The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose concept of reality was based largely on the semiotic meaning of language, is revered by postmodern objectivists who tout his major opus, the Tractatus, as the answer to all philosophical questions.  Wittgenstein's linkage of meaning and usage can be illustrated with a single example.  At one point in his argument Wittgenstein says:

How do I know that this color is red?—It would be an answer to say: I have learnt English.

His point was that meaning has a social character––intrinsically.  What makes it a matter of course to apply a concept in a new circumstance, or to continue a numerical series in a particular way, is one's training in a linguistic custom or practice.  Recently the American philosopher John McDowell expressed agreement in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics:

How can a performance both be nothing but a "blind" reaction to a situation, not an attempt to act on an interpretation, and be a case of going by a rule?  The answer is: by belonging to a custom, practice, or institution.

According to Wittgenstein, "institutions" rest on a bedrock of shared behaviors or natural responses.  This bedrock lies below any question of justification.  Part and parcel of our human "natural history", it is what makes linguistic practices possible.  Likewise, McDowell maintains that we cannot trace value experience to qualities in a world which is value-neutral, and that the foundational assumption of values is therefore unsupportable.

This conclusion, to my way of thinking, is an example of not seeing the trees for the forest.  It is based on a normative or social definition of value, avoiding the observer's perception entirely.  Wittgenstein was looking at a subjective phenomenon objectively, as a behavioral response.  Epistemology isn't concerned with what the subject says about a perceived value; what matters is what he senses and what produces the sensation.  It isn't even a matter of establishing whether what I see as red is what you see as red.  Because awareness is proprietary to the individual, my image of red and that of any other person cannot be identical.  Thus, no matter what is sensed by one individual, it can never be a part of any other individual's awareness.

Values, like truth and goodness, are "realizable" attributes, which means they are not only relational with respect to the objects experienced, they are relative to the subject of that experience.  To equate values with "properties" is fallacious.  While we can define the color red as a visual property that corresponds to a particular wavelength in the prismatic spectrum, that does not define the awareness of red but only its universal referent.  Thus, a color-blind person looking at a red object may actually see what others would call green or a shade of gray.  But even if it could be determined—let's say, by a brain scan—that the person was indeed seeing red, his particular sensation does not have a subjective correspondent: it is his image alone.  As an axiom, X's awareness of red does not equal Y's awareness of red.  Properties are universal; values are proprietary to the individual subject. The proprietary mode of this experience can be symbolically expressed as X_R ≠ Y_R, where R = "seeing red" and X and Y are individual observers.

For the Essentialist, Value is foundational.  Indeed, it is the value of a thing that we seek in our experience of the world.  Value, whether a tactile sensation, color, sound, taste or smell, is what fills our awareness and is retained in the memory of our experience.  We realize many kinds of value, of course, ranging from our emotional reaction to esthetic beauty to our intellectual appreciation of freedom and justice.  But if value is neither a property of the thing observed nor an attribute of the observing subject, where does it come from?

The epistemological argument is that if value has a desideristic or emotional basis, it is a psychosomatic phenomenon which cannot be primary or innate in the objective world.  And the epistemologists are right.  Value is subjective—once it is made aware.  But the source of perceived value is essential; that is to say, it "resides in" Essence.  And, just as rocks and trees and houses are essentially not differentiated objects, value is essentially not relative.  What we psychically apprehend is differentiated "otherness".  We sense the value of this otherness incrementally while cognitively constructing the objects by which they are identified.  In other words, otherness is primary, and Value and Being are secondary or derived experience.

In order to understand the derivation of Value, we must return to fundamentals—specifically, to the ontology of Essentialism.  I have often made the case that Essence is absolute and immutable, and accordingly can have no specificity.  The philosopher may say, as I have, that Essence is the "perfect embodiment of value", which is a euphemism in the same way that Eckhart's "Is-ness" is a euphemistic reference to God.  But the Absolute cannot logically be defined in terms of properties or attributes because the identity of an absolute transcends differences.  Nicholas of Cusa resolved this descriptive limitation by positing his First Principle as the "not-other".  We believe that all otherness is derived from a first principle (Essence) which does not change from its absolute to some differentiated state, yet has the potentiality to "actualize" an other which is differentiated.

