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by Silentio
6233 days ago
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Can't agree with you more. To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods. Interesting, too, that the author pairs harmony and beauty as having "intrinsic" value. We <i>might</i> think of beauty as intrinsically valuable but, once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable. Which brings me to my next point. To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony? I guess I'm not a big fan of moral philosophy. |
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Careful: this way lies Marxism. The value doesn't lie in the labor itself, because if the labor was just as valuable as the product of that labor then why not save the labor and sleep in? The value lies in what is produced. Which is why using less labor to produce something more useful is more valuable than using more labor to produce something useless.
"once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable"
You've gone through a loop and said nothing. I think a rainbow is beautiful because (by your account, which spuriously dispenses with the possibility of individual taste or universal beauty) my culture values pretty colors. But in what way does my culture value pretty colors? Answer: we find them beautiful. You basically said "we think things are beautiful because our culture defines what we think is beautiful", which is a simple, testable, false statement (some standards of beauty are shared across cultures, other standards can differ within a culture).
"To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?"
You can have harmony without everything in the world being harmonious. By analogy, can't we only call a system or an interaction "harmonious" if it is something distinct from disharmony? Isn't there a difference between two instruments playing the same pitch (or harmonious pitches, such as the same note an octave apart) and two instruments playing completely disharmonious pitches? (The answer is yes, and this can be scientifically demonstrated.) Likewise, when a group of people act in concert to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts, is that not more harmonious than a group of people warring with themselves?