Robert Welsh Jordan
<Chapter 9 of Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. A Handbook edited by John J. Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002) 175-196. The pagination of the book is given within the text below in angle brackets.>
Nicolai Hartmann was educated at his birthplace, Riga in Latvia and at St. Petersburg (Russia), where he graduated from gymnasium in 1901 prior to his university studies in medicine at Tartu (German, Dorpat; Russian, Yuryev) in Estonia and in classical philology at St. Petersburg. When he changed fields to philosophy, he moved to the university at Marburg, Germany. The principal chairs in philosophy there were held by the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Under their direction, he worked intensively on ancient philosophy, completing his doctoral dissertation in 1907 and his Habilitationschrift on Platos Logik des Seins (Plato’s logic of being ) in 1909. By 1912, however, Hartmann began a struggle against the general neo-Kantian approach and against the logical idealism of his chief academic mentors at Marburg. This shift was brought on, as he himself later reported, largely by studying the work of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. The change did not become public, however, until his Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (Outlines of a metaphysics of cognition) in 1921 after he assumed in 1920 the chair Natorp had held at Marburg. In that work he declares affinity with the work of these phenomenologists whom he identified as his nearest philosophical neighbors. Still, he had hardly any contact with members of the phenomenological movement until 1925 when he became a colleague of Scheler at Cologne. They remained friends until Scheler’s death in 1928. In 1931 Hartmann transferred to a chair at Berlin and finally to Göttingen in 1945. He died at Göttingen on 9 October1950.
During World War I, Hartmann had served at the eastern front in the German army. In the trenches during the winter of 1916-17 he began writing what would become his vast Ethics. Published only in 1926 this monumental work clearly shows that the writings of Scheler and Husserl had indeed affected its author profoundly. The concept of value and of persons as moral beings is the heart of Hartmann’s Ethics. Its center piece is its axiology or theory of value.
<176> Only two of Nicolai Hartmann’s many important works have been translated into English; luckily, one of these is his Ethik.1 Most of his other works also deal to a greater or lesser extent with what will here be called “moral theory,” where the phrase refers to theories about agents as entities capable of right or wrong actions, i.e., to theories about persons and the actions of persons. At the risk of overworking the word “moral” it will be employed as an aid in rendering Hartmann’s use of the German words Geist and geistig. Rather than the fairly standard but very awkward “spiritual” and “spirit,” the terms “moral being” and “moral” will be used to translate these German terms. Doing so may help to purge this exposition of the many religious, Aquarian, and New Age associations that would be inevitable with the word “spiritual;” Associations of that sort seem utterly alien to the spirit of Hartmann’s work as well as to its moral. Hartmann himself seems to use the words very much as synonyms for “person” and “personal.” The present use of “moral” harks back to Hume by way of John Stuart Mill’s discussion of “The Logic of the Moral Sciences” (Book VI of A System of Logic). The moral sciences referred to seem to coordinate quite well with what in German are called Geisteswissenschaften: psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities (the theory of the fine arts). Calling them “moral” is not adulation but connotes instead that they deal with a subject matter that is conditioned by habit and custom. This use is primarily neither argumentative nor pedantic; it is just an effort to minimize for the reader the already considerable obstacles to comprehension.
1. Overview of the Relation Between Values and Valuing
Contrary to widespread usage, Hartmann does not apply the term ‘value’ to components of persons. Values are not contents of anyone’s mind, nor do they depend for their being or their validity upon people or upon facts about people. What people often have in mind when they speak of their values are what Hartmann might call their ways of valuing, their emotions, their emotional attitudes, especially their typical likes, dislikes, loves, sympathies, antipathies, enthusiasms, indignations, rancors, and the like affective attitudes. He relies very heavily upon Max Scheler’s view that values are given through emotions. The impressional consciousness of the fact that something ought to be or is worthy of love or <177> approval occurs as positive emotion. This view has much in common with that of Franz Brentano, who held that something’s being good implies that it is worthy of love whether it be loved or not. More exactly, Brentano’s formulation would be that something’s being good implies that anyone having toward that thing (considered under the relevant description) an emotional attitude that is other than positive has toward it an incorrect emotional attitude. Hartmann does not agree, however, with Brentano’s insistence that statements formulating this implication are the whole of what it means that the object in question is good.
For Hartmann, that goodness and other valuational predicates are not subjectively relative means a great deal more than just that what is good is worthy of approval, what is bad is worthy of disapproval, etc. If it were possible accurately to introspect an emotion, such as a feeling glad, and so accurately to ascertain that whereof it is glad consciousness then we should learn from the affect far more than just that it is a positive affective consciousness of something or even that what it is conscious of is good. Emotions are necessarily grounded on some sort of cognitive awareness, however vague it may be.2 Any emotion entails in this way a sort of abstraction: whatever is loved is loved as having certain traits whether it really has them or not; what is loved has a description such that whatever satisfies that description is worthy of love, regardless of whether that description actually is or even actually could be satisfied by something else. In a variation of Heideggerian language, there is an affective as that is analogous to the hermeneutical or to the apophantical as. Love, however blind it be however often, is never totally vacuous. The doctrine of the foundedness of emotions is indispensable to the conception of emotions as intuitions of what ought to be that seems to be common to Hartmann, Scheler, and Husserl. Affective consciousness is receptive in a way quite like that in which sensory perception or reflective perception is receptive; it is a sensing of an axiotic state of affairs much as perceptual experience is a sensing of ontic states or affairs or of epistemic states of affairs. The intuitive consciousness of what-ought-to-be is not sensory perception but is rather a perception through emotion. Sensory intuition, i.e., sensory perception in the usual meaning of the phrase, shows that what is perceived actually exists or that it is of a sort that might have actual instances. By contrast, the emotional intuition of what-ought-to-be shows that what is loved, for example, is of a kind such that occurrences of that kind ought to be. Emotional intuition is not empirical intuition since it does not indicate actuality. It shows that all things of a certain kind ought to be and in that respect ought to be <178> loved, even if the belief that what is actually being loved is really of that sort should be false. Emotional intuition does not show even that what is in fact loved exists. Much more importantly, it does not even show that an example of the relevant universal ever has been actual. No human being has ever experienced a condition of international peace (using Hobbes’ definition of “war”). Yet international peace is an ideal that ought to be actualized {Hartmann, Ethik, 102-06, 125-27, 170-74; E1, 160-65, 189-92, 247-51}..
