What is the value of the value in the world of philosophy?
Once on the back of a card I read a paragraph explaining how remarkable it is that humans can give values and importance to people and things. It reminded me of a schoolteacher who once said, “what you give value in life you slowly become that, so it’s important to give value to the right things in life”. It made me wonder at that time, how to know what are the right things and can we even choose to give value to something, isn’t it that we just give values without even realizing it?
Valuable life of ours.
To a recognizer, life gives the impression of rarity. Against all the odds and dangers, threatening the fragile nature of life, life appears as the most precious thing there is in all of the universe, and because we ourselves are alive and have the capability to recognize life, we by default becomes precious, even if to no one else, at least to ourselves for sure. We consider ourselves and our loved ones, the embodiment of preciousness.
Thus, we are obliged to stay sustained, to continue living at any cost, at any rate, even if life sometimes conclude to be worthless to us, we carry on with this belief that life is incredibly significant in some mystical way to the point of divinity.
There is this stigma attached to death, that it takes away something so significant and remarkable, that the loss is irreparably enormous. This belief doesn’t stop at literal life and death, it only begins here, it goes deeper, and it spreads wider from here on out. Everything related to our lives has an incredible significance to us, our relations, our careers, our image, our thoughts, our opinions, our approvals, our disapprovals, our ideologies, everything. Everything related to us has an almost similar significance as our life itself in our minds.
If you think that in our heads, life’s significance and significance of things related to it, have completely different nature, recall the time or times when you have felt disrespected or the times when your image had been damaged, all those times what you had felt is reduction in significance of your life, like you yourself had reduced to a great degree, almost like death had approached you and crumbled your existence to a bare minimum. Your ideas, opinions, your relations all carry the weight of your existence, that’s why, any assault at them feels like an assault on your existence itself, like you are being killed.
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Bounded by what you care.
Significance in itself doesn’t mean anything, nothing is objectively significant, and significance is not importance. Something can be important for something to happen but is that happening significant is a completely different matter. Oxygen is important to continue living, but how important is it to continue living, depends on how much value you give to living. What significance thrives upon is VALUE. Saying it is significant is just another way of implying that something is valuable. We say significant other for a reason.
We give values to things, people, feelings and thoughts as we rate them subconsciously as per their usefulness.
Values are a big part or should I say a most salient part of our whole psychology, and is considered a really good thing, except…..it’s not that good actually. There’s a curse attached to the value, whenever you give it to something, the thing sooner or later becomes your suffering. Why do you suffer when someone disrespects you? It’s because you have given a lot of value to your own image. Why do you think it hurts, when a loved one does something against you or when they don’t love you back? It’s because of your given value to the responses of that person. Why does it hurt when a desire remains unfulfilled?
It’s because you have given a lot of value to your desires and wants, you feel that they are really significant for your existence.
Pleasures are significant because we add value in having them. Achievement, success, all is relevant in terms of our given values. Everything is significant directly proportional to our given value to it. Things don’t hurt; our given value to that thing hurts us. Obviously, I am not talking about physical pain here; however, even physical pain can vary greatly with the change in value or with the change in the course of value. For example, it can be more bearable to take the pain of chopping an already rotten useless arm than of chopping a healthy one, even at the same rate of sensitivity.
I know that can be a bit extreme example for some, so let’s talk about a more relatable one, did you ever have a toothache, a pain inducing tooth reduces its value to us, and if the pain is unbearable, the value goes in minus.
By design we become eager to get rid of things which are MINUS in value to us, even if it is our own LIFE. Note that the extraction of tooth is still going to hurt, but we are far more prepared and acceptable to this hurt than if it had come uninvited.
Given value to an idea, thought, thing or person is destined to become suffering because value at its core is CONTINUOUS EXPECTATIONS. Value acts like an amplifier to our sufferings, and if we go in depth, the core reason of our sufferings.
Value and usefulness are a couple for life.
Now, what about the good side of value; sure, there is a good side to it……. right? It is integral to us to give significance to ourselves and to others. We care about people, and we cherish them, this is how we grow together as a society, if we couldn’t care about others, there couldn’t be love and other positive emotions that we possess, however, the problem with value is that we can’t give value to something that is not useful to us in any way.
Now, I said useful, but usefulness here is in more literal sense than usual. If something is giving you anything that you want in any way possible, it is useful to you.
Look little closer.
This is not so easy to spot all the time, this can be really subtle, but there are no exceptions to this. We can only give value once we realise it can give us what we want. It’s obvious when you want something tangible from a person or a thing, but it’s really subtle when what we want is of an abstract nature.
