Jul. 10th, 2020

timelets: (Default)
valuing has a temporal dimension: to value X is normally to see reasons for trying to preserve or extend X over time.
...
Valuing is a diachronic phenomenon in the sense that, in valuing something, one does not merely manifest an occurrent preference about how things go in the future. Instead, one acquires a stake in how things go, in whether what one values is realized or achieved or sustained. This is partly a consequence of the fact that valuing any X involves seeing oneself as having X-related reasons for action that extend over time and whose content depends on how X itself fares. And it is partly a consequence of the fact that valuing a thing also involves being emotionally vulnerable to how X fares. When we value something, then, we project ourselves into the future and invest ourselves in that future.

...valuing is both risky and proprietary. It is risky because, in valuing, we give hostages to fortune.

And it is proprietary because, in valuing, we lay claim to the future—we arrogate to ourselves the authority to make judgments about how the future should unfold. In a sense, valuing is a way of trying to control time. It is an attempt to impose a set of standards on time and to make it answerable to us. To value something is to resist the transitoriness of time; it is to insist that the passage of time lacks normative authority. Things may come and things may go, but we decide what matters.
...
The fact that valuing is a diachronic phenomenon also enables it to play a stabilizing role in our lives

--- Samuel Scheiffler, Death and Afterlife.


Ultimately, some values become or cease to be "ungiveupable" (per Moyal-Sharrock's description of Wittgenstein's hinges.)

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