The destruction of imagination
“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ―
Pablo Picasso
Beginning with
Ockham [c. 1300] whose
nominalism reasoned that only individuals "exist in reality" and that universals "exist only in the mind" ... and continuing thru the Reformation with its emphasis on every individual relating directly to God with nothing between ... the Enlightenment's increasingly
anthropocentric,
dualistic universe eventually spawned an ex-Catholic priest turned psychologist-philosopher named
Brentano [c. 1875] who taught that the relationship between mental acts of perception and the external world being perceived was based solely on the individual's intentions for the object rather than on any properties or methods intrinsic to the object in the external world ... an understanding he called "intentional inexistence". Brentano's disciples included classmates who became famous in their own rights ... psychologist
Sigmund Freud and economist
Carl Menger ... who were faithful to their master's belief in the preeminence of the subjective over the objective when attempting to make sense of reality:
- intention replaced imagination.
As late as
Adam Smith in 1776, the ancient ethical idea of objective and subjective values co-existing and diverging were entertained by philosopher-scientists from Aristotle to Aquinas with conviction:
"The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes
expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of
purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may
be called ‘value in use;’ the other, ‘value in
exchange.’ The things which have the greatest value in use have
frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which
have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use.
Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing;
scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has
scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may
frequently be had in exchange for it." — Wealth of Nations
But by 1900 objective value had disappeared from the imagination of economists:
“Despite his intellectual roots in Aristotlean thought, Carl Menger was wise enough to see that Aristotle had erred in regards to exchange. One can make no sense of the relationship of value to market prices if one regards value as a property of goods themselves. Since the properties posited as ‘inhering’ in goods, such as land and labor, are themselves traded on the market, such explanations must always beg the question as to how those ‘determinants’ of value are priced. Menger's breakthrough insight was to realize that ‘[v]alue is… nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs... and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the… causes of the satisfaction of our needs.’ (Principles of Economics). In other words, value is the name of an attitude or disposition that a particular person adopts toward a good: he chooses to value it.” Carl Menger: The Nature of Value, Mises Daily Articles, Gene Callahan, 10/17/2003
Ockham's nominalism [ie. "value is only a name we assign"] had redefined natural as positive law, justice as profit, detached economy from ecology and delinked nominal/fiat money from real resources.
Bad grammar
“My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
―
A.A. Milne,
Winnie-the-Pooh
A great part of the blame for the subversion of sound thinking about value is attributable to the simple failure of communicants to use good grammar. They persistently conflated terms like "needs, wants, desires, happiness, welfare, ethics and value" as if they were merely nuanced synonyms which they are not ... as anyone who reads the ancients including Cicero's
On Duty will quickly and easily discern. The metabolism of nature sovereignly determines
needs based on
life and disposes of everything beyond needs as
waste to be recycled ... the best intentions of humans [paving the road to hell] notwithstanding.
But, once established, such "half-truths" become accepted and serve as foundations of sand for towering, intentional human edifices that must sooner or later fall in the storm:
"In the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject-matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics. ... One aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting the scientific first principles." — Whitehead, Process and Reality
And, if the truth be told, these notions were only "half-true" from the start, because they were only "half-brained" as neuropsychologist
Iain McGlichrist is now explaining in his ground-breaking work on the hemispherical functioning and significance of the brain ... another indication that value [and thus ethics] is firmly grounded in nature after all.
Good food
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
Even absent speculating skeptics like
Hume and
Proudhon, had Locke [
Of Property], Jefferson and the new economic liberals stopped to think comprehensively and coherently about the cosmology they were implicitly assuming, they might have seen their mistake soon enough to avoid the ethical and environmental disasters we now see playing out due to their dogmatic rejection of natural, objective value and our cultural acceptance [
nomos] of positive, subjective value.
But it was not until 1926, that philosopher-scientist AN Whitehead, in pursuit of a comprehensive and coherent cosmology, examined the simple but real and natural concept of
food, curiously missing from the grandiose Declaration of Independence [from nature?] of the new liberals, and explained why the morally-laden words "property" and "robbery" come [as Proudhon, Marx and others tried to explain] from the same root word [
privo] and from the same source [life ... not human intentions or even human labor]:
"Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food . This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification." — ibid
Real science ... follow it
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
With the advent of
quantum mechanics and the arrival of
Schroedinger's cat [c.1900], it was apparent to the rational scientific historian that Enlightenment heuristics [including the
subjective value theory], masquerading as science and even accepted as truth, were outdated and in desperate need of re-imagining. To this day, physics has largely returned from Newtonian dogma [at which Newton himself would have
blushed] to a cosmological pursuit with philosophy alongside laboratory experiments and space launches. But economics remains 500 year behind the times ... and stuck in a failed paradigm ... until now.
