Amid growing awareness that our socio-ecological crises share metaphysical roots, a renewed discourse of value is gathering momentum. Might there be any intrinsic meaning to human existence — or beyond it? Is value more than mere opinion? If so, how can we orient collectively towards more goodness in our lives and societies?
Numerous philosophers now argue that value and meaning are intrinsic properties of the universe. In this value-laden world, modernity’s “meaning crisis” arises not from an absence of available meaning, but an underdeveloped ability to perceive it.1 The implications are stark: where value goes unseen, it is easily destroyed. To halt our nihilistic spiral of ecological destruction, we must re-learn our long-neglected human capacity to perceive it.
The latest issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance takes a look at value realism and the concept of “valueception”, coined by 20th-century German philosopher Max Scheler and revived within more recent metacrisis discourse, e.g. in the works of Iain McGilchrist and David Temple.
A few quick observations -
In class last night, I asked students to list the biggest risk they see to themselves in the next couple years. One of those was “food, clothing, shelter”. That leads me to wonder if Maslow’s Hierarchy is involved with social preference for pleasure and utility. It’s all well and fine to deprecate sensory experience in a comfortable dwelling on a full stomach.
In a related theoretical vein, I am lately delving into risk analysis. From the point of view of any given system, I am defining first-order, second-order, third-order, … nth-order risk with respect to immediacy and proximity to the system itself. Not having anything to eat is first-order risk. Living in a food desert where foot is hard to get is second-order risk. Being low-income and enable to afford rent in a nicer part of town that affords well-stocked grocery stores is third-order risk. Etc. I’m wondering of Scheler’s higher ordered values might be mapped to higher-order risk abstraction? Looking beyond causes, to causes of causes, to causes of causes of causes and so on would seem to point in the direction of more comprehensive values.