To be real here what we want is always abstract actually. We give value to money because with money we can have many tangible things in our possession, but what you want from those tangible things is abstract, and that is what you actually want.
Moral of a moral.
Even our moral worth comes under the same premise. We give value to morels because by being a morally sound person or by doing good deeds we feel better about ourselves and even more to others which again makes us feel even better. If something gives us even a minute speck of preferable feeling, it is valuable to us, and if not at all, then it’s nothing to us, no matter how essential it is in other ways.
Our positive emotions are all part of this business in one way or another. Positive or negative, if something is valuable to you, you must be gaining something from it, and because of the abstract nature of gain the nature of exchange sometimes stays out of our awareness. If the feeling hits the spot, we can even die for someone or something.
Pride to die for…
This is why we attach extreme pride with military and such affairs; extreme pride is a good enough feeling to die for. Pride gives you a sense of achievement, relevance, worth, competence and significance all at once, even if it is for the last few seconds. If you can make someone, feel that they are gaining something incredible, they can even accept death as a price.
An ethical Delima with value.
It is not as bad as it sounds that we can only do good deeds when and if we can gain something in return because this is how it is supposed to be. We are selfish not by our nature but by our design, but then why world is not an ideal heaven? Why is everyone not doing “good” all the time?
This is where the problem with the value comes into play. Continues expectations from anything are destined to end in misery and disappointment. We often get disappointed by the RETURN from good deeds just like we get disappointed with everything else, however, the RETURN from good deeds and positive acts are more subtle than the bad ones hence we often miss it from far.
The Problem with good.
If you do charity, the return is not going to be more wealth; it’s simply going to be in the form of satisfaction, pride and maybe respect and if that proves to be insufficient, your value for good deeds will reduce to a great amount. This is why people don’t care about morals, ethics or character all the time. The gain from so called selfless acts are usually not as evident as other gains, mostly these acts are looked upon just as a sacrifice, hence, the value of morals is really great ideologically, but on the practical level reality is not that fascinating.
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What you actually give value to.
Value doesn’t increase our aptitude for morals; usually it just decreases it, though this is also true that whatever aptitude we have towards morals is also due to our given value.
As we grow up, we learn so many different beliefs according to our surroundings and environment, but then there are beliefs that are intuitive, that we don’t learn but we are born with. These kinds of beliefs are closer to our nature than to our upbringing. A belief which is embedded in our souls is that I AM SIGNIFICANT. All we know and will ever know is just ourselves, outside of us the world is just a speculation, an everyday assumption.
The point is.
For you, you are the most if not the only real part of this world. You are bound to be significant. There’s an old Egyptian saying that when God creates a person, he whispers in their ear “you are the most significant and special creation I have ever created, you matter the most, everything else is just there to be there”, and of course he whispers this to everyone.
Giving value is not the point, we ourselves are. Anything that reinforces us in any way, we give value to it, anything that strengthens our self in any way, we give value to it, anything that appears to fulfil us in any way, we give value to it. Actually, we can only give value to ourselves.
What can change?
I mentioned before that this is a subconscious process and we give values without even knowing that we are doing it, or more correctly we just realize values, so there’s no chance for anyone to stop it from happening, but that’s before realizing it, after realizing something’s value for you there could be a chance you can change it, but even if you could change it, how will you survive in this world without giving values to stuff, I mean, why would you put efforts in something if it has no value for you?
It is true that value is required for even basic functionality in this world, but amount of value is the real issue here. One can make a distinction between value to just function properly and value beyond that. How much one is invested in the process is the real question here.
This can.
The amount of our investment in people, things, situations and happenings decides the amount of our suffering. To do things just to pass by, just so you can function at least, can make the real difference, but then again, how much invested we are even in functioning properly?
A lesson we never learn.
When we look at past, we find that there were so many things and situations that made us suffer, things that seemed so significant, so meaningful and so valuable then, and things that end up amounting to NOTHING, if only we weren’t that invested in those people, those situations, if only we could change it then, if only we could change it now for today’s situations.
In mainstream there’s this overused hollow advice going on in recent times that you should love yourself, that you should care for yourself before caring about anyone else, and that you should be in a lovely relationship with yourself before getting into it with anyone else. Let me tell you this, you already love yourself, your problem is not that you don’t love yourself enough; your problem is that you do it too much. We are always at the center of our love, hate or any other goddamn emotion. Other people are not significant as a fact; they are only significant in accordance with what you WANT.
What do you think?
You think a person who doesn’t care much about himself will be sad because of it? Or do you think they will be free because of it? Do you think a person who is depressed and stressed is the one who doesn’t care about himself much, or is it the one who does it a LOT?
