#notetokent ...Values can, therefore, arise only through some mechanism of selection that endows one element in a total situation with a status that, though indistinguishable from the others in fact, is different from them in value.... The tasks of the conscious individual and the creative activity of the stars are knowable as facts, but we cannot from knowledge alone decide whether or not they have any value.... We have to perform, in the Domain of Values, a task that corresponds to the ordering of fact within the total givenness of experience. In the immediacy of the givenness there are neither facts nor values. We have a glimpse of the Endless Whole - the full significance of which we can never grasp. We assent to values by an empathetic discrimination that has its own methodology*.... If values lie neither in what is, nor in what might be, nor even in the adjustment of the one to the other, they must consist in a quality that is free from the determining-conditions [of existence]. It is almost universally recognized that there is such a quality and, moreover, that it is manifested in a diversity of ways as purpose, obligation, need, freedom, or as beauty, goodness and truth. Unfortunately, terms such as these are commonly used without due attention to the difficulty of defining them - a difficulty that arises just because they belong to those regions of experience that can never be reduced to knowledge. *Our soul, in the aesthetic state apprehends in the object (besides the qualities which can be conceptually determined) psychical accompanying qualities, and when we live in these concretely, our soul expands above the real sphere of its struggle with the eternal world.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:32:46 +0000
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