Real science springing from philosophical speculation and imagination is beginning to posit that ... as the ancients assumed ... nature does, afterall, provide a universal metabolic scale in which the common life needs and the individual idiopathic desires of all living creatures can be quantitatively measured, compared and ethically judged ... in life units:
More knowledge about life units is certainly coming. A new era is dawning as the neo-liberal collapse unfolds. But established half-truths die hard. Much we now think we know about economics is going to be overturned ... and we are going to return to nature ... or to dust ... it's our choice.
The road behind
"I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but rescue consists in going back til you find the error and working from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not." ― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
And, of course, the choice for the capitalist culture built on subjective value theory and its logical
techne [ie. its technology] of
fiat money and credit is clear:
- press ahead culturally ... into increasingly procrustean and totalitarian versions of commercial nominalism detached from nature and real life on the grounds that the practice has become Too-Big-To-Fail or
- go back culturally ... unwinding bit by bit ... even repenting ... initially to something resembling our pre-1970's Bretton-Woods style gold-based system of global currency and commerce [as BRICS seems to be wisely doing] even if it is alongside CBDC's and/or blockchains which transparently enforce common [if not yet completely just], physical [not merely financial] rules for and disclosure of resource valuation and allocation across continents and classes.
Going back would set great changes into motion immediately ... but they appear to be coming in any case. Furthermore, the "road behind" may lead from
global gold to
local resource [including labor] based currencies, credit and commerce which have already become essential as we pass through nature's
great simplification which scientists around the planet are seeing more and more clearly with each passing day as the inevitable ending to our intentionally unimaginative [ie. ignorant], financially perverted and unsustainably wasteful practices in energy, agriculture and transportation ... the once elegant edifices we intentionally built on foundations of sand.
The importance of money: is it natural or positive?
At this point, somebody with intellect
should observe that even the wisest and most ardent
organicist [like AN Whitehead] would admit [indeed insist] that taking the road behind can never bring us to a completely natural state of
commercial realism in which we discover, define and utilize nature's
common life unit [which, thanks to West and others, we can no longer deny exists] to accurately measure, morally evaluate and justly [whether considered as subjectively profitable or objectively zero-sum] transact all the opportunity costs for every proposed action any individual might take given that, assuming the organic nature of our universe, every such transaction would set in motion a new, continuous and infinite series of dynamic consequences resulting in a perpetually, non-neutral disequilibrium. So aren't we really going back to Hayek's pragmatic individualism with which we opened this blog post? Haven't we come full circle? Back to Ockham's nominal value and Menger's intentional [aka positive] money?
Or have we simply refused to accept the cosmological idea that
reality is process not stasis ... and that equilibrium is a
"ceteris paribus delusion" which supports the inorganic notion that intentional action [aka individualism, liberty, liberalism, neo-classical economics and libertarianism] is attainable and meaningful?
We must go back even further from Hayek's individualism ... to Adam Smith's moral sentiments ... to Aquinas ... and to Aristotle ... to
a hierarchical scale combining subjective and objective value ... to particulars and universals ... to physics and metaphysics ... to intention and purpose ... to a brain with a left and a right hemisphere ... to practice and potential ... to culture and truth ... to
Economy and
Ecology ... to Creation and Creator. And we must put and keep them together in a cycle ... a
3e-system ... a process ... which, like the wheel on a bike, turns many times as the journey progresses ... but with feedback [
Education] to correct and guide the oft-straying pilgrim.
And what is to be
the medium which connects subjective to objective value ... the
corpus callosum between
Economy [left-hemispherical, positive-law nomos] and
Ecology [right-hemispherical, natural-law logos]? Isn't it obvious from the very words themselves?
We must tie nominal money to real resources ... locally and globally ... if we wish to bridge the divide between subjective and objective value ... then TRUST that Ecology will both enable and constrain Economy as needed over time.
Does this require us to adopt a beneficient view of nature if we wish to have hope for the future? And does the evidence justify taking a beneficient view?
Aristotle believed a beneficient view of the universe was not only justified but required:
“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. ... We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” Metaphysics Book XII, Aristotle, 350 BC
For those who cannot accept this organic view of the universe, there is a more humane [and stoic] point of view also expressed by the ancients and described by Whitehead as
reverent duty:
"We can be content with no less than the old summary of [culture] which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."
And, for those who will not accept duty and reverence, there is no way back. What remains for them is the road ahead into irreverent intentionality ... which does not lead to life:
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." — Shakespeare, MacBeth
