In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch

Author:Jeff Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

VALUE AND WORTH

The most important things in the world seem impossible to measure. We have as yet, as Carlyle said, no scale to measure admiration by.41 And we have as yet no scale for measuring meaning, knowledge, hope, pleasure, reverence, curiosity, beauty, kindness, awe, justice, wisdom, and love.

Not everything need be quantified. Sophisticated as social scientists’ methods have become, and as valuable as their work is, we know how limiting metrics can be. Anyone who has dreamed of something like the Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus, his scientific system for measuring happiness—in other words, for measuring the unmeasurable—understands how the precision of measure and the significance of the measured are in inverse proportion to each other. The fact that these qualities are unmeasurable and unquantifiable, that they respond to a personal, subjective scale, is, perhaps, integral to their meaning.

Measurement in and of itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is a reliance on measure over experience and on the quantifiable over the qualifiable. Again Musil helps us here. In his 1922 essay “Helpless Europe,” he makes a distinction between morality and ethics. “In accord with its prescriptive nature, morality is tied to experiences that can be replicated, and these are precisely what characterize rationality as well, for a concept can only take hold in areas where explicitness and, figuratively speaking, replicability obtain.” In matters of meaning, however, replicability is an absurd notion.

Thus there exists a profound connection between the civilizing character of morality and of the scientific spirit, whereas the truly ethical experience, such as love, introspection, or humility, is, even where it is of a social nature, something difficult to transmit, something quite personal and almost antisocial.42

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