CONTINENTAL  PHILOSOPHY  GROUP

VALUES  AND  IDENTITY

Lindsay  Mell

Continental  Philosophy Group

Seminar  Paper

CONTINENTAL  PHILOSOPHY  GROUP

14  November  2004

Values  and  Identity

Recently, for the ABC TV Compass program, Alain de Botton was featured for a three-part series on a theme he’s been exploring – ‘Status Anxiety’. 

Although I missed the second session of this series, I was interested enough in what I saw to put together some brief observations on at least a couple of the themes de Botton proposed. 

Among the key perspectives he emphasised was one expressed basically through an analysis of society and culture in the United States, for which purpose certain individuals representing some variants of these perspectives were interviewed. 

As the camera panned across various well-established upper middle-class US neighbourhoods, de Botton noted that although the properties and land segments occupied by each dwelling varied, along with those dwelling in these, there was remarkable similarity among the aspirations of those concerned, except from a particular key perspective.  This was that each family sought something similar in this respect, yet what they sought was also somewhat different or distinguished from their neighbours. 

The rationale which de Botton developed around this was that, in a socio-communal context where everyone strove to own the same as what their neighbours owned, they each wanted their respective possessions to be just a little different from each other … In the context of a sea of similarity, some element of variety was considered crucial to enable them to maintain their interpersonal and personal continuity and stability. 

So the social and communal values evident here tended to range around the issue of ‘status’, and how people would position and/or situate themselves in this respect – hence, ‘status anxiety’! 

Consequently, the values people tended to adopt and apply collectively constituted a competitive ethos, to enable them to keep focussed on advancing themselves beyond their neighbours, but not so diverse as to propel them into a different league of experience and interaction … Otherwise they might become distended from the lifestyle context of their neighbours. 

This really represents a kind of equality underpinned by individual difference, in some sense.  Moreover, de Botton refers to and quotes the work of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) in this context, who analysed many aspects of fledgling US American society and culture in the early to mid-19th century. 

Accordingly, de Tocqueville observed this urge to propagate competitive equality in early American society and culture could prove to be fragile and unstable ultimately.  This was because people settled in densely populated communities might feel frustration, and perhaps resentment, at not always being able or positioned to assert what they considered to be their justified equality, in an affluent socio-cultural context where people tended to be focussed on wants, rather than needs. 

Of course, not all US American communities are affluent.  

But, for those that are so situated, the foregoing challenges and values tend to prevail. 

When considered from a certain particular perspective, a value can be regarded as a preference for something precious and/or special.  However, when it comes to a set of values, the situation transcends merely preference, as such.  A set of values implies a situation through which such values are grounded in an ethical context which provides an affirmative resonance for these, thereby serving to justify them in this sense. 

The most evident ethical context is not a mere preference through which something is valued as a given object.  Rather, an ethical context is the ground through which pertinent perspectives are brought forward and applied in consistent and cohesive forms. 

People then position themselves relative to the particular prevalent dynamics which emerge at this juncture.  However, what people seem to yearn for through this process is more a place to be, and be themselves, rather than being preoccupied with particular sets of values which inform their socio-communal and cultural development. 

Of course, people will establish preferences, and will form their values on the basis of these.  However, what will remain treasured, even revered in certain contexts, will be the place in which each person is positioned and situated.  This sense of place will even contribute to the essential character and nature of the person. 

The importance of a sense of place is vital in any socio-cultural context.  

Even a basic awareness of our own indigenous Aboriginal culture and society reveals how vital is the perspective and realisation of ‘place’ in this context.  

Accordingly, the most basic appreciation of Aboriginal culture will reveal the close association of all Aboriginal principles and precepts with ‘the land’ and the adaptation of these to the journeying of their lives. 

Meanwhile, in the US American socio-communal and cultural context, the adherence to a vital sense of place is evident in the reverence of US Americans for an assured generalised sense of patriotism, even of community in this sense.  At the conclusion of the recent US Presidential Election, through a review of voter concerns, economic security and patriotism were raised as among the top four values in the context of which Americans decided which candidate they would choose for President.  These were accorded greater priority than any international concerns or issues. 

The association of security and patriotism tends to link with a sense of place, as in the priority of one’s homeland, and even emphatic reverence of these aspects in a xenophobic sense.  The propensity of people to seek a place to be in life can provide a firm sense of security for them. 

Security, which is as much perceived in an (inter)personal sense as it is through financial and/or economic perspectives, also links with safety and stability in the socio-communal context, as a most resonant emphasis.  These values then further tend to link with the aspiration of ‘balance’, as in a preferred ‘balanced lifestyle’.  

This aspect of balance effectively completes the preferred optimal values set for many people from this socio-communal perspective. 

