Foundational theories of value usually fail either because the choice of foundations is arbitrary, or because some new faculty, unknown to science, has to be invented to account for the perception of value.  But the foundational theories may not have been completely wrong, according to Christine Tapollet, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montréal.  Her  book Emotions and Values (in French) argues that emotions are what bring us into contact with values in the same way that sight brings us into contact with the world of shapes and colors.  Just as sight gives us direct and justified access to the color of objects, so emotions give us a direct grip on values.  She cautions that our perception of value isn’t fail-safe.  For just as we can err in making color judgments, so we can have inappropriate emotional reactions.

Tappolet's point is that entities that relate emotionally to value are the "agents of action" in the world and have the capacity to change the world in accordance with their values.  Value-sensible agents will necessarily value some things above others.  They will value themselves first and foremost, if they are to be able to survive at all, and by influencing the present they change the future.  At every moment in time they are prepared to act.  If reasonable, the action will be based on a choice of the most effective option available that brings them closer to what they value.  Thus, a mother's love of her child is a value that determines her relation to her child, her environment and her life.  If the child is in danger, the mother will sense fear, and be alert to the most effective way to help the child she fears for.  Emotions, Values, Abilities and Action are all closely linked.

In the marketing industry, perhaps more than any other organized human activity, buzzwords have become as common as Mac machines and the ubiquitous iPods.  Like the overused words "quality" and "bargain", "value" has been misused and hammered by car salesmen and investment peddlers into a meaningless pulp of broken promises and worthless schemes.  The fact is that people choose one product or service over another because they perceive it as a superior value.  It doesn’t matter whether the purchase is a bottle of cough syrup at the drug store or a multi-million-dollar industrial deal; the perception of value is ultimately what drives the decision. 

But are we dealing here with a chimera of the emotions, or is value something "real" and tangible?   Regrettably, most people are of the former persuasion.  They maintain that if it can't be measured, quantified, or localized, it doesn't exist.  But the same can be said for conscious awareness; and who among us will be the first to assert that he or she does not exist?

When we examine human experience epistemologically, we observe that it consists of conscious impressions of the world around us.  Normally these impressions have a high degree of "specificity"; that is, they relate to particular properties of objects or events perceived incrementally in time and extended in space.  That we perceive discrete images of reality is not surprising, since space/time is the natural mode of human experience.  It is our impressions of these images that epistemologists and philosophers are at odds to explain. 

Scientists typically rule out any influence of emotional values on their research data.  They want the results of their experiments to be subjectively “value neutral”.  So that much of what we experience is scientifically invalid because it lacks the universality of objective data.  Generally what gets rejected falls into the category of qualitative value, whereas quantitative values—measures of magnitude, force, velocity, etc.—are (by scientific standards, anyway) those physical attributes that are universally consistent, measurable, dimensionally plottable, and behaviorally predictable.  And the epistemologists have for the most part accepted this distinction.

All value judgments clearly rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level.  A  distinction that has to be made, however, is the difference between subjective sensibility and objective knowledge.  Knowledge is the instrument of intellect; it consists of raw factual information―numbers, dates, objects, places, categories, concepts, personages, and relations.  The value of intellectual knowledge is utilitarian; it affords us universal correspondence with other human beings, facilitating the survival and advancement of mankind collectively.

When we experience an object as a "thing" by identifying its distinguishing attributes, the object becomes a useful piece of knowledge about our world.  We can put it together with millions of other finite pieces and complete a mental jig-saw puzzle representing what the experienced universe may be like.  The utility of such a picture is that it can be quantified,  communicated or published for anyone with an interest in physics or the natural sciences.  But the jig-saw image we've constructed is not a picture of Reality; it's only a picture of how the finite intellect perceives the physical universe.  Knowledge is a practical tool for dealing with a differentiated space/time world, not for enlightening us as to the nature of the Essence underlying it.

Emotional sensibility, on the other hand, consists largely of sense impressions which are proprietary to the individual subject.  These include the experience of psycho-emotional values such as pain, pleasure, desire, love, envy, and resentment, as well as the qualitative values of color, touch, sound, taste, and smell.  The intellect and the emotions together enable us to appreciate the esthetic value of beauty, harmony, freedom, morality, justice, honor, and magnificence, and their negative counterparts.  All of these values are qualitative in that they afford us a taste of the range of sensibility beyond objective, universal standards.

Perhaps no one has expressed the human affinity for esthetic value more eloquently than America's renowned poet-novelist Edgar Allen Poe.

"He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odours, and colours, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind—he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title.  There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain.  We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs.  This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man.  It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence.  It is the desire of the moth for the star.  It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.  Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.  And thus when by Poetry—or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods—we find ourselves melted into tears—we weep then—not as the Abbate Gravina supposes—through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses."  

— Edgar A. Poe: The Poetic Principle

But is there really a difference between the values we sense subjectively as qualitative or esthetic and those by which we measure and standardize objective phenomena?  No, because both lead to decisions and actions that can increase the the experience of value.  The value of practical knowledge isn’t limited to the satisfaction it brings the scientist.  Knowing what molecular structure can reinforce concrete, for example, can help us build better highways and construct earthquake-resistant buildings.  Learning the DNA code may enable us to cure genetic diseases and grow tissues in the laboratory that can replace vital organs.  A well-managed investment portfolio doesn’t just have monetary value; it affords the owner future security with more opportunity to pursue personal values.  Every utilitarian value has a psyco-emotional correlate, and every decision that an individual makes is a valuistic choice.       

