Meditation on Value

What do we mean when we say of something that it has value? And isn’t all our speaking inherently evaluating? Isn’t every utterance we make freely, an assignment of value? Isn’t it much more elegant if we consider ourselves living in a ‘soup’ of value, rather than in a generally valueless world, in which we occasionally elevate some special things as valuable?

Let’s breathe calmly as usual. This is a meditation, not a treatise. Value is a powerful abstraction. Quantified value is the premise of economic activity and qualified value underpins all other human interaction.

Here, I understand value as receiving attention. In this sense we turn everything we look at into something valuable. It is not an ontological trick. We think of value this way because we can’t find another meaningful distinction. In other words, we deconstruct the distinctions that were made in order to ‘save’ value. This is sympathetic when we talk about the value of material items. When we take on the special value of life and living beings, we seem to be in trouble. We don’t want to apply the same concept of value to the life of a child, and a stone. We can look at the stone all we want – it should never be valuable in the same way as the child.

I’m afraid we won’t find the ontological key to some sort of higher-level value of conscious or sentient life. The best we can do is becoming aware of our evaluation, of the way we attribute value to whom and what we encounter. In the example of the stone, when we do look at it for many generations, shave off some oddities and build a museum around it for good measure, we call it Unesco Cultural Heritage and indeed condemn those who destroy it in the strongest possible words. I am referring to the 2001 destruction of Buddha of Bamiyan statues by the Taliban.

We try to understand value. Not any specific value, but the gesture of giving-value in itself. We tell the story of a world in which we are surrounded by value and highlight some at the expense of others, but never relegate them to a domain of no value. We communicate values implicitly (by merely focusing our attention on something) and explicitly (by capturing it in words). Perhaps authenticity is the alignment of our implicit and explicit ways of gesturing values.