Intrinsic Value Philosophy Quotes

According to Stoic philosophy, when we assign intrinsic values like “good” or “bad” to external events, we’re behaving irrationally and even exhibiting a form of self-deception. When we call something a “catastrophe,” for instance, we go beyond the bare facts and start distorting events and deceiving ourselves. Moreover, the Stoics consider lying a form of impiety—when a man lies, he alienates himself from Nature.

To lead good, happy lives, we need to be able to focus on the book most important to us now. This means to stop reading some and never to start reading others. When we dwell only in possibility, we get nowhere. Doing what has intrinsic value to us helps us decide which books are right for us. It gives us a clear selection compass for which direction we should go in and which we should avoid.

IN 1908, A Harvard philosopher named Josiah Royce wrote a book with the title The Philosophy of Loyalty. Royce was not concerned with the trials of aging. But he was concerned with a puzzle that is fundamental to anyone contemplating his or her mortality. Royce wanted to understand why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves. This was, to him, an intrinsic human need. The cause could be large (family, country, principle) or small (a building project, the care of a pet). The important thing was that, in ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give our lives meaning.

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.... And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values!...

Plato's proposals in this matter are abhorrent to all true Christians. His intentions were, of course, excellent, for he desired the greatest possible improvement of the human race; but his good intentions led him to the proposal of measures which are necessarily unacceptable and repugnant to all those who adhere to Christian principles concerning the value of the human personality and the sanctity of human life. Moreover, it by no means follows that what has been found successful in the breeding of animals, will also prove successful when applied to the human race, for man has a rational soul which is not intrinsically dependent on matter but is directly created by Almighty God. Does a beautiful soul always go with a beautiful body or a good character with a strong body? Again, if such measures were successful — and what does "successful" mean in this connection? — in the case of the human race, it does not follow that the Government has the right to apply such measures. Those who to-day follow, or would like to follow, in the footsteps of Plato, advocating, e.g. compulsory sterilisation of the unfit, have not, be it remembered, Plato's excuse, that he lied at a period anterior to the presentation of the Christian ideals and principles. — 230

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to temporal categories: a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but only as a result of the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered the expression of a “period”, not of a timeless and intrinsic value, and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism and with a psychologism or biologism that destroys essential values . This philosophy derives a maximum of originality from what in effect is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature , and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the intelligence with which one thinks and abuses. But there is no escaping immanent Truth: “The more he blasphemes,” says Meister Eckhart, “the more he praises God.

Hope is a virtue independently of its realisations; it is an intrinsic value, an end in itself, allied to courage and imagination, a positive attitude full of possibility and aspiration. For that reason you discover more about a person when you learn about his hopes than when you count his achievements, for the best of what we are lies in what we hope to be.

On the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans had no doubt-mathematics was real, immutable, omnipresent, and more sublime than anything that could conceivably emerge from the feeble human mind. The Pythagoreans literally embedded the universe into mathematics. In fact, to the Pythagoreans, God was not a mathematician-mathematics was God! The importance of the Pythagorean philosophy lies not only in its actual, intrinsic value. By setting the stage, and to some extent the agenda, for the next generation of philosophers-Plato in particular-the Pythagoreans established a commanding position in Western thought.

Gary Snyder: We are still laying the groundwork for a “culture of nature.” The critique of the Judeo-Christian-Cartesian view of nature (by which complex of view all developed nations excuse themselves for their drastically destructive treatment of the landscape) is well under way. Some of us would hope to resume, reevaluate, re-create, and bring into line with complex science the old view that holds the whole phenomenal world to be our being; multicentered, ‘alive’ in its own manner, and effortlessly self-organizing in its own chaotic way. Elements of this view are found in wide range of ancient vernacular philosophies, and in recent thought… and it offers a third way, not caught up in the dualisms of body and mind, spirit and matter, or culture and nature. It is noninstrumentalist view that extends intrinsic value to the nonhuman world.

A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy. Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings. So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear. If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men. The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life. If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature. The classical is health; and the romantic, disease. When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. To praise a man is to put oneself on his level. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.

There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions. For those bounded by a belief in common morality, which is to say just about everyone, philosophers were immoralists or, at best, amoralists. These suspicions of the general public were not unfounded. Philosophers really were subversive! (Here, too, Strauss and Arendt shared a common—one might say Nietzschean—perspective. “Thinking,” Arendt wrote, “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.”) To survive in a world intrinsically hostile to freethinking, philosophers had to employ “esoteric writing” while presenting a public face of moderation and quiescence, whatever radical ideas they might be harboring. “Thought must be not moderate, but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.” Or as Strauss also put it: “In political things it is a sound rule to let sleeping dogs lie.” The best hope for the preservation of freedom of thought was to remain inconspicuous. The wise knew not to poke the beast. Inconspicuousness was not always possible. Constantly vulnerable to tyrants and to tyrannical majorities, philosophers were in need of friends, not only other philosophers with whom they could exchange ideas but also more practical people who could mediate between the contemplative elite and the vulgar masses. The philosophers’ best friends in the ordinary world were the people Strauss called “gentlemen.” Philosophers were not equipped to plunge into the political world, which consisted of “very long conversations with very dull people on very dull subjects.” Neither did they have the power to impose their will on the majority even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t. Instead, they needed the help of gentlemen who appreciated the value of freedom of thought yet could function among the ignorant populace. Philosophers, who were disinterested by definition, could instruct these gentlemen to shun private advantage and personal gain for the common good—and it would help if the gentlemen were wealthy so that the prospect of acquiring riches at the public expense would be less enticing—but it was up to the gentlemen to act as the bridge between the pure thinking of the minority and the material self interest of the majority and to win the support of the citizenry at large.

