From Valuing to Monetized (From Poets to the Sonnetized)

"... man designated himself as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the ‘calculating animal as such’."

-- Nietzsche from Genealogy of Morals

If humans can be called the value creating animal, then we limit our humanity when we limit the ways by which we define and assign value. Limiting value to quantification limits our humanity to numbers. When those numbers become more and more often attached to money, we more and more become monetary animals. (Humanity is monetizing.)

It could be said of Heidegger's later philosophy that he sees man as the poetic animal. What happens when values become monetized is like what would happen if we said to a follower of Heidegger's later thought that poetry is limited to sonnet writing. Humans become the sonnet writing animal. (Humanity is sonnetizing.) It is an absurd limit.

Yet, we so often go along with the quantification and monetization of everything around us, and of ourselves, without taking more than a passing notice of it, and rarely ever do we deeply consider what it means or does to us. The less we think over this monetization of everything, the more we shift from being a monetary animal to a monetized animal.

The Only Way Forward May Be A Few Steps Back

Before the gun control debate goes any deeper into a Republican vs. Democrat hate-fest, let's not forget that the Democrats had control of the House, Senate and White House for the first two years of Obama's presidency. During that time they couldn't pass (and I don't think they even voted on) what many would call 'common sense' gun control like closing the gun show loophole and reinstating the assault weapon ban.

I say this not to defend Republicans or to attack Democrats but to point out the possibility that we can't even agree on what common sense means. Things keep on being called common sense (which is really just a way of saying that they are obvious or agreeable to most people), yet they can't be agreed upon or put into action. We have no common ground to start from, and therefore no common sense. There is no common sense that is common to the different sides. Most often, what we call 'common sense' is merely what the people who agree with us can agree on.

Yes, the NRA plays a role in things not getting passed, but at least part of the reason they have such power is that we don't go beyond our own groups 'common sense' which gives more power to sound bites, memes and emotional appeals. When facts are used, there is no common agreement on what makes up a valid fact, so it is easy to tear apart facts as nothing but propaganda or misinformation.

Instead of trying to find common ground, and through that a common sense that is shared, we argue with facts that are seen as valid by only one side; memes and sound bites that are based on assumptions and emotions that are not held in common; and blatant emotional appeals that lose their force as soon as the latest tragedy falls into the background. All of these things only work to divide. This division makes finding a common solution harder and leaves us more vulnerable to getting manipulated into being upset while we sit and get nothing substantial done.

Mass shootings are a real problem just like racism, police shootings, health care and other big issues that America is struggling with. Day after day, it seems less likely to me that these can be dealt directly because there is no common ground and therefore no common sense, on which to rely. In the absence of common ground and real common sense, we resort to methods that divide and push any solution further and further away.

It is way past time to step back from the superficiality of the current discourse (and the 'common sense' that is only shared by those that already agree with us) and dig into deep conversations that won't lead to action or even agreement on the issues, but could lead to understanding on where common ground can be found and how a real common sense can be roughly defined.

No Mere Facts

“The greatness and superiority of natural science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rests in the fact that all the scientists were philosophers. They understood that there are no mere facts, but that a fact is only what it is in the light of the fundamental conception, and always depends upon how far that conception reaches. The characteristic of positivism—which is where we have been for decades, today more than ever—by way of contrast is that it thinks is can manage sufficiently with facts, or other and new facts, while concepts are merely expedients that one somehow needs but should not get too involved with, since that would be philosophy. Furthermore, the comedy—or rather tragedy—of the present situation of science is that one thinks to overcome positivism though positivism.”

-- Martin Heidegger from Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics 

And the positivistic-scientific mentality has colonized the idea of rationality and logic in general. We look to facts and more simply numbers to solve all problems and end all debates. This has lead us to throw facts and numbers at each other incessantly (when we are not going so low as to make our arguments out of purely emotional appeals or fill them with logical fallacies). We use and abuse facts and numbers with little knowledge or even care of the context, history or origin of them. We don’t bother to know what they mean beyond what they can do to prove us right.

That is precisely why we don't need more STEM and we need more humanities. We especially need philosophy and history that are taught as more than a survey of events and dates portrayed as self-evident facts. We need to stop trying to overcome the shortcomings of data and facts with more data and facts. We need to think about context and meaning. This is done by the humanities, and we can’t do so without proper exposure to important ideas from the history of philosophy and understanding of philosophic methods. I am not saying that the answers will be found in the philosophers of the past, though they may be. What I am saying is that without the ability to think philosophically and an understanding of the history of ideas and terms that come from philosophy, we will not be able to address the problems of awareness of context and definition of concepts that are necessary for us to understand how facts come to be and what they mean.