Getting Beyond Self-Worth and The Value of Human Life
Concepts like self-worth and the "value" of human life are not only misleading, but I think detrimental and responsible to some extent for the cycle of human oppression. To feel that you have worth, high worth, low worth, no worth, is to place a valuation on yourself, and when we do this towards others, we do the same. The actual feeling, for instance, of feeling worthless, despite the emotional agony, is only an experience of living inside of an emotion which seems to assign a value to the self. This valuation takes the form of a belief. Self-beliefs also seem to then make valuations about the self. It turns into a cycle of self-oppression.
Likewise, viewing human life as something which has "value" places a valuation on life. Lives become means to ends. The cycle of human oppression is also perpetuated by this process of valuation -> belief -> valuation, etc.
For the self, and therefore human life, to have some kind of "value", that value needs to be metaphysically predicated beyond value itself. The word "value" here seems both useless and unavoidable. Human life has to be metaphysically generative; the existence of human life itself must be what generates value; value must be predicated on human life, not life predicated on value.
Likewise, viewing human life as something which has "value" places a valuation on life. Lives become means to ends. The cycle of human oppression is also perpetuated by this process of valuation -> belief -> valuation, etc.
For the self, and therefore human life, to have some kind of "value", that value needs to be metaphysically predicated beyond value itself. The word "value" here seems both useless and unavoidable. Human life has to be metaphysically generative; the existence of human life itself must be what generates value; value must be predicated on human life, not life predicated on value.
Comments (19)
It's ambiguous, what "life" actually means. Do we mean the current present spectacle? Do we mean the temporally-unified structure of a life (as I do)? Or something else? A key part of the ambiguity, I think, surrounds the "ontological" distinction, or the whole beings vs Being schtick (though it's probably not exactly as Heidegger thought it was). Humans are beings which can invent all sorts of axiological and ethical paraphernalia to suit their ontic agendas, which typically involve some kind of aggression, manipulation or neglect of the Other. Thus it is said that people "deserve" things like equality, liberty, freedom, etc (even if it comes at the cost of other people's equality, liberty, equality, etc). But to go beyond the ontic and into the ontological leads us to the structural aspects of life: banal suffering, decay, death and moral impediment, all inevitable and guaranteed within the temporal structure of life. Once we arrive in this dimension it is much harder to see how any of these values could ever seriously be appropriate for beings with this Being. It's hard to see how a being-towards-death can seriously be given a positive value without the typical sleight-of-hand, the "obscurement" or "forgetfulness of Being" that leads to the exclusive valuation of intra-wordly, ontic beings and not Being.
The point I'm trying to make, then, is that within life, there can be positively valuable things, but life itself cannot seriously be seen as positive in value. That is to say, when the moral paraphernalia of the intra-worldly is applied to the ontological it falls apart.
Thanks for your reply.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The concept of the sanctity of life comes from Christianity, historically. So, the concepts you're working with here have that lineage, which I think is always helpful to remember, whatever you may or may not infer from that.
But how does the value of life come from being devoid of any positive value at all? That doesn't make sense.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Worthlessness can't be the predicate of a "right to life"; again, I don't see how any of this follows. When you say "we do not have the right to interrupt the being of someone else", this suggests value, but then your qualifier for that sentence is "because we do not have any positive value for this right to be appropriate", which doesn't follow either. Rather, if we had no positive value to predicate this right upon, then murder would be acceptable. We consider murder wrong because we do place a value on human life, regardless of whether this value is properly justified.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, it is. In this OP I'm using "human life" colloquially. Call it an individual person, or better yet, call it yourself to get the deepest grasp of what I mean. Apply the concept to yourself.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Ethics are only "invented" behind the desks of professional philosophers, and perhaps dictators, I think. For the rest of us, ethics isn't something we invent; it's something we inherit culturally, something we experience, something we know intuitively, and something we reason about abstractly (the order there is deliberate).
Quoting darthbarracuda
Right, to "deserve" equality or liberty is to suggest that we are owed something; and from who? Ourselves? God? This is another indicator that human life itself generates equality and liberty; this is the only way for these concepts to be unconditional. So the "value beyond value" of human life that I'm describing is then made up of these unconditional, existentially generated concepts.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Why is it much harder to see how value makes sense in the light of suffering? You need to take that notion even deeper. Uncovering the suffering and banality underneath the concepts of value and equality and liberty is not the final step; you're being ontologically lazy if you stop there.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But if this is the case, then hard nihilism necessarily follows. Another indicator that you need to take the ontology here deeper; either that or accept nihilism and the apparent ramifications that it has for your own life.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, maybe it does, which I think also points to the need for a "value beyond value" if nihilism is not to be accepted.
This is a good point. So, from where I stand, I currently think of life as necessarily consisting—on an individual plane—of a first-person point-of-view regarding anything that is other relative to the same first-person point-of-view; the presence of this ontic state of affairs is then in no way contingent on what we typically understand by self-awareness—on any degree of meta-awareness regarding one’s own awareness; and to be clear, I take this first-person point-of-view to be in perpetual transformations.
