The primacy of the passions

Value is not perceived as the empirical world is perceived but is constituted by the order and structure reflection and deliberation impose upon desires - the passions in our souls - that furnish the basic currency of evaluative and normative thought both as input (“intuition”) and output (considered normative judgements). Perception, like our other cognitive resources, is nonetheless shaped and informed by the passions in our soul as they in turn shape and inform it. Evaluative reason and justification is driven by our passions and ultimately grounded in them. While locally we generally desire things because they are valuable, globally, in the last analysis, they are valuable because we (at our best) desire them. Here the role of desire is grounding and global but it is still not Archimedean: it is not a matter of raw, brute desire but of evaluation informed by all the substantive ideals from which the whole complex web of our evaluative and normative thought itself is woven.