THE MIND CUTS:
THE HEART SINGS

In the days immediately following the presidential election pollsters highlighted “moral values” as the key issue influencing the outcome. Liberal commentators were thus given an opportunity to point out that both Democrats and Republics have values—though the ones the Democrats espouse may even be more moral than those of the winning party. Others noted that the phrasing of the polling questions themselves had resulted in an arbitrary black-and-white distinction between candidates who did or did not have moral values, while a few pundits confounded the issue by observing that relatively few voters of either party actually favor bans on abortion and gay marriage.
This phase of the discussion had pretty well run its course when analysts took a second look at the numbers, and found that moral values did not, in fact, stand out as decisive; by this time, however, the sense of frustration and despair felt by the losing party had dwindled into a sort of painful resignation, and attempts to “understand” the election were swiftly giving way to nostrums on the order of “There’s no accounting for taste.”

There were a few weeks during all of this when I found it difficult to look at the editorial headlines without wrapping my brain into a kind of perverse semantic knot. I would ask myself, for example, “What is the difference between morals, values, and moral values?” On an off-day I might limit myself to puzzling over the difference between value and values. As luck would have it, in my dreary and aimless wandering through the emotional wasteland of post-election ire and frustration (Do I need to mention here that I was a Kerry supporter?), I came upon an article in an old issue of the London Review of Books, in which the American philosopher Richard Rorty attempts to describe what recent controversies surrounding the issue of how we know things has all been about. This article had nothing to do with politics, and nothing to do with value, either, which may explain why it drew me in. As I followed Rorty’s line of argument, however, the very absence of this second quality—value—began to assume the force of a defect, rather than a virtue, and by the time I’d finished the article, I felt that a theory had formed itself in my head that was somewhat different from the one Rorty was advancing.
What follows is a rough approximation of the path my line of thinking took, accompanied by one or two choice comments I’ve supplied from the pages of Hume, Hegel, Montaigne, and a few others, to lend added color, if not credence, to my view. I’ve left most of the complexities and objections by the wayside in the interests of simplicity. Life is simple—thought ought to be simple, too.

As the seventeenth century drew to a close, (so Rorty begins his remarks) philosophers were all in a lather concerning Spinoza’s claim that motion is intrinsic to matter. If you held to this view, it was clear that your world-view had no place for God in it, and it followed from this that you were probably a moral and intellectual degenerate and a danger to virtue.
Similarly, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, philosophers were lining up for and against the assertion of Nietzsche and others that truth has less to do with any kind of transcendental or even empirical validity than with utility and consensus. Here too, if you accepted the radical new doctrine it would follow that you were probably a moral and intellectual degenerate and a danger to virtue.
Rorty writes, “[The] dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of truth, we must answer only to our fellow human beings, or also to something non-human, such as the Way Things Really Are In Themselves.” He refers to the latter theory as the “correspondence” theory of truth, and the former, to which he himself adheres, as the “pragmatic” theory.

The first thing to be noted about these brief remarks, I suppose, is that there are actually not two, but three theories afloat in them. Rorty has conflated utility and consensus, which actually have nothing to do with one another.
Fortunately, we may immediately dispose of the consensus theory of truth. No philosopher worth his salt is going to argue that the truth is what everyone agrees on. On the contrary, the truth often stands in stark contrast to the superstitions and irrationality agreed upon by the masses. In any case, there would be no point in discussing what everyone agrees on. Truth of that sort remains forever invisible, and it would also be very uninteresting.
This leaves us with two theories, the correspondence theory and the pragmatic theory. The correspondence theory suggests that truth is a matter of matching up the stuff “out there” with our thoughts “in here.” When the two correspond, we have arrived at the truth. The pragmatic theory dispenses with questions of whether inner and outer genuinely match, and contents itself with the fact that its principles function as they should “out there.” Rorty himself adheres to the pragmatic version: The truth is whatever works.
It strikes me, however, the pragmatic theory ignores the fact that truth has something to do with thinking. Let me presume, by way of example, that dry wood burns better than wet wood. This is a pragmatic truth—it will “work” to burn dry wood. Yet the truth lies, not in the act of burning wood, but in the intellectual process of recognizing, and therefore knowing that dry wood burns. Once we have agreed to this fairly obvious point, we find that we’ve returned to the correspondence theory of truth. A thought—”dry wood burns well”—corresponds to an external or objective reality—the burning of wood. The pragmatic theory may be described, then, as a correspondence theory that limits itself to the truth about events.
But is this really the case? A more careful look at the situation suggests that a pragmatic truth like the one we’ve just described refers, not to an event, but to a type of event. In point of fact, dry wood doesn’t burn well in every instance—for example, when the wind is so strong that the kindling point cannot be reached. The correspondence between thought and event isn’t universally valid. It’s only generally useful.