I believe that I get what you are saying and that it holds validity at certain plains of thought regarding reality—this when addressed more metaphysically. Yet, soberly and without any intent to disparage, I in my lexicon would term this overall argument “laconic” (both in the sense of “Spartan” and in the sense of “simpleton”). Einstein was good for quotes, including something like this, “make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”. To make it simpler relative to the requirements of a given context, then, to me is to be laconic—something I’m guilty of often enough.
I say this because, in my view, the moment you address life you address a set of first-person point-of-views aware of other. Thus, self as inescapable reference point (a technical self-centeredness) for actions becomes simultaneously established. With any such self, there are then basic value judgments of what is good and what is bad for the respective self—these ranging from the genetically innate to the most abstract concepts that humans are capable of either conjuring or discovering.
I’ll here use to “fppov” to specify “first-person point of view” for the sake of brevity.
Value will always be relative to, minimally, one such fppov. For instance, if one deems one’s own life to have no value, the question then is “no value relative to whom”? One’s self (as a fppov that holds one’s own total life as the object of one’s momentary awareness), others one is surrounded by, the species at large, etc.? Different people are likely to provide different honest answers despite these people affirming the same proposition. Same can be said of egotistic evaluations of one’s own value.
To me, there is no getting beyond self—and thereby beyond value of, firstly, individual lives one encounters (including one’s own) and, secondly, the abstraction of life in general (when it comes to us humans)—for as long as there is an ontic presence of fppovs.
So, in what I take to be states of overall health, it makes sense to me that one values one’s own total being (of body and mind) more when one does virtuous deeds than when one engages in vice (one might think of something extreme to make this general truism stand out better). And, furthermore, likewise does it make sense to me that one then finds value in a similar fashion for the individual lives of others—as unique persons or as individual cohorts—this, again, in respect to one’s own fppov.
Nevertheless, as concerns the abstraction of life in general and its ontic value, I fully agree that it is predicated on the very being of life, more particularly on the presence of human life from which values regarding this abstraction emerge, and not the other way around. As you say, “value must be predicated on (human) life, not life predicated on value.”
So a metaphysical plain of inquiry is laconic in your view?
Quoting javra
Yes, I agree and hold that view as well; I'm consciously aware of that in my argument, although I didn't make it explicit; it was implicit in that I began with "self-worth" and then moved to "the value of human life", by which I meant life on a more general scale; reaching out form the self to look at life in general. See my comments to darth here:
Quoting Noble Dust
___
Quoting javra
Yes, this is the whole point of my argument, essentially. All of those various ways to make a valuation about oneself are finite; when we do that, we're still measuring our value or worth; that measurement itself is the issue. That's why I'm looking for a metaphysical "value beyond value" that doesn't measure human value as such; of course the fppov will always measure itself finitely against a given set of measurements of value. I agree with you, but you're essentially just expanding my argument, but probably because I didn't express it well enough.
Quoting javra
I tend to agree that there's no getting beyond self, in the sense that all philosophy begins with the self. But the issue I'm trying to highlight in regards to measuring the value of human life is that it's always self-contained if we can never truly get beyond the fppov; and if value is always self-contained in this way, then nihilism follows, because all attempts to qualify a measurement of value in regards to life will always be based on something else within life itself; life is valued from within life, which is like qualifying an argument from within the argument itself. For life to have value, it has to be metaphysically predicated on some valuation that is beyond the human concept of value.
Quoting javra
This is all well and good for living every day life, for "being-towards-death" as darth says, but it again just highlights my point about value being self-contained within life, and thus essentially meaningless.
Quoting javra
I don't understand how you can agree here if 1) you consider the gist of my argument to be laconic and 2) your counter-argument is to emphasize the fppov, which is a given in my metaphysical argument for "value beyond value".
I’m short on time now, but:
Unless one wants to uphold materialism and its cherished assumption that death of the flesh is identical to an eternal death of the self … slightly more accurately and metaphysically, an eternal death of the primordial awareness on which awareness-of (hence, selfhood as we know it) is contingent … then nihilism is by no means an entailed conclusion. Nihilism is a product of materialism.
Buddhism upholds Nirvana as this end. Hinduism Moksha (though many variants of Hinduism also occur). I won’t get into other worldviews. Yet there tends to most always be found the concept of a metaphysical end as one of absolute, selfless, and superlative being: an eventual (… who knowns how many physically measured eons from now …) ending in which being/awareness holds presence in manners devoid of other-ness. And as typical of any such worldview, until then the self itself evolves into, ideally, closer proximity toward such “state of bliss”. As some say, for every rebirth there must first be a death (which obviously doesn’t hold materialistically—but is quite often addressed of the self in many religions the world over).
I’ll try to better reply latter on. Though I have to say that, even here, I feel weary of getting into what most would consider to be spiritual worldviews—even when they don’t necessarily contain the presence of deity.