The creation of an other by an absolute is a cosmic mystery.  By all the logic of the most brilliant minds of history, this is a logical impossibility.  And yet it happens, which means that the logic of relations is inadequate to deal with Absolute Essence.  But rather than throw up our hands and say "what does it matter?", we have applied Cusan logic to the ontology of Essence.  Our reasoning follows this paradigm.

If Essence is "not-other" and beingness is our experiential other, then experience deceives us.  What appears to be the object of our experience is actually something else—something that we ourselves create.  Plato and the Greek philosophers acknowledged that we experience the properties of things but not their essences; however, by pluralizing "essence" they demonstrated their belief that different things have different essences.  In the 18^th century, George Berkeley introduced phenomenalism to philosophy with the classic epistemological assertion "to be is to be perceived."  Phenomenalism is the view that objects are not distinct entities that we perceive with our senses, and that perception itself is all that really exists.

To the extent that Essentialists view objects as constructs of the intellect, we are phenomenalists.  But we also believe that actualized existence is a self/other dichotomy, and that to intellectualize an image of being from other we need to be aware of the other pre-intellectually.  Pre-intellectual awareness is best understood as organic sensibility to value, the object of experience being extrapolated [intellectualized] from a given set of values.  Thus, when we sense a brown column with a rough texture and branches sprouting from the top, our brain tells us that we are experiencing a tree.  The values are indexed in our neurons so that any time we sense the same set of values again, we "know" that what we are observing is a tree. Likewise, to recall a tree from memory, our brain retrieves the values corresponding to the object, and we visualize a tree.  Every individual must go through this process at least once in his/her life for every object that is recognized.

But how does this value epistemology resolve the ontological paradox of an other that is really "not-other"?

Quite simply, value is not other.  Unlike the tree intellectualized by the observer, and the observer himself, value is essential.  It is not contained in the tree, nor is it either indigenous to awareness or innate in existence.  Value is not a universal property, so it cannot be shared with others. In fact, without a referent value is non-existent—a nothingness—just as pure awareness is a nothingness.  And that is why philosophers and epistemologists are hard put to define it.

In order to make sense of this concept, we must return to the fundamental ontology of Essence and ask: What happens when Essence negates nothingness?  If we envision Essence as "the fullness of Being", as Eckhart did, then nothingness is a void in Being.  For Essence to negate this void would be a self-canceling tautology.  But if Essence is "absolute potentiality", as Cusa postulated, then nothingness is the absence of absolute potentiality, and its negation could conceivably manifest a reduction of either potentiality or absoluteness, or both.  Inasmuch as "absoluteness reduced" equals finitude, which carries with it the reduction of potentiality, this is the ontology that best explains finite existence and its reduced-to-relative values.  

From a metaphysical perspective, the most obvious result of negation is the actualization of difference.  The primary difference is the separation of awareness—actualized as the potential self—from Essence—actualized as the objective other.  (Forget about the plurality of selves for the moment; that division is the consequence of a subsequent negation.)  The point to remember is that, metaphysically speaking, there is no nothingness.  Essence has negated it.  And, because there is no nothingness, there is no other: in actuality, otherness is a proprietary illusion characterized by contrariety and change.  Essentially, actualized existence is the not-other theorized by Cusa.  But we don't experience existence essentially; we experience it differentially.  From a metaphysical perspective, actualized not-other is a division between two complementary "value-deprived" essents that account for self and other, subject and object, awareness and beingness.