There is a way of thinking that moves us beyond such generalities, and it’s an important one, although Rorty fails to mention it. I’ll give you an example: “On that Fourth of July my uncle burned the wood.” There is no practical value to such a statement; no attempt is being made to formulate a general principle of combustion to be of use in other situations. We might call this a statement of historical fact.
Some statements of this type are true, of course, while others are not. Once again we find ourselves in the realm of correspondence, as we attempt to ascertain who actually burned the wood, and when. It will not do, however, to verify the truth by setting a match to a new pile of wood. We’re dealing with an event that has already taken place, and an entirely different methodology applies to determining whether the thought and the event truly correspond.

Without pausing to delve into such issues, let me suggest that an even more interesting type of statement remains to be examinined—in my view the most important of all. A classic example of it would be “My uncle was wise to burn the dry wood.”
The difference between this remark and the previous one should be obvious. The addition of the word “wise” takes us to an entirely different order of thought, like Dorothy stepping out of her Kansas house and finding herself in the colorful world of the Munchkins. A word like “wise” is stirring, and challenging, and sometimes it can be inspiring, too. It constitutes a value judgment of the sort that can be the occasion for endless debate.
We commonly hear it said that such statements are neither ascertainably true nor false—they are merely matters of opinion. I would propose, on the contrary, that statements of the type “My uncle was wise to burn the wood,” are the only ones that can be true. Truth, in short, is a matter of determining the value of events.

At first glance, it might appear that what we’re examining here is simply another type of correspondence theory. We have an event “out there” and a corresponding value “in here.” And yet, in this case the event “outside” is very specific—a time, a place, a setting, an action—whereas the idea of wisdom “inside” remains vague. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that another observer would see only foolishness in the very act we’ve described as being wise. This difference of opinion does not derive from differences in perception—as if one of us had been given a faulty view of the event. No, it’s a matter of differing judgment.
Upon entering the world of judgment, we must bid farewell to notions like “objectivity” “certainty” and “verifiability.” I think it would be worthwhile to take a look at these alleged attributes of truth, one by one. Even a moment’s reflection ought to convince us that they have nothing to do with the issue.

1) We have all been “certain” of things that have turned out not to be true. It follows logically that certainty is not an attribute of truth.

2) To verify means to establish the truth of. This is invariably taken to mean “demonstrate” or “do again.” We can “prove” that dry wood burns better than wet wood by building fires with both types of wood. The key word here is “type.” All matters of verifiability entail dealing with the behavior of “types” of things. But strictly speaking, life is a matter of specific, unique events. And the things we really want to know about these events have less to do with whether they can be generalized into pragmatic laws, than in whether they embody the values that make life worth living. In any case, the fact that life is a matter of unique events, whereas demonstration pertains to types of events, suggests that that whatever can be demonstrated, cannot be true. Truth is not a matter of types.

3) As for “objectivity,” the only thing that is truly “objective” is an object. Truth, however, is not an object.

