27. Closing the Gap Between Faith and Facts (2)

* When I hear someone proclaim the reign of facts, which are, supposedly, nothing more than the evidence of our senses, I feel like shouting, “Fine. Show me a fact – a plain and simple fact.”

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– All right; here’s one: ice is frozen water.

“I see the liquid water, I see the solid ice, and I can witness the transformation of one to the other. But show me the fact itself – not an example of one.”

– What? I’m not talking about a thing per se, but an objective consensus about reality.

“That’s great. But since you claim that nothing is reliable but sensory evidence, I want to see that consensus. What colour is a fact?

– Don’t be silly; ‘fact’ is just a word.

“But each language has its own word for it. Present to my senses that reality which the whole world agrees on, independent of the sounds that all those words make.”

– Nonsense; the important thing is the general concept, the meaning.

“You’re absolutely right. So ask those fact-filled friends you’ve just disavowed to serve their meaning on a plate for me to taste. Have them play for me the pizzicato of their knowledge. I want to wake up and smell the proof, and feel the crunch of truth between my teeth.”

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Let’s face it: we are so immersed in the supersensory realm, where we effortlessly find our meanings, knowledge, truth, and facts, we won’t really appreciate it until, like a careless fish, we are hauled out of it (and put on the grill).

Notice also – and all proponents of ‘actuality’ do this despite themselves – how Spengler soaks his prose in value-heavy language that belies his passion for facts. (Indeed, if it arouses passion, it is no longer just a fact.) He contrasts the “purely living man” with the “intellectual”, and associates the latter with a “defect of his blood”. This sets the stage for a whole host of contrasts between “life” and things such as “thoughts” that, without his saying it outright, constitute a stand-in for death in this passage. If history, however, is nothing more than a sequence of events, and destiny is just another word for what the end-point of that sequence looks like, I see in it no value, and not necessarily even life. We could call the geological history of Earth ‘real history’ and describe its scorching destruction by the sun several billion years hence as our destiny. Even to prefer the history of a human being over the history of a fruit fly is to activate values that are not inherent in the subject matter.

When Spengler compares “life” and “the whole man” to the contemplative with his single organ, relegating him to “no history but the history of a literature”, “leaving him and all his thoughts to himself”, and “without importance”, we are witnessing how “real history” is actually code not for a dispassionate series of facts, but rather for a set of values that claim to be about actuality and are really all about power. This talk about facts is actually just a disguise, one that ironically enhances the value of its claims by their supposed value-free objectivity.

It is time for today’s physicalists and advocates of scientism in all its forms to abandon the pretence that facts are somehow superior to or prior to values, or that we can derive values from facts. Not only does it require a value – validity, relevance, significance, etcetera – to even recognize a fact, the very essence of a fact is that it takes us nowhere, let alone to a higher level. The value of any tool – a wrench, for example – consists in its being entirely subordinate to the use I make of it. By itself, without the aims and values which I possess, and which I have applied to designing or choosing it, it remains utterly dumb and inert. This inertness is precisely what makes it so useful; it conforms without resistance to my higher purpose.

Facts are tools, and are valued (i.e., given a value) for the same reason, namely that they have no agenda or value of their own. That is what makes them objective. They are utilized because they have no intrinsic value.* How mendacious, then, is it to turn around and convert their being value-free objects into a value per se, and proceed to use that to dictate what values we should have! And yet this intellectual sleight of hand has become so common that we no longer even think of calling it by its proper name – a gross deception.