On Value and Obligation

I recently found myself pondering the question of whether we, as humans, derive our value from our obligations, or whether our obligations are derived from our value. From the very outset, this questions assumes a great deal; namely, that there are no more choices than these. While that may not be true, the question as stated remains compelling, particularly as the basis for both value and obligation are examined.

In one sense, we really don't need value to have obligation; all that is needed is existence. As I have often stated elsewhere, every thing in existence has a basic duty to what it is as a being. This, in my view, can be taken as a basic axiom. In other words, it is the basic duty of all things to be reconciled in being to that which created them (their formal cause, that is), or that from which their sense of functionality, purpose, or teleology derives. It is thus that the sun has the duty to produce light, heat, and gravity, the moon has the duty to create a tide, seeds have the duty to produce plants, and plants have the duty to clean the air, replenishing it with oxygen. In the same way, we have a duty, regardless of value, to fulfill our own role in the world, whatever that may be.

However, I would be in error to let the clause regardless of value stand, because value and duty are not unrelated, as I have in fact assumed from the outset. At least in a sense, the sun does have value based on its role as the producer of much needed energy. However, value is inherently resident not in doing, but in being, because value is never created as the product of any activity, but is that which eternally exists in the person of God and that in which He, through creation, has made manifest.

But this itself invokes and even larger question which is critical to this entire discussion: can the essence of something (what it is) stand independent from what it does? I would contend that it doesn't. What something does is part of the whole picture of what it is. Nothing is truly independent, and the essence of something in part refers to what role it plays in the universe. It is difficult for us to perceive how a rock, or even a supercomputer, floating in space as the sole object in existence, can have any meaningful existence by itself. However, although there is an absolute relationship between essence and activity, the nature of the relationship is such that activity is dependent on essence. However, essence requires a particular kind of capacity, or potential, for a type of activity which is intended of it, for the very reason that essence is manifest in the mind of the creator. Teleologically speaking, the sun is not what it is because it is bright; it is bright because it is the sun. It did not one day decide to shine, and thus create itself, as the existentialists would have it, but rather, it was created for the purpose of shining, and thus it shone. Its luminescence is necessary to it being the sun, but it being the sun is the formal cause of its luminescence. In fact, while what it is the cause of its characteristics, what it does is the teleological purpose of its being. While the activity of the sun (its luminescence) is derived from what it is, what it is is derived from the purpse given to it by that which gave it being, and therefore, it's purpose and obligation of being luminescent. While activity stands in a dependent relationship to essence, essence itself cannot be distinguished from it's obligation. In this sense, obligation seems to be prior to value.

In the same way, to step out of our analogy, we may ask from what our value as human beings derives. This is to ask what, indeed, we are, and from the Christian worldview, we are beings made in the image of God. But, as previously observed, this same question of what we are is also the basis for our obligation, because what a being is meant to do, what role it is made to fill, and what it is to aspire to be, are resident in that which provided and defined its being through an act of creation and will. Thus God's act of creating us in His image defined not only what we are, but what we are meant to do and, in our state of deviance from God's created order and will, what we are to aspire to become. At the same time, this is the very thing which gives us our value: being created in the image of God. God, who gave us the duty to be what He made us to be, has therein given us the obligation to use our fatuities of will, passion, reason, humor, creativity, and love. As it is through these things that we are set apart from nature and are given a particular essence in being, so we have a particular value apart from the rest of nature, which is derived from that for which we are intended. While action itself does not define value, (just as luminescence is not the cause of the sun) the capacity and purpose to fulfill some type of activity and essence does. In fact, much of this can be summarized simply in saying that essence of being and intended purpose are really one in the same and cannot be separated.

Therefore, it is true that we have value derived from our obligations, because our obligations (if not the practice of them itself) defines what we are. In fact, as we have observed, all things in creation have some sort of obligation because of what they are, (and we have seen that obligation and essence are really the same) and their sense of value must incumbent upon the particular role they play in existence. Seeing as mankind has an especially important role as being capable of relating to God and glorifying Him by displaying His image in a special way, we have a special value. This is what we were made to be, so this is what we are; this is our obligation, so this is our value.