The point of this analysis is that, while all vertebrates are capable of experience and some sense of being, only man is endowed with the discriminative cognizance of Value.  Why is this important?  First of all, values tell us a great deal more about our world than can be gained from objective knowledge―most significantly, that the essence of reality is infinitely more than facts, laws, principles, and measurements, even though man has no direct experience of Essence.  Also, by virtue of our ability to realize the relational values of our experiential world, we affirm our connection with its Essence.  While subjective experience is parceled out in incremental units of value linked to the things perceived, the discerning person can see that these conditional values presuppose an unconditional Source or essential cause.

Inasmuch as man is unique among the species in possessing the capability to realize value, one wonders why philosophers and psychologists have rarely, if ever, advanced the idea that there is a purpose behind his design.  Whatever else he may be for all his alleged intelligence, man's existence is value-oriented; he is a valuistic creature.  Values drive mankind: they are the basis of morality and ethics, they set the standards in art and literature, they establish the goals and strategies of human progress, and they are the individual's link to his essential Source.  How is it possible that we have missed the logic of this conclusion in six thousand years of human history?

We seek sustenance for our being, water for our thirst, color and music for our pleasure, knowledge for our understanding, love for our fulfillment, beauty and strength for our admiration, peace and harmony for our contentment.  These are all values which, by our intellect and creativity are transformed into the things and events we call our "reality".  As earth's choicemakers, we are the agents of value.  Our cosmic purpose is to realize the value of our estranged otherness (Essence) from the finite perspective. 

The fundamental ontology of Essentialism is that Essence—not being—is the ultimate reality and the primary, Absolute Source of diversity.  For diversity (contrariety and difference) to arise from absolute Oneness, there must be a "differentiator" within the absolute potentiality of Essence.  But since we define Essence as perfect "Is-ness" (all that is), there is but one attribute within the absolute potentiality of Essence that qualifies as a differentiator—Nothingness, the antithesis of Is-ness.  Essence denies that it is nothingness, and so does not possess it, even though nothingness is actualized to create a differentiated universe whose value-sensible agent is its cognizant agent.  Nothingness is the “not” of negation that divides one thing from another in the objective world, and one perspective from another in subjective experience.

The human body, like all biological organisms, is proprioceptive; that is, it can respond to sense impressions produced within its own organic system.  Also, like other primates, the human animal is biologically designed to experience phenomena external to itself.  As a sentient being he can hunt for food, seek out a mate, or flee from predators and other life-threatening situations in his immediate environment.  But man has two capabilities which are beyond those of the lower animals: innate intelligence and value-sensibility.  By virtue of these endowments, man is a self-conscious agent.  This gives him the intellectual and emotional capability to make independent value judgments and the autonomy to exercise free choice.

We are habituated to conscious awareness as an outgrowth of biological processes, such as the evolutionary development of the brain and central nervous system.  The belief that we are biological organisms is predicated on the knowledge that thoughts and feelings "involve" these physiological organs.  But to assume such a notion is to make an intellectual jump ahead of our being-aware.  For conscious awareness does not reside in brain or nerve tissue, nor even in the physical body that one identifies as "himself".  These entities, like all other beings perceived in existence, are creations of cognizant awareness.

What fills the void of our negated awareness is not the thing we perceive intellectually as a discrete being but its provisional value to us, which we acquire as part of our experience and sense valuistically or emotionally.  In other words, experience negates the otherness of a thing in order to appropriate its value for (our) self.  Because value is essential, it is non-negatable, even though we only sense it in a relational context where it determines the form of the observed images retained in our conscious memory. By incrementally reclaiming our own displaced value from otherness, we dissolve the dichotomy and restore to its beingness the sensibility of the Source.  It is man who brings value into the world.

The Essentialist's reality paradigm is therefore not "the becoming of beingness", as postulated by existentialists, but, rather, "the awareness of value".  Awareness is born as a pre-conscious void seeking to reclaim—be filled or replenished by—its estranged value.  The core self is a nothingness which, by virtue of its essential origin, has the valuistic potential to become aware.  Metaphysically we are the passive agents of a world created by our sense of value.  Experientially, however, we are active agents, free to make the decisions that will determine our being-in-the-world.  And the form of that beingness is shaped by the values we experience as a being-aware of beings, by denying their otherness while at the same time supplanting our nothingness with their value.

The essence of man's reality is its realized value. The core of individual awareness is nothingness in want of its estranged value.  And because only value can annul the nothingness of the self/other dichotomy, it is the cognizant agent’s vital connection with the essential source.  Man is linked to Essence by value, is directed by value, and ultimately reclaims the value of his being in the Oneness of Essence.  That is why, for the Essentialist,  life is the singular opportunity to participate in the process by which being becomes aware of its essential value.

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    *The first four paragraphs of this essay were adapted from a review of Christine Tapollet's

      Emotions and Values posted by Paul Dumouchel on The BabelFish Blog.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               --HP

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