(no subject)
Oct. 26th, 2020 06:51 pmNow there was nothing, in my opinion, to prevent both of them, the naturalist and the seer, from being in the right of the matter; the one correctly divined the cause, the other the object or purpose. It was the proper province of the one to observe why anything happens, and how it comes to be what it is; of the other to declare for what purpose anything happens, and what it means. And those who declare that the discovery of the cause, in any phenomenon, does away with the meaning, do not perceive that they are doing away not only with divine portents, but also with artificial tokens, such as the ringing of gongs, the language of fire-signals, and the shadows of the pointers on sundials. Each of these has been made, through some casual adaptation, to have some meaning.
--- Plutarch, Lives (Pericles).
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Pericles*.html
Note the difference between the cause of an event and its meaning, i.e. the difference between How/What? and So What?
(no subject)
Jul. 10th, 2020 06:42 pmvaluing has a temporal dimension: to value X is normally to see reasons for trying to preserve or extend X over time.
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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.
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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.)