Value is one of the most fundamental notions in the intellectual canon;
more basic by far than truth or usefulness, or even, I would say, reality.
How easy it is to hear philosophers following their values in the
construction of all else! and how right they are to do so, though not to
reflect so little on its importance. It is because someone values certain
features of a notion of truth that they argue for these features and for
the importance of truth itself; and ditto for reality, or usefulness.
Scratch any metaphysics or epistemology and you will find a value system
determining the pathway among myriad possible discourses. Carry on the
pointless war of words about such matters and you will find at heart that
it is moral and political values that are the ground zero of debate.
Hierarchy itself is a value; some people WANT to be able to say that their
values are better than other people's, and for such intolerants a
hierarchical framework for values is necessary, dictated by their values.
Others value tolerance, diversity, cooperation, co-existence, and HATE the
endless wrangling over whose values and goods and desires, much less their
disguised philosophical, theoretical and scientific substitutes, are
better, truer, and more necessary to all civilized and rational people ...
For me values can but stand side by side, and sometimes not even close
enough to be compared if they can be understood only in incommensurable
moods, or from radically different viewpoints or cultural and social
perspectives. The range of human values is one way to characterize the
range of culture, as it also a way to characterize identities. We are what
we want.
And how do we come to want some ways of being, doing, being seen and done
to? some ways of saying, singing, giving?
The endpoints of value identities are rather nicely characterized by
Bourdieu in _Distinction_, where he notes how often we value what is
available to our social position and disparage or despise what is not ...
even if it confers great advantage on others in games we'd rather not play.
Bourdieu universalizes just a bit by assuming that in the zero-sum game of
limited resources we must all be players, like it or not, but he perhaps
WANTS to seem too hardnosed and realistic to his Marxist critics, or fits
too well his own model by valuing some forms of capital and power and
neglecting alternatives. Nonetheless, it's an interesting starting point,
or ending point, for a consideration of HOW we come to WANT, to value, to
desire as we do. B. has little to say about how people actually come to end
their days as little points on his social graphs, much less about how he
came to value the parameters that define position on those graphs.
We know it has something to do with sociality, and how it's mediated by
language and other signs; we know it changes over the lifespan in sometimes
surprising ways; and we know that it often ends up much as Bourdieu
describes it, reinscribing the structures of social differentiation. But
HOW?? jay.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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