What we experience as "nothingness" is empty space, the "voids" in existence.  Or, more correctly, nothingness is what we do not experience.  Actualized in existence, voids and spaces are the nothingness that divides what we intellectualize as finite entities in time and space.  But Essence is absolute—even in actualized existence—so all voids and empty spaces are "filled" with the Essence that we do not experience.  Proprietary awareness also has its source in nothingness, for pure awareness, like pure otherness, is a negate, an essent that is denied an essential value.  While the value denied to awareness is beingness, the value denied to beingness is awareness.  Existence is therefore a dichotomy consisting of beingness and awareness as co-dependent contingencies.

Pre-intellectually, the essent-value of beingness fills the void of our awareness, making us a "being-aware".  Our experience of otherness is a dual process that involves both the awareness of value and the intellection of being.  To appropriate the essent-value for our selves, we extract it incrementally from the essent [otherness], which leaves the appearance of a particular object in its place.  The beingness of this object represents what remains of the essent when it is reduced by the value thus appropriated.  The object then becomes a being made aware, or simply being-aware.  That expression also defines our own self-identity, in the sense that each of us is a being-aware.

The act of experiencing [intellection], therefore, is a negation of what one might call the essent's "beingness-value", or simply essent-value.  Awareness negates (or, as Hegel says, "annihilates") the being of a thing in order to appropriate the thing's value for itself.  But, in the experienced world, all values are relative; that is, they have specific referents.  It is the intellect that models the object from the values perceived.

To illustrate this process with a simple example, let's suppose that you have just installed a new PC in your work room.  You turn it on and your attention is drawn to a red light at the bottom of the monitor panel.  If we chronicle your experience in slow motion, what initially catches your eye is the color red.  You are aware of seeing red, which is to say, redness is the value appropriated by your awareness.  The next step in the process is intellectual; you need to account for this experience.  You assess the redness in terms of its relative brightness, and your brain recalls one or more similar experiences in the past, from which you conclude that it is a panel light. 

As you check the panel for other lights, the monitor comes alive, displaying a white screen.  Again, this is something you expect from previous experience, and you compare the softer brightness of the white phosphor screen with the brighter redness on the panel, providing further confirmation that the red light is an LED.  Even though redness is a value, not a thing, and you haven't seen anything but a red light on your PC panel, you have mentally constructed a light-emitting diode mounted behind the panel, which is fairly certain to be the objective source of the red light.  Epistemologically, it is the value of redness which, together with relational information gleaned from memory, enables you to negate (differentiate) the object from otherness.

Does this epistemology imply that the panel light would not exist if you didn't intellectualize it?  Yes, and this is the point of phenomenalism.  Things come into existence through the intellection of appropriated values.  You see red because this particular color value is presented to your awareness in the differential space/time mode of your experience.  If you had no intellect—no reasoning capability—the sensation of bright red would be the full extent of this experience.  But since you have a functioning brain and a neural network that relates this sensation to a known experiential referent, you are able to connect the perceived value to an "objectified" source.  Everything you know about the universe is acquired in this manner.  As a being-aware, your physical reality "becomes aware" through your intellection of proprietary value.

If you have managed to follow this epistemology, you may be wondering why experience at any given moment is dependent on one particular set of values, rather than any other.  This is a good question for which I do not have a ready answer.  Human beings are the subjects of a dynamic world whose constants are change and difference, and these parameters reflect the negated actualization of a static, undifferentiated source.  To attempt an explanation as to why we are presented with event A before event B is tantamount to explaining why the planet earth orbits between Venus and Mars, as opposed to some other arrangement.  I can only assume that the sequence of experiential events belongs to the category of absolute knowledge which is inaccessible to the finite intellect and can only be understood in terms of Cosmic Principles.

In any case, the next time you are "seeing red" for any other reason than a blow to the head or an injury to your pride, try to catch yourself in the act of objectifying its cause.  You may be surprised to discover that there is more to intellection than relying on a single memory. Indeed, if you are aroused from a deep sleep by seeing red, you will witness your own brain in the process of working out the source.  (One caveat for the reader: Should the red you see happen to be flashing, it would probably not be advisable to spend much time on cerebral introspection.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            --HP           

 

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