Zak Stein on Values

The following is from Zak Stein’s contribution to the Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist conference in March 2024. Zak Stein said (my emphasis in italics):

“…the perception of intrinsic value is a basic human capability. Just as our nervous system has evolved to perceive space and time, So it has evolved to perceive value.”

“The notion of a field of value is very important, similar to the types of fields that we find in the study of physics.”

“The eye of value refers to this innate ability for persons to see what is valuable. In the same way, a person can see what is the case with physical reality. Your physical eye interacts with the physical processes it perceives. So the eye of value exists where the human heart interacts with the field of cosmic value.”

“The field of value is a vast, evolving weaving of oppositorium coincidentia. This is far from a social construction, and it does not only emerge with the human ability to put language to it. The field of value proceeds in the emergence of the human. Life evolves in response to the preexisting field of value.”

“The eye of the senses, of course, must be refined and trained.”

“Value is in everything and can be found everywhere.”

“The field of value is discovered in the transverbal rights and archetypal image of the sacred complex. Civilization depends upon access to sacred value at the center of culture, not as doctrine and rhetoric, but as rituals that bind us as persons to each other and to the value of cosmos.”
—Zak Stein, Metaphysics and the Matter With Things – Thinking With Iain McGilchrist, Session 3 – Philosophy & Aesthetics

Rituals can certainly “bind us as persons to each other” (Nazi Germany, for example, used rituals for this purpose), but they do not necessarily bind us to “the value of cosmos“? And they certainly do not bind us to intrinsic value (as defined by Robert S. Hartman). (I think again of Nazi Germany.)

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