Living purposefully means seeing every moment of every day as a precious, irreplaceable part of an integrated whole—and acting accordingly. What practical steps are necessary to live this way? One crucial step is to explicitly organize and prioritize our values and goals with respect to their relative importance to our life and happiness. Consider a highly relevant passage from Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Bear in mind here that “telos” means “end” or “goal”; thus “teleological” means “goal-directed.” A teleological measurement is a value calculation made with respect to the relative importance of a number of goals or values. A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly. Thus all his actions have to be guided by a process of teleological measurement. (The degree of uncertainty and contradictions in a man’s hierarchy of values is the degree to which he will be unable to perform such measurements and will fail in his attempts at value calculations or at purposeful action.) Teleological measurement has to be performed in and against an enormous context: it consists of establishing the relationship of a given choice to all the other possible choices and to one’s hierarchy of values. The simplest example of this process, which all men practice (with various degrees of precision and success), may be seen in the realm of material values—in the (implicit) principles that guide a man’s spending of money. On any level of income, a man’s money is a limited quantity; in spending it, he weighs the value of his purchase against the value of every other purchase open to him for the same amount of money, he weighs it against the hierarchy of all his other goals, desires and needs, then makes the purchase or not accordingly. The same kind of measurement guides man’s actions in the wider realm of moral or spiritual values. (By spiritual I mean pertaining to consciousness. I say wider because it is man’s hierarchy of values in this realm that determines his hierarchy of values in the material or economic realm.) But the currency or medium of exchange is different. In the spiritual realm, the currency—which exists in limited quantity and must be teleologically measured in the pursuit of any value—is time, i.e., one’s life. The crucial points here for our present purpose are: (1) Our fundamental currency in life—the thing we spend one way or another depending on the clarity and consistency of our value hierarchy (or lack thereof)—is our time, which is our life. They’re the same thing. (2) If we don’t have our values organized and prioritized with respect to their relative importance—and thus integrated into a noncontradictory life-serving whole—we can’t even think in a consistently selfish manner, let alone act in a consistently selfish manner. The first point is relatively obvious: Our time is our life. What we do with our time—and how we do it—is what we make of our life. The second point, although not immediately obvious, is on examination true. “Should I go to the ball game this Saturday? Or should I go to the office and work?” Observe that the question cannot be rationally answered without knowing how these alternatives fit into the hierarchy and network of my other values, needs, goals, purposes. What is the nature of this ball game? Is my son or daughter playing in it? What is my situation at work? Is this Monday the deadline for a major project? What is the context here? What other values and aspects of my life are relevant to my making this decision? And, given that context, what matters most? To think rationally—to think selfishly—we must organize our values hierarchically and refer to them regularly. Some of the elements of the hierarchy are relatively straightforward. Our career (or our need to choose one) is certainly going to be one of our top values, as are our health, our romantic interests, and, if we have children, our children. And each of these top values entails or implies many related values, elements, and aspects. Plus there are all of our other values—recreation, friendships, art, fitness, home improvements, travel, and so on—along with all of the aspects of these values and goals. If we want to think clearly about our choices, goals, and actions in life, we need to know how our values relate to one another. We need a value hierarchy that includes and accounts for the many things that matter to our happiness. . . . theobjectivestandard/issues/2014-summer/purpose-value-hierarchies-happiness/
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 22:50:42 +0000