ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1992
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

The Free Press 1992 158 strana

očuvanost 5

So everything (even nihilism) comes back around to how we can live meaningfully – the meaning in life questions. What we’re after here are not factual statements about meaning (no booming voice from the heavens will do), but the valuational definition of meaning.

Members of Homo sapiens have an evolved set of vital interests, as Singer calls them – natural impulses, desires, and drives; inclinations that belong to our natural condition. These inclinations are unique to our organism, reflective of our special struggle to promote our evolved mode of existence. Homo sapiens has an impulse to care and compassion, to love of learning, to curiosity, to adventure and competition, to aesthetic contemplation. We take interest in these things because we were designed by evolution to take interest in them (or their progenitors). It’s our vital interest in these activities and concepts that creates our value system, that defines and directs the measure of what we deem important. That is to say: we bestow value based on our unique and preestablished inclinations. There is nothing transcendental or universal about love, or beauty, or the search for truth – these are human values, human preoccupations; some versions of these values may be shared by other species, but there is nothing supra-species about them, and certainly nothing metaphysical. There is no single pattern of existence that is meaningful for all species, no ultimate values that exist a priori. Further, labels like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” “beautiful” and “ugly,” are valuational terminology, and they ultimately refer back to the impulses and motives of our species’ struggle to exist and promote itself. The genetic and cultural foundations of value are baked into us.

Human values, though, go one step further into the realm of ideals. Birds may have an inner sense of what is a good twig and what is a bad twig, and bees of what is good nectar and what is bad nectar. But does perfection mean anything to them, and do they suffer from feelings of inadequacy when they fail to live up to self-imposed standards of excellence? We have no reason to think they do. Humans, on the other hand, fashion ideals. We set extraordinary standards and then try to satisfy them. We are obsessed with perfection, likely owing to both our keen intelligence and ultra-social biology (we live in a world of imagination but also of extreme social comparison). Our human nature gives us both the vital interests that create value, and the added layer of idealization.