Valueception

Recovering Our Capacity to Perceive Intrinsic Value

In the clear night sky, stars shimmer with beauty that moves us. In the face of a loved one, we glimpse something of immeasurable worth. In moments of profound insight, truth arrives not as mere information but as something that makes a claim on us. These experiences point to a dimension of reality we've largely forgotten how to talk about in our modern world: the realm of intrinsic value.

Our culture has developed extraordinary capacities to measure, quantify, and manipulate reality. We can analyze the chemical composition of stars, map the neural correlates of love, and algorithmically optimize decision-making processes. Yet alongside this technical sophistication, we've witnessed a profound atrophy in our capacity to directly perceive value, beauty, and meaning in the world around us. This isn't just a philosophical concern—it lies at the heart of our contemporary crises of meaning, connection, and collective direction.

This struggle does not stem from an absence of value in the world but rather from an underdeveloped perceptual capacity within ourselves. Like color blindness or tone deafness, many of us suffer from a form of value blindness that leaves us unable to perceive the intrinsic worth that saturates our existence. Our difficulty finding meaning reflects not a meaningless universe but an atrophied ability to perceive the meaning that has been there all along.

McGilchrist's Valueception: The Hemispheric Divide

Iain McGilchrist's extensive research on the divided brain offers compelling insights into this question. In his groundbreaking works "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter With Things," McGilchrist introduces the concept of "valueception" – our capacity to directly perceive values as realities that exist independently of our preferences or judgments.

This perceptual capacity, McGilchrist argues, is primarily mediated by the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in direct, embodied engagement with reality in its wholeness. Unlike the left hemisphere, which excels at abstraction, categorization, and manipulation, the right hemisphere maintains an open, receptive relationship with what is. It perceives reality not as a collection of objects to be utilized but as a living presence imbued with inherent meaning and value.

The cultural dominance of left-hemisphere modes of attention has led to what McGilchrist describes as a "hall of mirrors" – a world where we increasingly engage not with reality itself but with our representations and models of it. In this abstracted space, values become mere preferences or subjective projections rather than qualities we can directly perceive in the world.

Crucially, McGilchrist argues that how we attend to reality shapes what we're able to perceive. The narrow, utilitarian focus characteristic of left-hemisphere attention systematically blinds us to the presence of intrinsic value. Like looking through a pinhole, we see only what our mode of attention allows. A world approached primarily as resource, as means to our ends, gradually loses its inherent value and meaning, not because these qualities disappear from reality, but because our way of attending makes them imperceptible to us.

The Eye of Value in CosmoErotic Humanism

The philosophers Zachary Stein and Marc Gafni have developed this insight further through their framework of CosmoErotic Humanism. They speak of "the eye of value" – a perceptual capacity that allows us to directly apprehend the intrinsic worth of reality.

This eye of value, when open and clarified, enables us to perceive not just that things have value but how value flows and manifests in the living world. It reveals a universe that is not value-neutral but value-saturated, where goodness, truth, and beauty are not subjective projections but real dimensions of existence that call us to right relationship.

Stein and Gafni understand our current meta-crisis – the interconnected ecological, social, and meaning crises we face – as fundamentally a crisis of intimacy and perception. When the eye of value is clouded or closed, we become functionally blind to the intrinsic worth of the natural world, of other beings, and ultimately of ourselves. This blindness doesn't just impoverish our experience; it enables destruction that would be unthinkable if we could directly perceive the value of what we're destroying.

The eye of value isn't just a passive receiver; it's an active capacity that shapes how we exist in the world. When this perceptual organ is functioning well, we naturally align our actions with the flow of value we perceive. We don't need complex ethical calculations to know that clear-cutting an ancient forest is wrong – we can feel the wrongness directly, just as we can sense the dissonance in a jarring chord.

Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma: The Soul as Perceptual Organ

The late meditation teacher Rob Burbea offers another perspective on this theme through his innovative Soulmaking Dharma. Burbea speaks of "soul" not as an immortal substance but as a mode of perception that can be cultivated. The soul, in this view, functions as an organ of perception that discovers/creates meaningfulness, beauty, and sacredness in our experience.

Burbea emphasizes that perception is never passive reception but always a creative act that brings forth aspects of reality. The soul as perceptual organ both discovers and creates value through its unique mode of attending to the world. Through what Burbea calls "ways of looking," we can train ourselves to perceive dimensions of reality that remain invisible to more utilitarian or materialist frameworks.

This soulful perception involves the cultivation of the imaginal capacity – our ability to perceive meaning and value through images that are neither merely subjective nor conventionally objective. The imaginal realm is where value becomes tangible to us, where abstractions like "the sacred" or "the beautiful" take on concrete form and presence that we can directly engage with.

For Burbea, the crisis of meaning we face stems largely from the atrophy of this soulful perception. Modern materialist frameworks systematically discount the validity of the soul's perceptions, treating them as merely subjective or "not real" compared to the supposedly objective measurements of science. This delegitimization of soulful knowing leads to a world that feels flat, meaningless, and devoid of inherent value.

Hartmann's Value Perception: The Mathematics of Meaning

These contemporary frameworks echo earlier philosophical insights, particularly those of the 20th-century philosopher Nikolai Hartmann. Hartmann proposed that ethical perception functions similarly to mathematical or geometric perception. Just as mathematical truths exist independently of whether any particular person perceives them correctly, values exist in reality whether or not we have developed the capacity to perceive them accurately.

This doesn't mean values exist as physical objects, but rather as real structures of meaning that we can apprehend through the right kind of attention. Just as someone untrained in mathematics might fail to perceive the elegance and truth of a complex theorem, someone with undeveloped valueception might fail to perceive the inherent worth of a forest ecosystem or the sacred dimension of human relationship.

