They were both part-right and part-wrong.
It is possible to say that mathematical logic does not apply to the
world of the subjective thing that is valuation. This would of course
place all values outside the sphere of quantification. Placed outside
the sphere of rationality, values become undefended, and consequently
there is no rational defense for things that bring about happiness and
no protection from things that destroy it. It is not difficult to see
how this leads to a population of miserable people who are always
struggling for scraps of sunlight, wasting all their resources
defending their likes and dislikes while preventing the energy from
going to benefit the social whole. The idea that valuation is
subjective and not in any way based on any universal principles, or on
anything rationally discernible, is what Mortimer Adler called
suicidal psychologizing on the part of philosophy - a case of copping
out on the task of explaining the human being; a copping out that has
made the bulk of the people believe philosophy to be irrelevant to
their lives.
The hideous injustice of this line of thinking consists of the fact
that it degrades and devalues humanity. It states that people's
experience is subjective hence not rationally quantifiable, and then
the bulk of the people who practice this line of thinking do the
unforgivable and the illogical: they leap from the tentative
("subjective is not quantifiable") to an impossible value judgment
("subjective is unimportant"). What it states is that if something
can't be objectively demonstrated, it's worthless - a hubris of
empiricism that asserts empiricism as the only way to compute value,
and renders all experience that can't be demonstrated beyond all doubt
to everyone unimportant. In an unforgivable logical error for people
who claim logic as their guiding purpose, they take their inability to
measure something to mean that it can't be significant to people - an
absurdity if there ever was any.
Now if experience of the people, as this logic contends, effectively
does not matter, then it becomes excusable to commit grave harm to
people with impunity, for as long as it isn't measurable. Thus,
psychological abuse and emotional damage is easily forgivable because
it can't be traced, and crimes that rarely get reported - crimes such
as incest, battery and rape - are likewise to be forgiven. It is also,
according to this logic, sensible to attack and devalue those who seek
to provide to people a good experience - experience such as that of
beauty, compassion, and love; experiences for which there is no
empirical demonstration but which possess paramount value to people
who receive them. To paraphrase R.D. Laing, It is fashionable to talk
of experience as merely subjective, but never of anything as merely
objective. To devalue experience as "merely subjective" is to devalue
mankind as the recipients of the experience - and a philosophy that
sees the experience of beauty, or love, or spirituality, or
compassion, or happiness, as "merely subjective" or "in the eye of the
beholder" is the philosophy that does violence to humanity, excluding
these considerations from our social interactions and our environments
we create and relegating the mass of the people to be mistreated and
to live in despair and ugliness.
Is experience subjective or objective? It is both. The event that
causes the experience to occur is an objective happening; the
experience of the event as felt by the person is subject to sensory
interpretation. The study of physical beauty by Judith Langlois has
shown that a face with a particular proportions will be experienced as
beautiful by subjects from all cultures. Another study has shown that,
out of 500 faces shown to 20,000 subjects, all faces got picked at
least once, but some got picked only once and others hundreds of
times. The experience of beauty occurs in presence of some objects and
not others, and some objects evoke the feeling of beauty in more
people than do others. Both the object and the subject¦s tastes
and values are involved in the computation; the experience is a
function of both. Experience is - integrative.
To those who do not consider experience to be a real event due to the
fact that it takes place "only" inside a person's head, one needs pose
this question. Is computer software real? Its effects also take place
only inside the computer, or the computer system to which the computer
is attached. Yet nobody of any authority would begin to claim that
computer software is not real. How much more real, then, is the code
by which runs human psyche, measurable as it is only through its
effects on the person's emotions which may or may not manifest in
actions - but which in all cases occasion events in the human brain to
occur.
Thus both Kant and Ayn Rand had it partially right. The experience is
both objective and subjective, and this makes it doubly real - formed
both by the objective happening and the sensory-emotional
interpretation. To understand an experience completely, one has to
observe it externally as well as experience it, either directly or
through the mechanism of empathy. This averts the nasty habit of
trivialization of experience which is undertaken by the so-called
rationalists, and builds a certain measure of compassion for one's
fellow women and men that is most paramount to making right decisions
governing their lives.