Now at first, this strikes us as being horribly utilitarian. Are not things (and certainly humans) valuable for what they are, before and apart from consideration of what they do or are expected to do? One would be right to point out that God is not clockmaker who merely gives all of His cosmic cogs a special pin on which to turn, and cares for them only insofar they complete His machine. Is not our God rather a being of incomprehensibly great personality and passion? Yet pointing this out only serves to complete the point being made. We have come to see that value and obligation, and the nature of our existence itself, are all really the same thing. It is indeed true that our value comes directly from being made in God's image as the creation He lovingly breathed into being; that we are valuable because God valued us! Upon reflecting thus, we would desire to reverse our hypotheses and say that we have an obligation be what God made us to be simply because we have been given so great a value. But it is here that the great irony emerges, because in stating what we thought was the reverse, we have really said the very same.

Part of this confusion probably resides in the fact that we generally tend to dislike the terms obligation and duty. We often use them to refer to distasteful jobs that nobody really wants to do, but are necessary nonetheless. If we are obligated to do something, we have no natural desire whatsoever to do it, but we suffer it anyway either because it is necessary, such that the displeasure of doing it is outweighed by the consequences of not doing it, or else we are being paid or rewarded in some other fashion. This is not at all the sense in which I use the term. I might rather say that if a man loves his wife, he has the obligation to treat her kindly. Yet his obligation is not in spite of his love, but because of it. If he loves her, this obligation is a joy more than it is a burden. It is the natural response to his love, and is the very thing he longs to do. In fact, it is just as true to say that he loves his wife for the very reason that he has this obligation of desire to do what is best for her, for that is, in a large part, what love is. In the same way, our obligation as purposefully created beings is not at all a job for which we are rewarded by being valued; the obligation is, as it is for the man who truly loves his wife, itself the reward; they are inseparable. We are not like prostitutes, who do our "obligation" and then recieve our wages, but rather like the most pure and passionate of lovers, whose "obligation" to one another is in fact the truest and most powerful expression of depth of their love, which to express in it fullest is their longing. In fact, the most passionate and reckless intimacy is, between such lovers, the most proper and right thing to do. In the same way, the duty we have received as beings created to fulfill a special purpose is the very thing we desire most. If our value derives from our inherent obligation or role, we must remember that our obligation, being that purpose through which we were formed, is to participate in perfect and abounding joy; to be what it pleased God to have us be, to fulfill the passion of the unadultered heart.

A second point which should be made is that giving us value independent of purpose is, in reality, not at all what we want. The irony is that for however much unconditional value resembles arbitrary value, we yearn for one and deplore the other. Nothing is more contrary to love than to tell someone "I love you, even though I have no reason whatsoever to do so", just as it is an oxymoron to say "I extend to you my compliments, even though there is nothing for which you should be complimented." God's love for us passes our comprehension not because he had no reason to love us in the first place, but that he continued to love us even after we rejected his love. It is amazing for the very reason that he looks on us in our sin, looks past our undeservingness of His love, and says "I made you; I made you beautifully; therefore I love you and I long for you to be my child again!" His love is unconditional, but it is not arbitrary, and so has He valued us. He did not in some haphazard fashion decide that this lump of dirt was innately so much more valuable than the next, and therefore to give it some appropriately important duties. Rather, He created from a lump of dirt something made to fulfill the most important role of all: to express His own image as a personal being, and create another being with whom He could truly relate that would worship Him and take joy in Him, and thus did He create something innately valuable.

Here, at the end we see (and have probably suspected all along) that the question of whether obligation comes from value or the other way around, did indeed assume too much, for in all reality, both statements mean the same thing: that we are created for a special purpose as the image bearers of God. Although in the sense described philosophically, obligation as the essence and purpose of it's creator is prior to value, if value is a characteristic of such an entity's essence deriving from this teleological form, we must also recognize that value, in the ultimate sense, is a form which proceeds from the character of God Himself, and He expresses through all His actions, all His principles, all His created things, and even-especially-us. We are (or were intended to be) expressions of things which God indeed holds truly valuable. This value is our obligation; this obligation is our value. It is what we were made to be, and now, through the blood of Jesus Christ, have sure hope to be again.

