"Values are what command our allegiance"

Iain McGilchrist, Robert Pirsig, and the direct perception of Value(s).

*This post provides context for a Perspectiva event on Wednesday night. You can sign up here.*

“And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

This statement comes from Plato (no less) in his book, The Phaedrus, and it is also the opening quotation in Robert M. Pirsig’s cult classic: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, which has sold over five million copies and which I chose as the book that influenced me most for Rebel Wisdom’s Book Club.

Plato and Pirsig’s statement came to mind recently while reading chapter 26 of The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist which is about Value, partly because in that chapter Iain provides philosophical context to contend that we can actually perceive value directly, and that, at least in this sense, the answer to Plato’s question is: No.

And yet it’s never that simple, because just as we can perceive we can misperceive, and it’s not clear what we mean by ‘good’ and ‘value’ and if they are the same thing. Such details matter, because while talk about values is perennial and ubiquitous and as important as ever, it is rarely grounded in any shared reflection on what exactly we are talking about. On Wednesday at 7 pm UK time, Perspectiva hopes to begin to correct that, in the second of our inquiries into Iain McGilchrist’s work, which features a conversation with Zachary Stein who is a Philosopher of Education working on a book about Metaphysics where the exploration of Value features prominently. The conversation will go where it wants to go, but Iain and Zak plan to focus their discussion on the nature of value, asking questions such as "what are values, where do they come from, are they important, and if so why?". They will consider the possibility that values are fundamental to the nature of the cosmos. And alongside this, they will explore Max Scheler’s concept of valueception - the idea that we can directly perceive value underived from any cognitive calculation. You can sign up here.

In this post, I want to contextualize the importance of the discussion, by indicating why a richer understanding of Value and values matters for civil society and democracy. I also take the opportunity to note some curious parallels between Iain’s work and Robert Pirsig’s more generally, which is particularly apparent on the matter of perceiving value.

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On Waitrose meat, poultry, and dairy products you can read, if you want to, that The John Lewis Partnership that owns Waitrose works with ‘farmers we know and trust and who share our values’. There are similar expressions of values in various ethical commerce contexts. In economic and financial circles there is less talk about values plural, but Value is used as a kind of euphemism for money, as in: ‘this investment venture is a good value proposition’. And in what is sometimes unhelpfully described as ‘grey literature’ in Civil Society, there is a theory of ‘values modes’ that uses polling and segmentation analysis to divide the population into three main clusters of values outlook - Settlers (broadly those with personal and local concerns, concerned with matters like housing and immigration) Prospectors (broadly those seeking progress and status concerned with their own prosperity and an economy to support that) and Pioneers (broadly those concerned with ‘bigger than self’ issues like ecological collapse and inequality between countries) and this segmentation has influenced political campaigning because messaging that works on one cluster will typically not work with others.

There is also the landmark report Common Cause: The case for working with our cultural values by Tom Crompton in 2010 which argues that there are ultimately two major values clusters that are broadly intrinsic (things valued in themselves like beauty, integrity, nature, empathy) and extrinsic (things valued as markers of personal success like money and status). The report is nuanced and the theory has been updated, but the argument is that these value clusters are in a kind of zero-sum relationship, such that if you promote, let’s say ‘Green Growth’ as a climate strategy or advocate the measurement of ‘natural capital’, you tacitly reinforce extrinsic values in a way that undermines, for instance, the love and reverence for nature as an end in itself.

Also noteworthy is the work of Jonathan Haidt, particularly in his book The Righteous Mind, where he explores why ‘Good people are divided by politics and religion’ and suggests its because of what he calls moral foundations: The Care/Harm Foundation is based on concern for others and a desire to protect them from harm. The Fairness/Cheating Foundation relates to a particular sense of justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, sometimes called proportionality, as in Aristotle’s famous line that ‘justice is giving each their due’. The Liberty/Oppression Foundation is about resisting domination, and the sensitivity to people being tyrannized. Jonathan Haidt says this “triggers an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants.” The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation is about the love of tribes and teammates, about our drive to form cohesive coalitions, whether through families or nations. The Authority/Subversion Foundation is about tradition and legitimate authority, grounded in respect and an appreciation for the structures provided by hierarchies. The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation is about avoiding disgusting things, foods, and actions but it extend to a broader conception of purity or disgust, and our ideas about what is sacred. To oversimplify, the political right experiences the full set of values as important, while the political left experiences a narrower range (the first three) but feels them more intensely.

These are just three of several examples of how the discussion of values appears in the public domain, and all of them are rooted in their own way to some kind of evidence base in the social sciences. There are perhaps deeper foundations though, both theoretical and meta-theoretical, which is why the way Iain situates Value and values in his philosophical framework is so…valuable. Iain begins the chapter by saying: “What life brings, I would maintain, is not consciousness, then - which I have argued is present from the beginning - but the coming into being of the capacity for value…Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness to and within, the world.” Later he writes: “Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. They are what gives meaning to life: such things are beauty, goodness, truth - and purpose.” And then later still in chapter 26: “Values are what command our allegiance”. Iain uses his perspective on values as ‘ontological primitives’ to critique utilitarianism, explore the relationship between love and cognition, reflect on goodness, advocate a kind of virtue ethics, consider the power of beauty and its relationship to goodness where some aspects of the argument feature, The McGilchrist Manoeuvre considered here previously. There is plenty to discuss on Wednesday!

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A full exploration of how Iain’s work relates to Robert Pirsig’s is beyond our scope here, but personally, I think a strong case can be made that Iain provides the scholarly basis for the intellectual excitement that made Pirsig’s work so popular. In his first book, Pirsig’s distinction between classical and romantic understanding is uncannily similar to Iain’s account of the difference between the patterns of attention in the left and right hemispheres of the brain (though there are differences too) and Pirsig’s struggle to reduce ‘value’ or ‘quality’ into what he calls ‘subject-object metaphysics’ is uncannily like the inability of the left hemisphere to re-present schematically what is fully present to experience. Pirsig’s breakdown/breakthrough is also about identifying value with the TAO and in our last session Iain was quite happy to describe himself as a Taoist. (See Thank you Robert Pirsig for a description of the climax in question).

There’s more to say, but in terms of the perception of value, in Pirsig’s second book, Lila, I remember he presented a version of the great chain of being, and ended with a beautiful summary of what his ‘metaphysics of quality’ was about. For Pirsig, ‘quality’ (which for Pirsig is another term for Value) is the fundamental feature of the world, and something beyond the subject/object distinction we tend to build our ideas of reality around. The following extract from right at the end of Pirsig’s second book captures the main idea; goodness, quality or value is something we can intuit directly when we unlearn our cultural conditioning:

…They were all walking down the road … when one of those raggedy nondescript dogs that call Indian reservations home came onto the road and walked pleasantly in front of them … [the woman] asked John ‘What kind of dog is that?’. John thought about it and said, ‘That’s a good dog.’… The woman …wanted to know what genetic, substantive pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking before them could be placed in. But John Wooden Leg never understood the question. He wasn’t joking when he said ‘That’s a good dog’. He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her … John had distinguished the dog according to it’s Quality, rather than according to its substance. That indicated he considered Quality more important…

Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn’t a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it.

“That’s a good dog”. Whenever I see a dog, I think of the depth of that line. Iain’s philosophy is altogether deeper and more grounded than anything that can be inferred from this anecdote, but I hope it’s a good way into the idea of ‘valueception’ that we’ll be considering on Wednesday night.

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Jonathan Rowson is Co-founder and CEO of Perspectiva but writes on Substack in a personal capacity. He is the author of The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life and can be found on Twitter @Jonathan_Rowson