Among eastern and/or Asian-based cultures, the further ideal of ‘harmony’ is linked to this preferred values progression, while in western-based cultures the preferred aspirational ideal tends to be a much more loosely defined diffuse notion of ‘freedom’, especially in the US American context. 

All of these deep-seated values resonate around the ground of being for probably most people.  People tend to refer to these values as ‘the ground on which they stand’, and/or simply ‘where they stand’ or ‘what they stand for’ in life.  

However, ‘freedom’, and presumably ‘harmony’ in the eastern context, are ideals, and not therefore either necessarily or usually worked through in a conscious sense, or even experientially for many people. 

So people tend to eschew the relevance of ideals in such a socio-communal context, even though they will often strenuously deny this – but then much of contemporary culture is based on a predilection to deny reality, from my perspective … even the denial of any form of authentic reality from an existential perspective. 

This concern to establish a ‘ground of being’, or grounding in life, really translates into a deeper concern with affirming a place to be, or an authentic place in life, in my view.  Consequently, the whole protracted journey of people finding themselves, and discovering themselves, is really essentially all about this – simply establishing and asserting one’s place in life – the place to be, and the ground of one’s being, where a person can say they are ‘home’, or are where what they call ‘home’ in this life, and potentially even beyond this life in a metaphysical or spiritual sense. 

‘Home is where the heart is …’ as they say – and there are potentially much greater dimensions of meaning in this expression than simply a statement of feeling. 

Perspectivally, one’s place in life, or the ground of being, emerges through at least a few (inter)personal and socio-cultural dimensions, which remain emphatic for me throughout all my perceptual exploration and research into this realm of being and identity. 

At the outset, the ground of being provides the basic context through which people establish meaning in a broad sense, and particularly how the meaning they consequently establish pertains to them personally.  Meaning is the foundational principle through which people interpret the phenomenon of their being and experience. 

People tend to carry out this initiative or enterprise of discerning and/or interpreting meaning through their perception and/or perspectives of how such meaning pertains specifically to them in the wider context of socio-communal endeavour.  This is really all about the significance of one’s being. 

Effectively, when people seek a place to be in life, they are aspiring to establish and affirm what is their distinctive contribution in life.  They either recognise or impute some form of purpose for their lives which, in a socio-communal context, is necessarily based on a perspective of significance derived through discerned or interpreted meaning.  However, for many people, all this often proceeds almost inadvertently, as they tend to derive only a meagre sense of how to feasibly assert their distinctive contribution in all this. 

This ‘how to’ aspect of this endeavour turns on the place of relevance.  

People continuously grapple with the challenge in life of realising that who they are and what they do is distinctive – that ultimately only they are who they are – they therefore are authentic, in this sense at least; and they in themselves, along with what they do and where they are situated, collectively represent some form of contribution in life.  All these aspects of (inter)personal being, once discerned and affirmed, represent the relevant significance of a person’s place. 

However, all these realisations are basically minimal in perspective in the whole context, as well as for the person in question themselves, if they are not truly valued, recognised as worthy facets of being, while also respected and appreciated in this sense. 

All these qualities or attributes of value are what I consider potentially bring forth the resonance of each of our distinctive contributions in the context of life, being and experience … And through all this we establish our place(s) in life. 

So, what we value and establish in life is only superficially about ‘things’ and ‘status’, as such. 

The greater deeper perspective is that what we value is all about our place(s) in life … and what is the essential meaning, significance, relevance and resonance of this perspective. 

However, if we decide, as de Botton presumptuously seems to infer, with ostensibly meagre evidence to substantiate his position, that death is finality of existence for every facet of being, then the purpose of life as meaning, significance, relevance and/or resonance remains severely constrained and deplete.  

Really, such a position does tend to emaciate much of the relevance of human purpose – although there is still the prospect of the distinctive contributions of people being pertinent in themselves from the perspective of human development and/or progress. 

Consequently, from a narrow materialist perspective, being, life and reality can be potentially or feasibly merely subject to formless fate or chance, without any element of destiny or fortune evident. 

My perspective and perception is that such a fundamentally materialist position lacks a sense of earnest mutual maturity and magnanimity in scope and determination. 

Those who maintain there is more to being and life than what can be known conventionally through the five human physical senses independently thence are situated to raise an emphatic challenge to such constrained reasoning and presumption.  How would de Botton find a valid magnanimous place for the phenomenon of intuition, or even imagination, in his rigid perceptual scheme of being and identity, for instance? 

What would be the ‘value’ of intuition from such a materialist perspective as he proposes … and from whence would such a quality as intuition be derived? 

Lindsay Mell, 

10 November 2004.