In the prison of my subjective feelings

A prison of our own making - photo by Enrico Hänel from Pexels

One time when the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at a magnificent waterfall that many people were admiring he overheard one visitor describe the scene as "sublime" whereas another called it "pretty". Coleridge decried the expression of "pretty" as failing to match the reality of the sight.  

The academic and writer C S Lewis explains Coleridge's disgust:

The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. ...  'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.'"

When people are in a group where there is an argument going on, each of those arguing looks for support on the basis of what everyone should agree to, what is logical, what is true to that which exists in the real world, and akin to that, what is the God-given reality. In other words, each party in practice points to some objective moral or intellectual value that the other side has violated. Each side ought to know, but often doesn't, that it is pointless to say "I don't care what you say, I have my own opinion - [or worse] - I have my own facts".

To speak about the objectivity of moral and intellectual values means there's something outside of what I think or I feel - my subjectivity - and things are right and wrong or good and bad in reality, for reasons that everyone must agree to because, on consideration, those reasons can be arrived at logically or because they can be observed and their meaning agreed to.

We have our own feelings and emotions but we have to live in the real world. Therefore, we have to train ourselves to react in an appropriate manner to what we encounter. The child has to learn "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful", as Plato wrote. Teachers help the young learn of the richness that lies in Shakespeare's lines, or in the works of other writers or artists that have lasted the test of time - esteemed because they are seen as being true to life and therefore valuable in understanding the human experience.

Some in education, especially, come up with methodologies or concepts they want introduced into the curriculum. They often shy from expressing an objective value for their innovations but say they are important because they are "necessary" or "progressive", or "effective". However, Lewis states:

They could be forced by argument to answer the questions 'necessary for what?', 'progressing towards what?', 'effecting what?'; in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own sake.

Objectivity relating to intellectual and moral values is not just a Western concept. Lewis refers to the principle being the basis of the Tao, the ultimate reality,  and acknowledges Hinduism's focus on what is known as Rta:

In early Hinduism conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta — that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. 

Unfortunately, what worried Lewis, Coleridge, and Plato, is now widely accepted, namely that values such as what is good, what is beautiful and what is true "are just expressions of my subjective point of view, my subjective feelings". This means there are no principles outside ourselves that determine how we should behave or what degree of respect we should give to others. Here is where we pick up the content of a talk given by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles.

He expresses what is the common sentiment of younger age groups: 

"Don't tell me what to think; don't tell me how to behave; don't tell me what's beautiful. My subjective feelings determine value and what's the matter with that?"

That attitude of a young person going into life draws a heartfelt response:

Do you see everybody how it locks us into these little prisons - the little prison of my subjective consciousness of my immediate feelings, and how the realm of objective value breaks us out of these pathetic little prisons and allow us now to explore worlds beyond my little arena of feeling and subjective apprehension?

To be drawn by a great master [artist] into the realm of objective value - it opens my life in such a wonderful way.

Another problem with this hyper-subjectivism is we're locked in our little prisons affirming our own feelings all the time - it sets us necessarily against one another if my feelings are incommensurate with yours. My feelings have no real reference to an objective value. All I can do is fight with you. We can't appeal together to some transcendent "third" by which our feelings are measured. No, we're just now in a war of feeling against feeling, this little prison that leads to warfare. I'm afraid that's where a lot of people find themselves today. That's the default position of a lot of people.

Break out of the prison! What gets you out is objective moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value. What opens the door toward real communion [is that] together we fall in love with Shakespeare, together we fall in love with Dante.... Good, now we've transcended this little petty world.

I know you hear this all the time, but don't let them seduce you with this suffocating subjectivism. Rather be open to the realm of the objective.

Michael Sandel, a political philosophy professor at Harvard, says in his book What Money Can't Buy, "We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning." He means we ought to use our intellectual powers to arrive at principles that allow us to agree on the reality of all that is important. The purpose of that is to create a harmonious society. For example, we need to go beyond scientific findings and find the deeper values of matters like patriotism, family, solidarity and justice. 

In an interview on that book, he is asked if there is "any downside to engaging with the world through the eyes of moral philosophy, rather than simple market logic?"

His answer is: "None but the burden of reflection and moral seriousness."

Rather than charging into debates on important issues flailing about with hot emotions or pure assumption, we need to identify values that are relevant to the context, that provide essential meaning. Sandel gives a topic related to his book's subject matter to illustrate his approach and he points to the goal of social discourse:

"Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialisation," he writes. "'Debasement', 'defilement', 'coarsening', 'pollution', the loss of the 'sacred'. This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being." 

Those "higher ways" point to the importance of understanding the distinction between subjective and objective values. Lewis and his short work The Abolition of Man (see here) states that emotions "can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it". Further: 

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own natural impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. 

All the more reason to escape from the horror house of subjectivity, that small prison of self-invention and emotional self-absorption. 

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