fact and value

What is meant by 'and' here?

It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition.
----L. Robbins, 1935.

So began the long slide and the dominance of the 'engineering approach' (Sen).The Gradgrinds want to talk about 'facts' all the time. What else is there? Everything else is, strictly speaking, nonsense or, to put it in milder terms: what transcends us may exist but we cannot know anything of it, nor can we say anything about it.

'And': is there a dichotomy (not just a distinction) here or is there entanglement?

From Iris. M:

Fact and moral value are separated so that the latter cannot be derived from the former. But in this 'move' the realm of the ethical shrinks and the world becomes the world. Values are something lyingly added.

Wittgenstein:
morality is a (stoical) acceptance of the world (fact, necessity, fate). To accept it as a whole, as if from outside, is the moral sense. We cannot alter the facts. Morals, then, becomes a matter of style, an attitude, a way of looking at the world. The world is either good or bad. The world must wax or wane depending on our attitude.There can be no detailed ethical propositions, no moral "facts". Only silence. This running up against the limits of language is ethics But surely the awareness of limits points to something?

We enact morality. The word is the deed. True, but we also try and justify our actions through arguments, reasons..'life is not an argument'.

The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without..the allure of unity. One wonders if the 'success' of the modern west depends on a tension or a heightened awareness of the disjunction between body and spirit, revelation and reason, intellect and will?..and has this been responsible for her creativity and her calamities? The spectacular society is one such disjunction: between vision and the good; existentialism another: the blind will.

To separate fact and value so categorically runs the risk of the latter becoming irrelevant in the face of the relentless onslaught of the worldview of science. The Nazis were, no doubt, very intelligent in a superficial sort of way. But understanding lies in another direction: integral intelligence is neither abstraction nor is it intuition. The intersection of the idea and beauty...often rounded, always open...western man, on the other hand, suffers from a hypertrophy of the mind.But human beings are moral agents. This does not require a negation of facts but, rather, being on our toes when it comes to two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason (Berlin)

What is meant by 'and'? Amphibious beings come to realise that there are 'different modes and levels of insight and understanding'.Truthful vision, virtuous action. The question is not whether separation is possible but whether a reconnection is? Knowing isn't everything.

The austerity of this severance also had a part to play in the Romantic movement, as involving the liberation of the individual into the open space wherein to construct his [own] morality..stirred by reflection upon freedom versus necessity, passion versus reason [interests], value versus fact.How to reconnect to the world? Eros (Plato) or duties (Kant).

Hannah A:
pleasure is a fundamental awareness of the world.

The Good life becomes selfless through an increased awareness of, sensibility to, the world beyond the self. Attentiveness...In a good man duties are more like habits than acts of the will...the picture of unity again.But we live in a demythologised world. There are no more images. The mirror has cracked.We yearn for the transcendent, divine, pure but in picturing it to bring it closer we make idols and lose it. But in shattering it we are left only with silence and absence once again and then we wonder whether that second space even ever existed. Our human frailty means we search for and do not search for a name.

"The idea of reverence is common to what we usually thought of as religious and moral attitudes, connected with art, love, respect for persons and for nature, extending into religious conceptions of the sacred or the holy...Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. 'Don't kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden'. Even the use of 'him' or 'her' instead of 'it' may help. ..Formal religion provided ritual and imagery, presenting it as something ordinary and usual. What happens every day is important , images can affect the quality of our thoughts and wishes. The damage done to inner life, to aloneness and quietness through the imposition of banal or pornographic or violent images by television, is a considerable wound...Some understanding of, and taste for, exercises in detachment and quietness, the sense of another level, and another place, a larger space, might thus be acquired for life. Simply sitting quietly and calmly can be doing something good; subduing unkind or frenzied thoughts certainly is. Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world."

(for Bob and Trumwill, who think we need more analytical thinking)