ABSTRACT
The act of setting a goal means intuitively grasping things as a whole. This grasping consists in taking account of our whole experience of the situation with which we are confronted. The situation is not being apprehended in isolation from everything else but is grasped in relation to everything else. The decision or goal-setting process may be analysed deductively after-the-event but not while it is taking place. The after-the-event reasoning is inevitably selective and is represented in a linear fashion. Both reductionism and holism, if taken as sole guides, lead into a cul-de-sac. To value something is to relate to it personally and bring it into the corpus of important items that make up our personal interests and preoccupations. As a result, we can say that nothing whatsoever has any meaning, use, or value in the universe except in so far as we put meaning into things, find a use for them, and hence value them.
