I spent a whole year of my life on the notion of intrinsic value. Specifically, defending the philosophical necessity and importance of the largely undefinable intrinsic value of human subjects as well as animals, plants, mountains, ecosystems, and historically significant material objects.
I assume lots of people’s eyes are glazing over already.
Sounds positively scintillating, doesn’t it?
The thing is, I chose this topic all on my own. It wasn’t assigned.
The interrogation of intrinsic value encompasses several pressing issues—ecology/nature, science, progress, awe, ethics, justice, why we value what we value. It was a year of learning the intricate ins and outs of how the Western philosophical canon—almost entirely white and male—chose to bestow meaning and value on the rest of us. I’d like to believe that many of them didn’t even realize or acknowledge the hierarchy automatically they applied which put free, landed, literate Greek and European men at the top.
For those who’d like a quick refresher: intrinsic value is often defined as the value a thing, state, or person has in its own right.
I know. Not a compelling or even understandable definition.
Sounds a bit circular even.
Compare the more obvious ‘extrinsic’ value—a quality, thing, experience, person, etc. that has value to a person (ahem, a someone with intrinsic value.)
If you want a proper dip in the madhouse, check out Stanford’s online phl library entry on intrinsic value here.
Philosophers have been going around and around trying to come up with a more solid definition for thousands of years. Aristotle, for example wrote pain is ‘bad and to be avoided,’ hence pain’s opposite—pleasure—must be intrinsically good. Wisdom, beauty, peace, honor, power, achievement, ambition, violence, knowledge, security, love—all of the world sorted into the ‘good’ or ‘nasty’ buckets of human experience and feeling, weighed and measured by the metric of if it had intrinsic value. That X was good or bad ‘in and of itself.’
Months into this deep dive and I still had no idea what these dudes were on about. Some claimed that philosophical claims needed to be ‘grounded’ in a logical progression back through one thinker’s argument to another’s… ideally lodging in a logical proof that couldn’t be disproven. (Spoiler: this achievement is non-existent.)
Then, there was the wing of philosophers who thought maybe intrinsic value didn’t (surprise) actually exist. See Hobbes, Hume, Dewey and Beardsley. That maybe only subjects who were capable of valuing things could even assign value. I mean. Sure.
Too bad for penguins, wetlands, honeybees, and mountain ranges that can’t assign value via this metric, and hence aren’t bestowed rights, protections, or a voice in actions that concern their survival or thriving. Also, too bad when factors like structural racism, sexism, landedness, (dis)ability, etc. tirelessly churn to remove personhood and subjecthood from countless humans and stakeholders.
If I’ve still got your attention and haven’t lost you somewhere between the dusty stacks of Alexandria or under the wheels of Peter Singer’s cable cars, I’d like to tell you what it felt like to read thousands of pages in this rather hopeless quest.
That is what actually mat(t)ered in all this.
I tore my hair out. I walked for miles through brambled woods muttering to myself. I built raised beds, seeded tobacco, potatoes, habaneros, tomatoes, tomatillos (it was a Solanacea garden year.) I watched a beaver dam give way with a pop like dynamite and go flooding down the hillside, tearing everything in the slough out. (It closed the highway below for several hours as fish and frogs were shoveled off the asphalt.) I took pictures of porcupines, mown down on the roadside and rotting in the weeds.
I kept trying to find this “ground” that my advisors insisted I needed to locate in the pages of books, in my mind, as I planted hundreds of daffodils, maneuvered a snowplow at the edge of a ravine, transplanted trees, endlessly cut back that prickly and glorious goddess Multiflora rose.
I smile now. But only just. I was up to my elbows in ground.
Intrinsic value enveloped everything.
I hiked the ridges and sweated and weeded and turned compost. I breathed and it was value. The land breathed and it was value. It all had incalculable value. Me, the hills, the worms, the breeze, the hail and the peepers, the stones and the foxes.
I couldn’t understand how someone or something could be given or refused value on the say-so of a book. On the say-so of a dead man. On the say-so of a patriarchal canon that had only allowed women, indigenous peoples, black people, ecosystems… rights and the privilege to say ‘no’ for but the barest fingernail trimming of recent history. And even those hard-won rights were being wrenched, those values undermined. Every shift forward led to backlash, craven semantic gymnastics, to more taking and greed and usury and rape and oppression.
I wrote a 25-page paper on how intrinsic value has value and shouldn’t be abandoned.
At my oral defense, I was asked “But why? Why should we want to conserve nature? Why ‘save the planet?’ It exists for our use.”
Bless your heart, unnamed N’awlins philosophy professor. (You tripped me up, big time.) I still got an A.
But what I learned was philosophy without the voices of women, the voices of the land, the voices of the marginalized, the voices of those believed to be voiceless…. is but an exercise in madness.
It’s a poison and I swallowed it. I thought it was part of me. That it was my failure to understand. That I was lesser-than due to my vantage point and inability to throw my entire self into this realm of men who fruitlessly, constantly were searching for ground.
While they stood on top of it.
What I do know: we are, we are awe, emerald borers, blood, tourmaline, protons, tarpon, radon, microplastics, and stars. This entire universe is value creating value stewarding value spiraling into value. It’s intrinsic value (and turtles) all the way down.
The whole of it is ground.
Yes....all of it. I recently (finally) discovered the word androcentric. I'd been stumbling around for years attempting to locate the feeling I was having every time I watched most movies, read most books on anything related to history and even every time I sat in front of a teacher sharing insight about a particular Buddhist text/sutra/meditation technique. (you get the point). It's dawned on me, 65 years in, that I've been shown the world and its history through the lens of a man's western world view. I think I've been carrying around a good deal of anger for a very long time now. It's taken a long while for me to feel rooted in my own intrinsic value. I wasn't taught it, I wasn't shown it. All those philosophers telling us "how things are" IMHO, derive from the *fact that the origin theory clearly shows man as the creator and therefore, *he has rights to what is the truth. I'll never get Simone de Bouvouir's quote from the Introduction to "The Second Sex" , "Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being." I only got as far as the introduction, but that one sentence informs so much.
Anyhow, you're writing has woke me up this morning! It's early and 21 degrees and I need to finish my coffee and get the dogs out for their walk. My new take on all this (for me), is that it's my job to unearth and discover the unheard women's voices and accomplishments throughout time. I'm no longer waiting for some white male scholar to "help me understand" a history that they've forgotten to include half the population. They are many women's voices already surfacing (including yours), we just need to listen.
Be well my friend.
The minute Plato starts going on about Ideal Forms, all have to admit that he's making it up. Whatever his repository of metaphysical meaning is, it's all in his head. That prof wasn't good at philosophy questions either, ya? "It's all for our use." Like, but that is the question, IS IT FOR US, or is it just ... being there, us interacting with it in one of several possible ways....