The Pseudo-Metaphor: Contemplations of Heaven

          I recently read a piece inquiring into the location of values in the natural world.[1]  The tone of the piece was very earnest.  The author appears to have uncritically swallowed what is marketed as the “scientific world picture” and yet cannot abandon his commitment to the philosophical position of moral realism.  Thus, he diligently tries to transmute the lifeless atoms in the void into living, breathing persons with moral inner lives.  He characterizes this quest for the philosopher’s stone as the “location” problem.

          I had two fundamental reactions to this piece.  The first, the simplest, is that whatever a “value” is, whatever sort of thing a “value” could be, it is not an ingredient in things, the way oxygen is part of a water molecule.  Certainly, there are living, breathing beings in the world that are the locus of ethical values.  We do speak of the value of human life, for example.  That life exists in space and time.  At the same time, the practice of vivisection will reveal no value at any level of the organism.  Abandoning reductionism, perhaps we can view the person as a totality, as a whole, and perhaps the forms of our language suggest that we value the person as a living unity.  However, here it seems that what is revealed compels value, but value is not what is revealed.  What do I mean?  We see the person as “possessing” or manifesting life (for life is not an ingredient either), and on account of that life, we accord them value.  If we run the operation the other way, it is possible we could see a person as possessing no value, and therefore there would be no adverse ethical consequence if we took their life.  

          We can talk about the location of a physical object.  We can describe the location of physical object, for example, in a physics experiment, or playing a game of battleship, or in giving directions to the store.  This article mentioned above seems to talk about “value” in terms of a metaphor with a physical object.  Yet our concept of “value” is not analogous to a physical object, or even a quality of a physical object.  Moreover, the article seems to presume that any concept for which the metaphor of a physical object is not appropriate should be eliminated from the language.  Thus, you can appreciate the author’s conundrum:  he is committed to narrowly limiting the sphere of metaphors (as all serious hard-thinking people are these days) to metaphors of physical objects, and perhaps their qualities and quantities, as well as committed to “objective” or “real” moral judgments.  What does it mean to the author to say something is “real” or “objective”?  We can presume it means that one can create a service-worthy metaphor between the concept of value and the concept of a physical object.

          Stepping back, we can question this whole philosophical project.  Why are the only “real” or “objective” concepts in our language those that can be analogized with a physical object?  If we presuppose that the grammar of our ethical concepts is not analogous to the grammar of our physical concepts, why should this bother us?  If we wrote a beautiful poem, should we be upset if the poem could not rendered without aesthetic impairment into the form of a sonnet?  I can only assure you good reader that these people, in fact, exist, and are doing this very important and serious philosophical work on these questions.  Perhaps we can call this condition the “Philosophical Delusion,” and note that while being contagious, it is not generally dangerous.

          Two points need to be made about these metaphors.  One, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the metaphor of a physical object to talk about ethical values, any more than there is anything wrong with using the metaphor of a fluid to talk about viral infection (e.g. it was in his head and now descended into his chest).  But when we use a metaphor, we should use the metaphor self-consciously and for the purpose of clarity.  That is to say, the metaphor makes it possible to view facets of the problem we might otherwise neglect.  On the other hand, when we are infected with the “Philosophical Delusion” and driven by the “quest for philosophical truth” into forcing the forms of our language into one metaphor that does not really fit, we end up propagating confusion.  It is perfectly fine if you want to say ethical propositions are objective or subjective or need to be eliminated (so far as you explain what you actually mean), but when you start to speak of the location of values in some literal fashion, you are speaking nonsense man!  If values have a physical location, then we can obviously give directions to ethical values, the way we might give directions to a restaurant.  An interesting premise for a fairy tale, but not a useful philosophical point-of-view.

          But here I have to stop myself, because it occurs to me that we do, in fact, make literal statements about the location of values.  For example, what is the source and destination of the good?  Obviously, it is up in the sky, heaven.  What is the source and the destination of evil?  Equally obvious, it is down in the earth.  We can even point down.

          Now I understand to certain educated readers, these statements must be viewed as unsophisticated balderdash.  But what does that mean?  I think it means that in some sense, we too would be inclined to say these things, but that tendency has been rooted out by virtue of our education and training.  Yet, I think there is something very profound in these assertions that we are inclined to miss, and that is that one could travel the ends of the Earth, speak to many people, learn many languages, and one could discover that most human beings everywhere in the world conceive of the good as being associated with the sky and heaven, and evil as associated with the ground and fire.  It is as characteristic of human beings as the use of our index finger to point.

           The question becomes, if, in fact, human beings generally do assign a literal location to the good and to the evil, why then do the philosophers reject it?  Why does the philosopher need to construct a “better” or improved account of the location of ethical values?

          Perhaps the first thing that is obvious is that human exploration of the heavens has not revealed a heavenly realm of beneficent beings so far.  At the same time, we speak of heart break without blushing, but medical science has not established beyond a reasonable medical certainty that a psychologically painful separation causes the severance of the cardiac tissue into two.  But even hard-thinking rational philosophers sometimes admit to having broken hearts.   I think we need to carefully consider these figurative expressions, and what they mean.

