Passage
The fact is often obscured by the widespread confusion about the nature and role of emotions in man’s life. One frequently hears the statement, “Man is not merely a rational being, he is also an emotional being”, which implies some sort of dichotomy, as if, in effect, man possessed a dual nature, with one part in opposition to the other. In fact, however, the content of man’s emotions is the product of his rational faculty; his emotions are a derivative and a consequence, which, like all of man’s other psychological characteristics, cannot be understood without reference to the conceptual power of his consciousness.
As man’s tool of survival, reasons has two basic functions: cognition and evaluation. The process of cognition consists of discovering what things are, of identifying their nature, their attributes and properties. The process of evaluation consists of man discovering the relationship of things to himself, of identifying what is beneficial to him and what is harmful, what should be sought and what should be avoided.
“A ‘value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep.” It is that which one regards as conducive to one’s welfare. A value is the object of an action. Since man must act in order to live, and since reality confronts him with many possible goals, many alternative courses of action, he cannot escape the necessity of selecting values and making value judgements.
“Value” is a concept pertaining to a relation – the relation of some aspect of reality to man (or to some other living entity). If a man regards a things (a person, an object, an event, mental state, etc.) as good for him, as beneficial in some way, he values it and, when possible and appropriate, seeks to acquire, retain and use or enjoy it; if a man regards a thing as bad for him, as inimical or harmful in some way, he disvalues it – and seeks to avoid or destroy it. If he regards a thing as of no significance to him, as neither beneficial nor harmful, he is indifferent to it – and takes no action in regard to it.
Although his life and well-being depend on a man selecting values that are in fact good for him, i.e., consonant with his nature and needs, conducive to his continued efficacious functioning, there are no internal or external forces compelling him to do so. Nature leaves him free in this matter. As a being of volitional consciousness, he is not biologically “programmed” to make the right value-choices automatically. He may select values that are incompatible with his needs and inimical to his well-being, values that lead him to suffering and destruction. But whether his values are life-serving or life-negating, it is a man’s values that direct his actions. Values constitute man’s basic motivational tie to reality.
In existential terms, man’s basic alternative of “for me” or “against me”, which gives rise to the issue of values, is the alternative of life or death. But this is an adult, conceptual identification. As a child, a human being first encounters the issue of values through the experience of physical sensations of pleasure and pain.
To a conscious organism, pleasure is experienced, axiomatically, as a value; pain, as disvalue. The biological reason for this is the fact that pleasure is a life-enhancing state and that pain is a signal of danger, of some disruption of the normal life process.
There is another basic alternative, in the realm of consciousness, through which a child encounters the issue of values, of the desirable and the undesirable. It pertains to his cognitive relations to reality. There are times when a child experiences a sense of cognitive efficacy in grasping reality, a sense of cognitive control, of mental clarity (within the range of awareness possible to his stage of development). There are times when he suffers from a sense of cognitive inefficacy, of cognitive helplessness, of mental chaos, the sense of being out of control and unable to assimilate the date entering his consciousness. To experience a state of efficacy is to experience it as a value; to experience a state of inefficacy is to experience it as a disvalue. The biological basis of this fact is the relationship of efficacy to survival.
The value of sense of efficacy as such, like the value of pleasure as such, is introspectively experienced by man as primary. One does not ask a man: “Why do you prefer pleasure to pain?” Nor does one ask him: “Why do you prefer a state of control to a state of helplessness?” It is through these two sets of experiences that man first acquires preferences, i.e. values.
A man may choose, as a consequence of his errors and/or evasions, to pursue pleasure by means of values that in fact can result only in pain; and he can pursue a sense of efficacy by means of values that can only render him impotent. But the value of pleasure and the disvalue of pain, as well as the value of efficacy and the disvalue of helplessness, remain the psychological base of the phenomenon of valuation.
