of vague and novel moments, there is no warrant for maintaining that developed and intelligent moments are lacking in this character. The development and organization of the former into the latter involves no denial of the meaningful character, in fact, it requires the presence of it to furnish the very stimuli and clues to the development. This, now, is what we mean by the term “values.” Generalizing, we may say that the world as experienced is a world of appreciative qualities, of value aspects. It is not an impersonal casing that compasses us about, but a multiplicity of guide-posts that may serve our human purposes and become linked with our personal fortunes. In so far as content, “friendly or unfriendly, good or bad, attractive or repellant.”18
In harmony with this admirable statement, our view is that while critical interpretation may convince us that the world does not mourn when it rains, we cannot pass beyond the value-category, but can only, substitute more careful and cautious formulations of the value of the world. But [255] while interpretation is really dealing with the world at all — it must formulate in terms of worth. The details of such a critical and more or less agnostic (except on the general principle that the world is a realm of values) formulation of the implications of aesthetics, can not be considered here. As in science, it is a matter of assuming a disinterested attitude, forgetting private concerns (not translating or grief into the clouds [[???]]) and discovering what, in such an absorbed attitude, free from personal cares or desires and with normal sense organs, can be observed still, and even more insistently and uniformly, to impress itself upon us. In any case such applications are aside from the general point of our discussion.
Our entire view may be summarized in a quotation from Swedenborg — a man of high scientific attainments in spite of, (if one sees it so) his peculiar religious conceptions and expressions: —
“All delights of the world, resulting from its variety, are nothing unless the mind also partakes of them, for no human delights can be real without the participation of the soul, since the more refined delights are lacking: and the delights which the body and soul are capable of enjoying together are not genuine and true unless they have some further connection, and terminate in the veneration and love of God; that is, unless they have reference to this love and ultimate end, in a connection with which the sense of delight most [256] essentially consists.” (Quoted by F. Sewall in “Swedenborg and The Sapientia Angelica” — Philosophies Ancient and Modern Series, p. 27.)
We take the final clause together with the use of the words “real” and “genuine” above to indicate that the view is of the nature of pleasure as we have construed it — as in principle and inalienably, in some degree a felt and willed harmony with the Divine Self-Realization. Since this is also essentially love, and concerns itself with the welfare of a world of creatures, the knowledge of other minds and so of realities objective to us as knowers is explicable and consistently conceivable. For as the Divine Interest is inclusive of or in conscious identity with the value or the reality of all, in our own harmony or intuitive identity with the Divine we are participators in his knowledge of our fellows. As embracing something of the Life of God, we embrace also beings which that aspect of the divine life includes within itself.
Note. We may consider a final question before closing the topic of Value. If all is essentially love or unselfish Interest whence comes hate and pain and hostility. We have pointed out that a pleasure, which is at bottom not wholly self-enclosed, or capable of becoming wholly and explicitly egoistic without destroying itself, may not the less be made the object of a further pleasure, or pursued selfishly. Again we have that pleasure in pleasure which we held to be of the
[257]
essence of pleasure itself. But unless at bottom there is a pleasure in something beyond the self enjoying it, we reduce the self to an activity building pleasure upon pleasure, but the ground of the whole series absent — while in addition the empirical facts indicate that the foundation of the introverted pleasure is a genuine spontaneous interest, as of a child, in things beyond us or persons in relation to us. But, on this foundation self-seeking becomes applicable as we have argued. Hostility is a natural consequence of self-seeking.
But, how is it with rage, pain, and hatred. We can only point out that all, at any rate, are social, and betray interest in others. And, secondly, that inasmuch as love is a desire for the betterment of its object, or the service of it, it appears as a strengthening of such desire to endow it with a negative as well as a positive aspect of feeling.
There is, perhaps, detectable a propriety in the presence of a sense of rejection and of repudiation — (in the presence of the errors, self-seeking, etc., our view of reality implies) — of negative value — i.e., of pain or of rage.
In any case the essential objectivity of valuation is as much true of pain as of pleasure. We feel pain when damage is done to our bodies. A damage effecting not us alone but the race (we might desire to mutilate our bodies, but the pain would remain). And we feel grief in the grief [258] of others as naturally as we rejoice in their well-being.
No radical inconsistency appears, manifest upon this point, therefore.
——————————
Endnotes
1. The relation of this situation to the irreducibility of mind and knowledge (Section 11 (1) p.192) is clear.
2. This definition would advance us, however, if pleasure here meant not simply the pleasure taken by the particular will in getting what it wants, but an other-pleasure. Cf. p. 227.
3. As in a recombination of electrons.
4. Or, what is the attractiveness of the adaptation? The answer, the pleasure it gives leaves us, as before, with no explanation for the giving of pleasure, and with the hedonistic paradox.
5. Thus Perry’s dilemma is none for us. (Jour. of Phil.,1914, p.150). Interest both cognizes and constitutes value. It cognizes both its own value (“enjoys itself”) and the object’s. It (or it and the object together); and the second value interest also constitutes, but another interest.
6. What is sought, then, is not pleasure as simply our own; but other-pleasure as such, since only as such can it be also ours. Identity of well-being with another is the complete and harmonizing purpose.
7. On the other hand highly general uniformities of opinion as to the bare fact of significant beauty, — in, for example, a flaming sunset, a rose with its color and odor, or the blue sky, are obvious facts. A man who questioned many of these judgments in genuine honesty would hardly be thought sane — if his sense organs were thought to be healthy.
8. In any high or full sense. Any human delight has, we have seen, some native element of unselfish [[??? – review what may or may not be an erasure here]] interest. But there may be a large measure of deliberate turning in upon the subjective aspect of enjoyment.
9. And therefore sympathy in some respect however little realized in full consciousness, with other-life.
10. We may add, as illustrating the describability or definability of colors, that such a classification as “gay” colors is no mere label for bright colors, but actually describes what brightness is for experience — gives the very essence of difference between a tree trunk and an oriole for vision. And no trace of description on an other principle is available
11. It may be thought that the changes in bodily sensation caused by absence of visual stimulus is the real loss of value. To me it seems clear that the value of the color of the rose is not essentially felt as a feeling within the body, but is intuited as “out there” in the rose. The living outer wall of consciousness is permeated with its value and does not simply dump it into the bodily enclosed sphere of feeling.
12. Cf. page 236-237 above.
13. And, more generally, that sense-quality and feeling value-quality) are essentially and in principle one.
14. The pragmatist view, one supposes.
15. Cf. the striking analysis by J. F. Dashiell. Phil. Rev.,1913, p. 520.
16. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 162.
17. I.e., we cannot fully picture or enjoy their satisfaction in advance. “Know” here is not an extra-valuationa1 idea — since we take such to be impossible.
18. J. F. Dashiell, J. of Phil., 1914, p. 492-493.