This seems like an appropriate place for one of my philosophies:
It’s a fallacy to attribute value of any kind to human beings or living beings in general. We are each a source of value creation. We assign value to our relationships with others, and with ourselves. We can never truly know another, or to some extent even ourselves. And without truly knowing, we cannot assign true value. All we can assign true value to is our relationships to others and to ourselves.
You aren’t worthless, no one’s worthless, no one’s valueless. Each of us is an end-in-ourself. Each of us capable of that original act of value creation. Yeah, some people are better or worse at various things in the physical world. Some people we have better relationships with than others, and so we value those relationships more strongly, and feel worse when those relationships end. And some people have more relationships, or more people wanting to have a relationship to them. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are all equal with regard to creating and assigning value in the world.
So you can consider yourself and your relationships “worthless”, because they do not matter. Or you can realize that worth can’t really be attributed to living beings, just like it can’t really be attributed by humans to a god, and that we are all “worthless” in that sense. That things only matter because each of us says they matter. It’s your life, it’s your actions, it’s your value judgements. No one else can live it, no one else can do them, no one else can make those judgements.
One thought on “DW Ch12 P42”
Robert
This seems like an appropriate place for one of my philosophies:
It’s a fallacy to attribute value of any kind to human beings or living beings in general. We are each a source of value creation. We assign value to our relationships with others, and with ourselves. We can never truly know another, or to some extent even ourselves. And without truly knowing, we cannot assign true value. All we can assign true value to is our relationships to others and to ourselves.
You aren’t worthless, no one’s worthless, no one’s valueless. Each of us is an end-in-ourself. Each of us capable of that original act of value creation. Yeah, some people are better or worse at various things in the physical world. Some people we have better relationships with than others, and so we value those relationships more strongly, and feel worse when those relationships end. And some people have more relationships, or more people wanting to have a relationship to them. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are all equal with regard to creating and assigning value in the world.
So you can consider yourself and your relationships “worthless”, because they do not matter. Or you can realize that worth can’t really be attributed to living beings, just like it can’t really be attributed by humans to a god, and that we are all “worthless” in that sense. That things only matter because each of us says they matter. It’s your life, it’s your actions, it’s your value judgements. No one else can live it, no one else can do them, no one else can make those judgements.