Epistemology

O flame that burns so bright within,
why do you hesitate to tell
that wisdom which thou know so well,
as though our eyes alone possess
the strength to truth from error win!
Wilt thou, inner eye, confess
to be as blind, though inward dwell?
Among deaf ears and silent tongues,
and eyes, though seeing, sightless be,
art thou, O heart, from nonsense free;
alone that sense which truth percieves?
Stand thou but on higher rungs
of that same form, which lacking, grieves
that light, though there, he cannot see.

What is knowing, and what are its instruments? This question is central to concept of epistemology, and this poem addresses one of its issues: which means of knowing with which humanity is equipped can be counted as trustworthy? The empiricists say the senses, the rationalists, the mind, and the mystics, the heart. We can see where our senses sometime go wrong, and that empiricism used exlusively precludes anything that might exist apart from what it is inherantly able to reveal, such that such an epistemology finds itself guilty of begging the question. Exclusive rationalism, on the other hand, brings us such examples of Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence, which is within itself a logically coherent argument, but in no place draws a tangent to the objective world beyond the thinker's mind, and such a dichotomy between the objective and the strictly logical is the necessary result of exclusive rationalism. And mysticsm--a trust in the heart, the intuition--yields no greater trustworthyness, for the bottom line, as the poem states, is that the heart, though perhaps a higher part of man, still belongs to him in his fallen, (or, as an evolutionist might paradoxically yet accurately say, imperfect) state, enshrouded by deception.

But if this is the final analysis, what hope of knowing anything do we have? This question can be addressed at both the philosophical and theological levels. On the philosophical level, we can concede that the outlook is ultimately a bit dim, and accept the fact that there are a great many things about which we can have very little certainty. However, things are not really so bleak altogether, for while our epistomological equipment is flawed and imperfect, it is still present. While we may not have all that we desire, we have every right to work with what we have. Our senses may sometimes deceive us, but once we have understood them the best we can and honed all of our technological exentions thereof, we have every right to assume the truth of what we have perceived. To put it simplistically, it may be theoretically uncertain that grass is green or that the moon orbits the earth, but our only reasonable option is to believe that both are true. It may in fact be that nature has played some cruel joke on us and we are really as blind as bats, metephorically speaking, but until we can hear it laughing at us, we can only live under the assumption that our senses really can tell us some things about reality.

Impiricism, however, falls severely short when it attempts to be exclusive. First of all, any claim an impiricist makes that his senses alone, apart from reason can adequetely inform about reality neglects the observation that raw facts and data without an interpreter and a rational system by which they interact with one another are meaningless. On a practical level, no observation by itself does us any good unless we make rational inferences and deductions from them. We interpret things we observe using the principles of cause-and-effect, non-contradiction, and with principles of mathematics. Without reason, there is no possible way of drawing connections between our data, producing meaning from it, or even refining our very methods of obtaining it. This much is apparent on a practical level, but it must also be recognized that aforementioned principles of reason such as non-contradiction, cause-and-effect, and mathematics are a priori laws, which are not the products of observation, but must be presupposed if any of our experiences are to make sense to us.

But while impiricism gives us facts without meaning, rationalism deprives us the means by which we can have any material to which we can apply forms of reason. In order for any knowledge to be possible, there must be both interpretation, and something to interpret. That was, it seems, the error which so many philosophers of the last five centuries tended to make: they each stood on only one epistemological leg, and as a result, their approaches to the study of existence was enfeebled. Immanuel Kant characterized this in his idea that the phenomenal (the picture of the thing which we see) could not inform us about the noumenal (the thing itself.) In some ways, this seems to harken back to the methodical skepticism of Descartes, who suggested that we doubt everything that can possibly be doubted. While this position does reflect the ultimate feebleness of the mind and heart, it deprives us of making our necessary presupposition; that until it becomes apparent that it is otherwise, we can trust that grass really is green, that acorns really do fall from trees, and (as Alvin Plantinga would point out) that other people have minds. The Kant's skepticism of the noumenal unjustly places any meaningful knowlege of reality beyond our grasp. While he recognized that our senses could tell us something about what we sensed (for in view of his skepicism of the noumenal, that is really all that he could say), our reason could draw no further conclusions about reality based on what we saw or percieved, or by extention, what the very existence of reason could suggest to us.