Too many studies of “truth” run aground in efforts to verify, latch on to, or demonstrate things. Meanwhile, in daily life we’re overloaded with minutia concerning the long-term effects of eating celery, say, or the five best ways to remove ice-dams from the roof. These truths have been verified in studies that will impress us until other studies “prove” the opposite. Yet the things we really need to know about are of an entirely different order. The invasion of Iraq was wise. Or not. And why. The Rembrance of Things Past is a great work of art. Or not. And why. Such blunt evaluations soon become interwoven in the extended analysis and description of events that we call history. This realm of inquiry is still very much with us, of course, but for the most part its enduring significance goes unrecognized. (Rorty, for eample, fails to mention it.) Opinion? Speculation? Recreation? What I am suggesting is that truth is a matter of assaying the value of events. There is value everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, though it differs at every point in character and intensity. Against the physicist’s universe of energy and gravitational fields, we need to set the philosopher’s universe of value-laden events—much more varied, interesting, and fraught with cosmic significance.

You may observe, by way of criticizing the lofty heights to which I have elevated historical judgment, that there is always a personal element involved. Well, yes. No one has apprised the situation more concisely, perhaps, than Montaigne, who once observed:
Things in themselves perhaps have their own weights, measures, and states; but inwardly, when they enter into us, the mind cuts them to its own conceptions.
With common-sense penetration into the complexity of the issue, Montaigne notes the character of the object as object, with its own “weight, measure, and state,” while also observing that our thoughts reflect our unique personal categories of judgment—the way we “cut” things—with equal strength.
Many philosophers of renown have missed this point entirely. To take but a single example, the young Shelling, in a letter to his room-mate, (February 4, 1795) outlines the progress in the development of his own thinking in the following terms:

I am immersed in the work of Spinoza—don’t be astounded. Do you want to know why? For Spinoza, the world was everything (the absolute object, as opposed to the subject); for me, the ego is all. The proper distinction between critical philosophy and the dogmatic seems to me to lie in this: that the former derives everything from the absolute ego (determined by no object), the latter takes all from the absolute object, that is, from the non-ego. The latter, in its most developed form, leads to Spinoza’s system, the former to the Kantian. Philosophy must derive from the unconditioned. Now it is a question of wherein the unconditioned lies, in the ego or in the non-ego. If this question is decided, then everything is decided. For me the highest principle of all philosophy is the pure, absolute ego, that is, the ego insofar as it is simply the ego and not determined by any object, rather is posited by freedom.

Shelling, in attempting to come to grips with the fact that life has both an “inner” and an “outer” component, finds it necessary to establish which is the reality, and which is the shadow.

The man to whom Shelling wrote his feverish letter was G. W. von Hegel. Hegel would later arrive at the idea that to choose between zones would be a mistake. Neither zone dictates the shape of the other. Rather, the order of our thoughts comes to reflect, with increasing accuracy, the order of the natural world; while at the same time, our values—our categories of judgment, as it were—make themselves manifest in the world, little by little, through our actions. “It may be held the highest and final aim of philosophic science,” he suggests, “to bring about, through the ascertainment of this harmony, a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason with the reason which is in the world—in other words, with actuality.”

Hegel’s use of phrases like “reason in the world,” and his insistence that reason and actuality are the same thing, has long been a source of confusion to students of his work. It might help us to consider that the intelligibility of an event—it’s coherent form, we might say—is the same as its actuality. Many events have very little form, of course—the traffic jam, the Britney Spears tune, the hamburger wrapper drifting across the parking lot—but these events are not fully “actual” either. In Hegel’s view, things are more or less actual—more or less real—depending upon how much value and coherence they possess. At one point he observes that “God is actual, he is the supreme actuality, he alone is truly actual.” Common life, the stuff of the here and now, is only partially and imperfectly real or actual. As are we ourselves.
In Hegel’s view, life is a long process of making ourselves more real, by participating in the ongoing development of the actual. It would all be a lot more difficult than it is, except for the presence of that thing which he calls “the concept.” We might be better off referring to it as the Universal. The expression may sound gassy, metaphysical, abstract...and empty. It’s just the kind of word that has given metaphysics a bad name. I find it fruitful, even indespensible. Well then, what is it?