But a system of value that is self-contained is inherently materialistic, thus nihilistic.
Quoting Noble Dust
What would a system of value that is not self-contained be? Even when one invokes an Abrahamic Creator Deity the system of value itself as a whole would be self-contained. This self-containment, then, to you makes all forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as only three examples of possible systems of value—inherently nihilistic and materialistic. (?) On account of my own limitations, I don’t know how to reply to this—presuming that this is an accurate interpretation of your own position.
If I’ve misinterpreted, can you better explain this conclusion which you state as fact.
I recognize the terms were vague. By self-contained I meant this:
Quoting Noble Dust
So, to "value" life is to use a concept (value) which we apply to things other than human life. I think this might be the root, or a root of the objectification of human life; of oppression.
I recognize this was probably a poorly worded argument; I keep coming back to the fact that I want to do away with the concepts of "value" and "worth" in regards to human life (because they fall short of the mark), but language doesn't allow me to do this. But intuition does. The inconsistency of terms and the muddled descriptions are a result of this problem. I feel like there's a word missing in language to say what I'm trying to say about human life. "Value" and "worth" are paltry shadows of the concept I'm (unsuccessfully) trying to evoke here.
I was thinking this sums up the core aspect of your argument:
Quoting Noble Dust
And given your latest reply, I’m now taking it that you hold disagreements with the human concept of value … maybe due to the human concept of value itself being a human construct that is not the core referent it tries to conceptualize? Am I in the general ball park?
Yes! I'm usually much more eloquent than this; actually, one of the reasons I started this thread was because I was having such a hard time articulating what the argument was. This OP was the third draft, and it was still not on the mark. Your summary there is workable, and the quote you site as the core aspect of the argument is also workable.
As I'm re-reading, though, I do have to say that I thought I made this apparent; maybe not. I appreciate your patience either way.
I’d like to remind that laconic, as I so far understand it, is also Spartan (such as in the movie 300): i.e. courageously to the point.
That should answer #1. As to #2, in my current outlook, it is the metaphysically ontic aspects of the first-person point-of-view within which the “value beyond [human conceptualization of] value” resides. My emphasis of the first-person point of view wasn't a counter argument but an intent to make the argument no simpler than as simple as it ought to be ... considering. At any rate, it wasn't an argument against what the OP concludes.
Haha. I'll take that as a compliment. Philosophy shouldn't be without courage anyway.
Quoting javra
So it's something within being? Or Being? I'm having trouble parsing through that.
Quoting javra
That makes sense.
Quoting javra
No, I didn't mean that, so you're correct here. It may have been a misstep to equate my so called "self-contained" value system with materialism, but I still haven't parsed through that properly; there's still something there. Actually, it's very simple: any given religion (other than materialistic strains of Buddhism or Hinduism) posits a system (which includes value) which obtains beyond the physical. Now, zoom back in to every day life, and our every day human concept of value, the one which you rightly described as "a human construct that is not the core referent it tries to conceptualize", suddenly seems meaningless without a metaphysical referent. So, if someone were to insist that it doesn't require a metaphysical referent (which I think is implicit in economics, politics, capitalism, communism, etc), then their view, would, necessarily, regardless of whether they are conscious of it, be a materialistic, and thus a nihilistic view.
This rings true to me. Yes, I too take it that there needs to be a metaphysical component to being in order for value-systems to not be nihilistic. Although, I’ve yet to come to terms with the notion of “meaningless meaning”, a notion which I take to be common staple within nihilisms … which, because of this, so far don’t make sense to me.
Grateful someone agrees.
I'm not familiar with a nihilistic "meaningless meaning". What is that?
Oh, my late night sense of humor. Nihilists believe that there is no basic meaning to life or existence, yet they mean things when they speak, so at least their speech is meaningful. Yet because there’s no basic meaning to life, this meaning is basically meaningless. Thus: "meaningless meaning". Or something along those lines.
So do you tend to ascribe this metaphysical aspect of being outside individual selves? Inside? Both?
Classic.
Quoting javra
Which aspect? The "value beyond value", or something else?
Yes, the value beyond conceptualizations of value. I'm working with the presumption that we're on a close enough page with what this signifies--but, to the extent this is wrong, I'd like to find out more about your opinions.
For my part, to use more Eastern slang, to me it is the Akasha—some term it void, or sky, or emptiness—that serves as the non-physical core of the first-person point-of-view—of all first-person points of view. Slightly comically and slightly seriously, in western cultures (as in many of the East) it sometimes was/is termed the fifth element … from what I seem to remember at any rate. The element that binds all other elements together. Here, to be clear, I'm addressing the five ethereal elements of fire, water, air, earth, and this fifth. Oddly, The Fifth Element comes to mind now, but that’s not quite what the potential metaphysics of Akasha would be about. Anyway, my blabbing away aside, please feel free to offer your own takes on what you interpret to be the metaphysical component of being.