Hartmann's understanding highlights why our modern confusion about values persists: we haven't recognized that perceiving value requires training and cultivation, just like any specialized form of perception. We don't doubt the reality of mathematical truths simply because some people can't grasp them; likewise, we shouldn't doubt the reality of ethical truths simply because our collective capacity to perceive them has atrophied.

An Integrated Understanding: The Perception of Value as Human Birthright

These diverse perspectives converge on a profound insight: humans possess an innate capacity to directly perceive value, meaning, and sacredness in the world. This perception isn't merely subjective preference or cultural construction but an engagement with dimensions of reality that exist independently of our individual minds.

This valueception operates like other forms of perception—it can be more or less developed, more or less accurate, more or less refined. And like other perceptual capacities, it requires cultivation through practice and proper attention. Our current cultural blindness to intrinsic value doesn't indicate its absence from reality but points to a collective atrophy of our perceptual capacities.

The convergence of these frameworks suggests that our contemporary crises of meaning, belonging, and direction stem not primarily from philosophical errors or missing information but from underdeveloped valueception. We struggle to find meaning not because the universe lacks inherent value but because we've lost the perceptual capacities needed to apprehend it directly.

Most significantly, all these perspectives suggest that this capacity can be recovered and developed. The eye of value can be opened; the soul's perception can be cultivated; our right-hemispheric engagement with reality can be strengthened. The path toward healing our relationship with reality begins with rekindling these dormant perceptual capacities.

Practices for Cultivating Valueception

If valueception is indeed a capacity that can be developed, what practices might help us cultivate it? Drawing from the traditions and frameworks we've explored, several approaches emerge:

Contemplative Practice: Meditation, particularly forms that emphasize open awareness rather than narrow concentration, can help shift our mode of attention from the left hemisphere's utilitarian focus to the right hemisphere's receptive openness. Practices that develop presence, embodiment, and non-utilitarian awareness create the conditions where values can be directly perceived.

Aesthetic Education: Deep engagement with beauty, whether in nature or in art, trains our capacity to perceive value directly. When we learn to truly see a painting, hear a piece of music, or witness a landscape not for what we can get from it but for its inherent qualities, we strengthen the eye of value.

Ethical Apprenticeship: Just as mathematical perception develops through engagement with mathematical problems under the guidance of those with developed mathematical perception, ethical perception develops through engagement with ethical questions under the guidance of those with developed ethical perception. We learn to see values by apprenticing ourselves to those who see them clearly.

Imaginal Practice: Following Burbea's approach, we can deliberately cultivate the soul's perceptual capacity through practices that engage the imaginal realm. This might involve working with imagery, metaphor, and symbolic understanding to develop our capacity to perceive meaning and value in direct, embodied ways.

Community of Practice: Our perceptual capacities are shaped by our social environments. Communities that validate and support valueception create the conditions for its development, while environments that ridicule or dismiss such perception inhibit it. Creating communities where direct perception of value is honored and cultivated becomes essential for its flourishing.

Implications for Our Collective Future

The rediscovery and cultivation of valueception holds profound implications for addressing our contemporary crises. When we can directly perceive the inherent value of ecosystems, of other beings, of truth and beauty and goodness, our relationship with reality transforms. Actions that seemed reasonable within a value-blind framework become unthinkable when we can directly perceive the value of what would be destroyed.

This shift doesn't happen primarily through better arguments or more information but through the development of perceptual capacities that allow us to see what was previously invisible to us. A person who can perceive the inherent value of an ancient forest doesn't need to be convinced not to destroy it; the value itself becomes directly apparent and compelling.

Educational systems oriented toward developing valueception alongside other forms of knowledge would produce individuals capable of seeing dimensions of reality currently obscured in our culture. Political and economic systems informed by developed valueception would naturally align with the intrinsic values they perceive rather than operating from value-blind abstractions.

The heart of our meaning crisis lies not in the absence of meaning from reality but in our diminished capacity to perceive the meaning that saturates existence. The path forward involves not constructing meaning in an empty universe but developing the perceptual organs that allow us to recognize and participate in the meaning and value that have been here all along.

Conclusion: Opening the Eye of Value

In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, and virtual realities, the cultivation of distinctly human valueception becomes not just philosophically interesting but essential for our survival. The computational systems we're creating can process information with unprecedented speed and accuracy, but they fundamentally lack the capacity for direct perception of value.

The eye of value, the soul's perception, the right hemisphere's direct apprehension of meaning and worth—these represent capacities that no artificial intelligence can replicate because they emerge from our embodied, conscious participation in reality itself. As we face decisions about the future of our societies and our planet, these distinctly human capacities for perceiving value directly may prove to be our most precious resource.

The good news embedded in all these frameworks is that valueception isn't something we need to invent or construct; it's a natural human capacity that simply needs to be uncovered and developed. Like learning to see the hidden image in a stereogram, perceiving intrinsic value requires a shift in how we attend to reality rather than the addition of something new.

This shift in perception doesn't happen all at once but emerges gradually through practice and proper attention. Each moment of directly perceiving beauty, truth, or goodness strengthens this perceptual capacity. Each act of honoring the value we perceive reinforces its clarity. Each community that validates and supports this mode of perception helps to preserve and extend it.

The invitation before us isn't to construct meaning in a meaningless universe but to develop the perceptual capacities that allow us to recognize and participate in the meaning and value that have been here all along. In rediscovering valueception, we don't just find a solution to our crisis of meaning—we recover our birthright as beings uniquely capable of perceiving and honoring the intrinsic value that always saturates existence.

Philosophical foundations: This piece draws upon several wisdom traditions explored in my Lineages of Inspiration article, which outlines the key influences shaping my understanding of human transformation.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together