[W]hen one truly takes into account a consideration or an end or a consequence or the avoidance of a consequence, one does not weigh it so much as one seeks it. What is authoritative does not so much restrain one as it animates and feeds one’s thought. And it is this that the metaphor of mind as weighing and of analysis as supplying or discovering grounds for decision, with its various geographical and gravity-derived associations and images, fails to convey. The value, the end, the consideration, feeds into the imagination, the cunning, the resourcefulness of the decision maker. The value might as well be a dead thing from the description of it in the common metaphors of the process of decision making—one speaks of a “dead weight”—whereas it is a warm thing, living if you will, and the authoritative decision maker is warm toward it.
Joseph Vining, The Authoritative and the Authoritarian 177-78 (1986).
