Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Matter and (In)Difference

What we call matter is the principle of difference.  Material things can be differentiated from one another.  Material things are discrete and exist in relation to each other.  We can speak of beautiful things, but beauty is omnipresent.

Beauty is not material, and thus beauty cannot be differentiated in any absolute way.  It is not an ingredient of material things, the way carbon atoms may be.  Quantity necessitates measurement, which necessitate materiality.  To measure something, it must be capable of differentiation from what we use for measurement. (Because beauty is not material, beauty is not differentiated, ergo beauty is one, not in the sense of a numerical unity, but in that it forms an undifferentiated unity of many contrasts, a family resemblance.  Because it has no material limit, it admits to no ultimate description or definition the way a material phenomenon like electricity does.  A definition can only be possible by considering only a limited number of its manifestations.  Such a definition is always a lie, because it is founded in placing a material limit on a concept which has none.)

Can beauty be said to exist?  Certainly, the existence of beauty cannot be proved by scientific investigation of the world, as beauty is not material.  On the other hand, beauty cannot be said to be subjective, as after all, beauty is a concept, and "beauty" is a word, and the meaning of the word is not completely idiosyncratic.  We may never agree that Van Gogh's paintings are beautiful, but you still know what I am saying if I say that "Cypress Trees" is beautiful.  On the other hand, if I made up some word, "zalligook", which I employed to idiosyncratically label random things, you would have no idea what I was talking about.  So to be clear, the use of the word "beauty" is governed by intersubjective norms of usage.  Beauty in this sense exists, similar to the way in which we say that trees exist based on insubjective agreements of perceptual judgments.

But beauty is a concept, and beauty is incapable of measurement, and we can imagine a tribe somewhere lacking a concept of beauty, and another tribe with a sense of beauty which was completely unintelligible to us.  We can ask, why is it that our concept of beauty doesn't simply fall out of our language?  I think we have to say that beauty has not been erased from the language because beauty is something we value.  Of course, I also have to admit that beauty has a worth, it is in general, a good means of selling something.  Beauty has its fair admixture of the meretricious.

Worth I will leave alone.  It is clear that worth relates to the realm of quantity, that is to say, it is by nature material.  Value, on the other hand, is clearly immaterial.  We value our children without generally assigning them worth.  Furthermore, it is clear that worth is in some sense parasitic on value.  If someone we value dies as a result of another person's negligence and there is a lawsuit, we will be forced to place some worth on the life of our dearly departed, and if we get a favorable verdict, we will be said to get justice which will in fact be a lie.  Yet worth and value are disentangled.  The performance of certain financial transactions yield great worth, but are difficult to justify as manifesting anything in the way of value, in fact, sometimes they yield negative value.  Likewise, we may value Van Gogh's paintings, but they never yielded anything significant in the way of worth during the life of the painter.

Yet it is difficult to conceive of a society of people in which the concept of value had no place.  Certainly, the life of a traditional person is soaked in value.  There is the ritual performed before the planting of the corn, to demonstrate the value of the corn and the value of powers which sustain the corn crop through the growing season.  There is the ritual of harvest, of thanksgiving to the benevolent powers which yield such bounty.  There are the rituals performed for the dead, to celebrate their value to their families and their communities.  There are rituals of birth, and marriage, to celebrate the creation of new forms of life and connections.  On the other hand, the modern person has made progress, and has disposed with the rituals and superstitions of the past.  One way to view this progress is in the devaluation and desacralization of ordinary life.  Yet even the modern person, who mindlessly plants and harvests mere things, still manages to conduct rituals for dead relatives and marriages and the like.  People are still ready to make sacrifices for political or charitable causes.  The reduction of the human being, and the reduction of the human environment to a mere series of mechanical events in time has not been accomplished.  We have been denuded of our ancestral memories, of our historic customs and our ways, but there is still room for progress, there is still more we can forget before we become like the machines we idolize.  In fact, perversely, the cult of progress may be nothing more than the valuation of machinery over people and our collective memory.  Only a person would be called to sacrifice their humanity in order to become a part within a mindless machine.   The machine, like a sadistic killer, is supremely indifferent.

Ultimately, a humanity without value, no matter how twisted or warped, is inconceivable.  A world without value would negate the need to measure or to ascribe worth.  What is depression, if not the total devaluation of human life and the world?  For the material world to function as a space in which human forms of life are possible, we must presuppose the existence of something from outside the material world, the source of this mysterious value.  We may even initiate new rites:  the breaking of the machine.

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