Ludwig Wittgenstein gave a lecture on Ethics in 1929, in which he treated some of these expressions, and noted that these expressions appear to be analogies:

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem to be using similes.  But a simile must be a simile for something.  And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it.  Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts.  And so, what at first appeared to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense.

Returning to our heart break example, speaking of a broken heart appears to be an analogy.  Obviously, through medical science we can establish that our heart is not actually broken (although we might feel pain in our chest).  But we say that we know that something inside us is broken, analogous to our heart.  What then is broken?

          The natural instinct in a culture saturated with neuroscientific just-so stories is obviously to jump for some neurological analogy.  But note that we say our heart is broken, not some region of our neocortex.  Further, medical science has not revealed that any portion of our brain is severed as a result of a separation.  Our brain is not broken either.  Let us suppose that when human beings experience separations, that scientists observe some characteristic activities in certain portions of the brain.  Is the broken heart an analogy for this brain activity?  The problem with this explanation is that our language of heart break is a grammatical convention of our language.  It is unclear how an empirical hypothesis about unknown brain activity can in any way relate to the long-standing conventions of the English language.  If heart break were, in fact, an analogy, we would be able to state the analogy, and we would know what the literal analog was.  We would not have to speculate about some hypothetical future finding of neuroscience.  It is clear that the statement is just something we say, and something we say in certain culturally prescribed contexts.  For example, we do not typically say that our hearts have been broken (except facetiously) because we experienced a flight delay (even if scientists could measure activity in the “heart broken” portion of the neocortex in these situations).

          What then is the language of heart break?  It is not our heart, a physical organ, that is broken, but we ourselves who are broken in our hearts, in our essence.  I do not dispute this statement, but there is possible confusion here.  This break in our essence is not somewhere inside, hidden.  There is not a little person inside our body reading the heart gauge and issuing descriptive reports on the status of our hearts, like an attendant in a cardiology unit.  This fetching little metaphor only produces confusion for us here.  There is no inside—when we are true to ourselves, the condition of our hearts is written into our faces.  It is the luminosity of our being.  And the assertion is not a description, it is an expression of that luminosity.  The language of heart break is not a proposition that stands for an inner, hidden state of our being, but rather, the language of heart break is a symbol, an expression, of our being[2].  It is merely a gesture, a signal, not a factual assertion.

          The symbol has no reference.  It does not stand for an inner spiritual or an inner physical process, it is nonsense, meaningless in that sense.  But in the symbol, something valuable is revealed.

          How can we then analyze the idea of the good being located in the sky, and evil in the ground?  It is clearly the experience of perceiving the world as the manifestation of hierarchy.  Note this is not a case of a sign, of the world standing for some invisible hierarchical realm.  We see the world, and we see the world as the manifestations of a hierarchy.  We are speaking of perception, not about a theory or a metaphor.  It is a visionary phenomenon, not a literary phenomenon.  Nor is the content of what we see any different from the way we view things ordinarily.  We are not hallucinating, we are not having a vision of the heavenly hierarchy.  We are simply seeing the world, the good old ordinary world, as an enchanted place.    

We can make a distinction between sensation and perception.  We have sensations, but perceptions are conceptual.  We have visual sensations, but we see things.  Perception involves seeing things as the embodiment of concepts.  We see the dining room table, not our visual sensations.  Although this way of seeing cannot be likened to a theory or a metaphor, we cannot deny that our perceptions can be wrong.  For example, we may perceive a snake, but later discover that the snake is a really a coil of rope.  But we have to ask, how can our perceptions be wrong?  Because we have conventions of language that establish empirical conditions that corroborate (or falsify) our perceptions of reality.  If we look more closely at the seeming snake, we discover it has no eyes and is not moving, for example.  And it is important to note that in this mode of perceiving the world, as the manifestation of a hierarchy, there are no empirical criteria that can verify or refute this vision.  It is, as Wittgenstein stated, nonsense, but important nonsense.  After all, it establishes the physical location of value, our philosopher’s stone.

Obviously, there is nothing to compel or prevent us from adopting or rejecting this way of seeing.  At the same time, it does strike me that discursive philosophy cannot add or subtract anything by way of further explanation or theory here.  Thus, as unsophisticated as it sounds, I am forced to conclude that if it were possible to say anything about this matter, we would have to say that the location of the good, the valuable, is in the sky.   Call it the invisible sun.

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[1] http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/01/locating-value-in-the-natural-world.html#more

[2]  If scientists discovered that excitation of a certain region of the brain stood in one-to-one correlation with people’s first person accounts of experiencing heart break, I would be inclined to say our brain expresses our heartbreak, not that our brain activity was our heartbreak.  Otherwise, we might as well say our frown does not express our sadness, it is our sadness.