In this series of posts I’m trying to proceed as naively as possible, refusing philosophical questions, and just describing things as they appear. The key examples in an earlier post is that the earth appears to be still and that the sun and moon appear to rise and set such that we’re stationary and at the center of things. Of course, we now know this is just an appearance and that the earth is actually spinning and that it’s a sort of an illusion of perspective. We distinguish between the appearance and the reality. I’m beginning with this naive realism that temporarily suspends the appearance/reality distinction for methodological reasons to capture salient features— especially surrounding value —that are difficult to derive in the philosophical attitude and that I think tend to get overlooked. I want to treat value in all its forms as realities of our experience that pervade every aspect of the world we navigate. Hence the thesis that the world shines with values. The philosophical question then becomes that of why some people see them and others do not? Why are some of us blind to them in the way that some people are color blind? Is it that they values are just subjective or is there something else going on? With that question we enter the philosophical attitude that distinguishes appearance and reality. Take the example of genocide. How can people do this to others. Is it that the worth and dignity of persons is just subjective, social constructs? I’m not so sure. Why? Because the same people who do these horrific things to others treat other people as ends in themselves in other aspects of their lives. They see the shine of value dimly and inconsistently. This suggests to me that these atrocities come from elsewhere, requiring extensive rhetorical conditioning to lead us to see the persecuted group as worthless and to be destroyed. To get to that thesis, however, I need to begin with the pre-philosophical experience of value to see how it actually shines in experience before we begin to philosophically reflect.