When I attended the Burningman festival in Nevada, the organizers
invited the media to participate in the event in order that they
understand the event AS IT IS EXPERIENCED BY PARTICIPANTS before
writing about it to their audiences. My friend Gil, who was about 8
years older than me, said that this ruined objectivity. He was
committing the error common to his generation - the error of believing
that external measurement without participation is the only way of
understanding an event. An experience is understood best when it is
felt on one's own skin; when one understands it not solely as it
appears to an observer, but as it is actually experienced. The
organizers of Burningman made the right decision in inviting the media
to be participants. It allowed them to have an experience of the event
that was not merely objective - not merely external - but also
subjective. It allowed them to see the event both from within and from
without. It allowed them to have the integrative perspective, which I
suggest is the only complete way to understand an experience.
Human interaction is thus an integrative phenomenon, consisting of
interactions between action as it is made and experience as it is
perceived. When Person A insults Person B, the situation contains both
the objective event - of A making the statement - and the experience -
B feeling insulted. The experience as felt by B is a function of two
things: the statement that A made and the emotional structure of B as
it interprets and is affected by the statement. To understand the
transaction, both have to be taken into account. To state, as did
Eleanor Roosevelt, that people can't hurt you unless you let them, is
to place the responsibility for the entire event in B's territory and
leave A free to hurt, malign and abuse whomever he would desire. To
state, as do New Agers, that we are in control of everything that
happens to us, is to excuse every crime on the face of the planet, as
it states that me raping, torturing and killing a New Ager would be
something she has thought up and for which I am not to be held
accountable.
And to state that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is to eliminate
the beauty consideration from our contributions to the environment in
which we live. It is to free the architect, the engineer, the builder,
the artist and the musician of responsibility for creating works that
are beautiful and tasteful. It is to give a green light to greed,
bloat and tastelessness that wants to turn America into a giant strip
mall and Americans into obese tubs. It is to mire people in
hideousness in which their spirits shrivel and their body, shorn of
all pleasure and stimulation, has nothing to do but bloat.
It is a damnable ideology, one that is partly responsible for the $117
billion in health costs that obesity costs the nation each year - and
costing far more in people's ability to enjoy and appreciate human
experience, with romance, sex, art, creativity, freedom from abuse,
ecstasy of physical exertion and pride and pleasure of living in an
environment that is an improvement and not a degradation on nature
becoming inaccessible to people as a result.
Some objects - like the faces in the Judith Langlois study - appeal to
something universal in human beings and are experienced by all who
perceive them as beautiful. Others are experienced as beautiful only
by people with certain tastes and beliefs. The art that touches on the
universal in human beings is art that is timeless; the art that serves
its times or its subjects is art that is limited to its audience. Both
are necessary; both are legitimate. Classical art is still loved today
because it speaks to the universal in human beings, but the
currently-anachronistic music of Jefferson Airplane was just as
important for its times.
I had a girlfriend who was seen by everyone she met as beautiful, and
by some as the most beautiful woman they've ever beheld. I had another
girlfriend that was seen as beautiful by some people and not by
others, with most Europeans and the Orientals finding her delectable -
and most residents of her native Oregon seeing nothing in her at all.
The poetry I post on the Internet draws reaction both good and bad,
with some poems attracting only compliments, others only attack and
others both. My personal experience, as well as the above-mentioned
studies, indicates that beauty is an integrative function - with some
forms of beauty universal and appealing to everyone and others
appealing only to certain tastes and beliefs. The experience of beauty
is a shared function between the object and the recipient; a person or
a piece of art can be beautiful universally or only to certain tastes,
with some possessing universal appeal - some others appealing to some
people - and some appealing to nobody. To claim, as do some
"feminists," that there is no such thing as beauty and that beauty is
an artificial construct that is used to keep women from developing
self-esteem, is an absurdity that is refuted by the Judith Langlois
study and by experiences of anyone who has ever looked at a classical
piece of art or at Yosemite Park or at sky over rural Arizona on a
cloudless night.
Seeing experience of life as is both subjective and objective - as
integrative - as a thing that can be discerned both from within and
without, with the integrative perspective - the perspective of both
experiencing something immediately and measuring it externally -
superior to the mere objective method of measurement without personal
experience and the mere subjective method of living it without having
a theoretical overarching perspective - one can rather postulate a
model of the individual's interaction with the collective.
(for next chapter, google on "***@yahoo.com pomegranate
society individual 5")