The point of all of this is the necessity of keeping both of our epistemological feet soundly attached to us and planted firmly on the ground. While indeed there is always the possibility that we are in error, and that we would be the laughingstock of the noumenal if it is anything that can laugh, we can only, within the realms of sanity, assume that such is not the case, and this being so, we really can have at least some presumably good knowlege about reality through both our perception and what we can infer from these perceptions and the fact of their existence. Eyes and minds and hearts may be flawed, but they are too great a gift to be thrown aside in epistemological despair.

Yet another consideration that is required in the philosophical contemplation of epistemology is the practical reality that none of us have really obtained the majority of our view of the world by such a rigorous and analytical system. We build up our total knowledge from the ground up in theory only. Our knowlege of the impirically observable world is formed largely on what others tell us, whether through those who have gone before us and studied it directly, or simply as students reading textbooks. In terms the deeper foundations of our worldviews, we do not start with our ability to reason, employ it to the task of learning about what we see around us, and then using reason to put these facts together and then make some kind of inference as to what reality is behind the existence we percieve. Quite frankly, we believe in God because our parents did, or, to bring up a whole other subject which I do not intend to discuss at this point, because the same concept of the divine which until rather recently was universal among all culturers, whatever it may be, has also worked its influence on us. The point is, we do not, and in reality cannot, form all of our ideas about reality "from the ground up."

This is not say that this bottom-up way of looking at epistemolgy wrong, but that it is not the only way. In fact, one might say that the two loci of epistemolgy are the "bottom-up" and the "top-down." While the former is useful for obtaining some new knowledge and as a lense through which to evaluate the soundness of our conceptions, the latter is the inevitable approach we use. The point is that rather than beginning with a blank slate and filling it with our observations and deductions, we begin with our ideas, and, if we desire to treat them in an appropriately critical way, see how they line up with observations and deductions we make, and see how well they address the critical questions of existence.

However, this brings us to our second leval on which we intended to address a pessimistic outlook on our ability to know anything: the theological. For all that has been said concerns the structure, not the purposeful functioning, of a sound epistemology. In fact, all of this might be called pre-epistemolgy. Once a worldview is accepted, it has every natural right to inform us about reality. In a very broad sense, that is the very essence of what a worldview is for. The people judge their king before the king judges the people. So with a worldview: it must pass a test, but once affirmed, it must be seen as reliable. If it is not, it is worthless. But it is necessary, for some presupposion (although not an unevaluated one) is an absolute necessisty for all intelligent activity. As it has been wisely said, we must know something before we can know anything. Therefore, both orientations of epistemology are necessary: the one for evaluating our knowledge, and the other for knowing.

For a Christian, this gives us confidence in our ability to have knowledge, particularly in that we can be justified in relying on God's revealed truth in Scripture. We do in fact have hope of attaining some knowledge, for our minds, eyes, and hearts, though fallen, are given to us by God, for the purpose that we might ultimately know Him better. But two things must be kept in mind: our epistemology is still fallen, and it is most unwise to think as though knowledge can be an independent human achievement. Having been given the word of God, we must rely on it. Secondly, we must never desire knowledge for its own sake, for doing so brings us perilously close to the sin of Adam and Eve. We must not be as Faust, who sold his soul for knowledge. While gaining knowledge expresses part of God's design, and glorifies Him by acting as His image bearers, to pursue knowlege apart from knowing God is to miss the point entirely, and in fact, demonstrates the essence of sin through the desire for something good like knowledge, but by ourselves, on our own terms, and for our own glory. The Greeks were right to see knowlege as something innately valualbe, but were wrong in that they did not see the basis and end for its value: to know God. This, then, is the fulfillment Christian epistemology: to know Christ, because it is through Him alone that we know God.