Hume once remarked “To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.” A moment’s reflection will show us that this simply not the case. To see is to perceive, by definition; but to feel, to love, to hate—these are emotional responses to experience. They possess that confluence or clash of inner and outer elements, which are the basis of true thought. But the experience of emotion is not, in itself, an act of thought.
For example, when we’re moved by the sight of a field of daffodils, or the sound of a string quartet, the reaction is spontaneous, unbidden—it takes us by surprise. Dumbstruck with pleasure and admiration, we can do no more than to attribute a degree of value—in this case beauty—to the experience. We may advance to a conceptual level, by determining what the “design” components are, that have so moved us. If we’re unusually dedicated to the endevour, this line of thinking will lead eventually to a definition of beauty based on design components—a personal “aesthetics,” as it were.
It never happens the other way around, however. We don’t conjure aesthetic principles out of thin air, observe that they apply to a given experience, and deem that experience beautiful as a result. That’s not what beauty is. The emotional reaction comes first, the evaluation and conceptualization come later.
Similar remarks could be made with respect to goodness, which is often codefied in law, but invariably interpreted and modified by the intuitive wisdom of those who sit in judgment over individual cases. And so it goes with other values.
Of course, it might also happen, that upon seeing a field of daffodils, we may be moved to express our affection for the beauty involved through the simple and largely intuitive act of sketching the field. And it’s also possible that, being inspired by the intelligence and insight of a scholarly work, which rings true in every way, we may be moved to apply the same discipline and reflection to some other controversy or conundrum.

This vary brief analysis leaves many of the complexities unexplored, but one element that needs to be introduced is universality. It’s a shady and disreputable concept, perhaps, but we cannot do without it.We might rehabilitate it to a degree by noting that it refers, not to things that everyone can agree on, but to that mysterious element that each of us, as individuals, share with the cosmos. I know it sounds a little spacy, but there’s no getting around the fact that at times of unusual transport or insight, we sense a participation in life that’s genuinely, if only mildly, cosmic. There are affinities between “inner” and “outer” that run far deeper than we can fully comprehend, and we are attending to such things every time we register the value of an experience or an event. Borges touched upon the principle as it applies to poetic creation very aptly: “To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing.”

Philosophy concerns itself with the logic of the relations between experience, emotion, expression, and conceptualization. One key to all of this lies in the question of what it means to “partake” of something. We would have no difficulty with the idea of partaking of a plate of cheeses, but how does one partake of the good, or the beautiful, or the useful?
As usual, the answer is a little slippery. When we meet up with beauty, for example, we partaking of it in the act of appreciating it. When we create a thing of beauty, we partake of it even more. When we turn to the latest study of horticulture or world affairs, hungry for the life and value to be found in the details, we partake of life. When we plant a garden or run for public office, we perhaps partake even more fully. Whenever we get to know another person well, we are rooting ourselves ever deeper in the ongoing development of stuff.
The universality that we make contact with whenever we partake of life goes by many names—development, conflict. Oppositions between real and ideal, inner and outer, love and death, freedon and necessity, are all reflections of the central and abiding dialectic that animates everything of value, everything that’s real.
The Hegelian logic explores these realms without much clarity. Perhaps it’s just as well. The universality of dialectic cannot be defined “in general” because it is not a type among other general types. In attempting to define it, we resort to expressions—life, love, form, vital energy—that are hardly less vague than the term universality itself, because by its very nature universality is always concrete. It shows itself at any and every point where “inner” and “outer” life meet.
There would appear to be a contradiction inherent in the idea that the universal is always concrete. Yet as Hegel once famously remarked “... contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only insofar as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and vitality.”

Although pragmatic issues are always with us—remember the dry firewood?—I have tried to suggest in these remarks that there is an entirely different order of truth contained in judgments of value, on the order of “My uncle was wise to burn the wood.” Such truths cannot be demonstrated—they can only be pondered or partaken of. Perhaps there was a painful necessity involved in my uncle’s simple yet controversial act, which destroyed the antique furniture, though it helped my ailing aunt through a difficult night. These are precisely the things we need to know about if we’re going to bring coherence and purpose to our lives. It might be better if we referred to this “act” of truth as as an apprehension, rather than a judgment, for there is nothing arbitrary or high-handed about it. Value presents itself to us with greater or lesser force almost everywhere we turn. It also sleeps in our substance. We think the truth whenever we recognize value. We live the truth whenever we bring value forth into the light.