Young men and women in large numbers choose to go to college. On Dewey's theory, only too well accepted by the students, the reason cannot be any intrinsic value in knowledge. To give such a reason would be to flee from reality and take refuge in the discredited Aristotelian ivory tower. For the young man, college is a means of getting a better job; for the young women, it is a means of getting a better man. But neither the family that marriage brings nor the food that the job supplies is to be chosen for any intrinsic quality.

Mullinax: This of course gets to the notion of fiction as a separate world, and not as an appendage of some sort to the "real" world. The idea that we should let fiction be fiction, and not philosophy or sociology or psychology. Gass: Right. We've allowed music to be music. Oh we try, of course, to make it out to be something else. We use music in a roundabout way. Music to make love by, all that stuff. But we don't normally go around regarding music as anything more than music, and not as a message to the world or this or that. And we're doing that more and more with poetry. Fiction is slower to get there because it's been attached to doing all these other things. Art shouldn't try to make you do something, or even to produce in the reader a feeling or emotion. Its aim is construction. The artist wants to create an object that has intrinsic value, something worth living with as an end in itself. The artist makes an object he can have a non-utilitarian relation to—a companion.

One of the most striking consequences for philosophy of the evolutionary origins of many intuitions is that it is very difficult for a brain, designed by spontaneous processes that intrinsically favour existence, to escape its own biases and arrive at counterintuitive conclusions that put its own value into question.

To reach the truth, it must be at the absolute level. But does the absolute truth exist, and what does it mean? Do ideas represent truths? To what extent do ideas represent truths? These questions mostly relate to society and abstract or concrete questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Exact sciences are based on and governed by different standards and concepts of truth or ideas about the truth. Regardless of this dichotomy, it is only a dichotomy on the surface. Deep down, the absolute truth is at the equidistance from all these essential points, or all approaches, regardless of their origin (based on purely theoretical thought or conclusion resulting from an experiment), provided that all these approaches have equal merit based on the intrinsic value of any particular endeavor or approach.

Intrinsic personal value - the foundation of ethical value - starts when our individual life journeys begin. It ends only with the cessation of our existence.

To argue against abortion on the grounds that it prevents beings of high intrinsic value coming into the world is implicitly to condemn practices that reduce the future human population: contraception, whether by ‘artificial’ means or by ‘natural’ means such as abstinence on days when the woman is likely to be fertile, and also celibacy. This argument does not provide any reason for thinking abortion worse than any other means of population control. If the world is already overpopulated, the argument provides no reason at all against abortion.

The term “objective,” let me stress here, does not apply to all values, but only to values chosen by man. The automatic values that govern internal bodily functions or the behavior of plants and animals are not the product of a conceptual process. Such values, therefore, are outside the terminology of “objective,” “intrinsic,” or “subjective.

For Stoics the intrinsic value of wisdom, as an end in itself, always surpasses everything else,

The aim of education is to promote the self-realization of individuals by encouraging their growth through creativity, self-expression and wide-ranging experience, enabling them to reach full flower. These are progressive, child-centred aims, deriving from the connected values and the epistemology. The aims are purist, because they concern the development of the child for its own sake, as something for intrinsic value

Advertisers are very much like philosophers they analyze society, determine intrinsic values, and create a way to implement them.

Conscious businesses believe that creating value for all their stakeholders is intrinsic to the success of their business, and they consider both communities and the environment to be important stakeholders. Creating value for these stakeholders is thus an organic part of the business philosophy and operating model of a conscious business.

A better alternative might be to combine the incentive method with the use of motivation selection to give the AI a final goal that makes it easier to control. Suppose that an AI were designed to have as its final goal that a particular red button inside a command bunker never be pressed. Since the pressing of the button is disvalued intrinsically and not because of its causal consequences, the button could be completely inert: it could be made of Play-Doh. Furthermore, it is irrelevant whether the AI can ever know whether the button had been pressed. What is essential is that the AI believes that the button will more likely remain unpressed if the AI continuously acts in the principal’s interest than if it rebels. Refinements to this setup are possible. Instead of trying to endow an AI with a final goal that refers to a physical button, one could build an AI that places final value on receiving a stream of “cryptographic reward tokens.”11 These would be sequences of numbers serving as keys to ciphers that would have been generated before the AI was created and that would have been built into its motivation system.12 These special number sequences would be extremely desirable to the AI, constituting a special kind of reward token that the AI could not attain though wireheading.13 The keys would be stored in a secure location where they could be quickly destroyed if the AI ever made an attempt to seize them. So long as the AI cooperates, the keys are doled out at a steady rate.