Whether Brentano might have been persuaded to share this view is unclear. He insisted that feelings are necessary conditions for acquaintance with goods and evils; the concepts of the good and the evil derive, he also insisted, from the necessarily obscure internal perception of itself inherent in every emotion. This “perception” was denoted “feeling” by Romantic thinkers two centuries back and “intellectual intuition” by some Absolute Idealists; these terms denote the same intuition whereby each emotion is what some call an Erlebnis (lived experience). Even Brentano eventually allowed himself to be persuaded that to acknowledge correct affects implicitly acknowledges universal and necessary laws regarding goods and evils {Brentano, 109-12; E, 111-13}. He still resisted admitting that there can be synthetic a priori cognition of goods and evils, and he may well have been correct in doing so.
The emotions explicate further the meaning inherent in something understood {Hartmann, PgS, 168} , and the way they do so shows that there are laws regarding what ought and what ought not to be. These axiotic laws are what Hartmann calls values; although he is not always consistent in doing so, that is how the word will be used here. When more precise use is required, they are called “values (Werte]” when they are laws about what ought to be (about what is of value) but are called “disvalues (Unwerte]” when they are laws about what ought not to be or what is contrary to value (wertwidrige) (about evils).
That they are laws concerning what ought to be sets them apart from laws of ontology as well as from empirical laws. Ontological laws and genuine empirical laws are bound to be satisfied by what actually happens. An alleged empirical law is true only if it has no actual exceptions so that any actual exception would prove it false. An alleged ontological principle is true only if it could have no possible exceptions and might be proven false not just by actual counterinstances but even by merely possible or plausible cases whose description would be inconsistent with the alleged law. There are therefore some clear criteria for falsification here: actual exceptions in the one case, plausible exceptions in the other. If there are synthetic a priori arithmetical laws to which all dyads, triads, tetrads, pentads must conform then they will have no possible, much less actual counterinstances. If there be laws of formal logic that are also laws of formal ontology then no true proposition or true description will fail to satisfy them. Laws of physics or of chemistry determine what is physically or chemically possible, necessary, or <179> impossible. The cognition of axiotic laws in theory of value or in theory of praxis has no comparable criterion for falsification. Such laws determine, as Hartmann understands them, what is axiotically impossible (what ought not to be) or what is axiotically necessary (what ought to be) {Hartmann, Ethik, 215-24; E1, 191-92} . But things which ought not to be or to occur do actually exist and occur {Hartmann, Ethik, 126-27; E1, 192}..
Through the affective sensing of what is of value, the intuition of the state of axiotic affairs — that trustworthiness ought to be, for example — a person is aware of axiotic requirements, entailed by values, concerning what the world ought to be like or what ought to happen or what ought to be done. The person’s feelings have been affected by this requirement; her feelings are not free but are bound to respond to the requirement. The sensing of what ought-to-be apprehends the axiotic state of affairs, does not generate it; on the contrary, what is of value generates the emotional sensing. The sensing of values is less like grasping them than like being grasped by them {Hartmann, ZGO, 308; Hartmann, PgS, 156, 168} .
Those who, like Hartmann, understand emotions to be intuitions, hold that they are incorrigible. They are often misplaced, as when someone treasures the trustworthiness of a treacherous friend. Still, they can never be wrong as emotions, no matter how mistaken the underlying beliefs may be. The incorrigibility of value-feelings is their force in determining the real: they are “included”3 as intentional objects in the value feelings: values are ideal and universal entities and are invariably co-intended in every emotional sensing of an axiotic state of affairs {Hartmann, ZGO, 307-09}.. In contrast, persons and all constituents of persons are real, can exist only in real time; their way of being is entirely different from that of values and of all other universals.
Although the ideal being of values is a necessary condition for there to be any sensing of them, their ideal being is entirely independent of any sort of consciousness or knowledge. They are able to generate emotional responses in those persons who fulfill certain definite conditions {Hartmann, WsF, 298-301} Nevertheless, laws or requirements concerning what-ought-to-be that are implicit in any value do not otherwise commit or compel the person to conform to the law. Conformity of the person’s will to the requirements of values is a matter of axiotic rather than of ontic necessity. The person’s will is not compelled to conform but is still free not <180> to do so. When she does not, her behavior necessarily violates the axiotic requirement so that what is axiotically necessary (a certain definite good) does not occur. To that extent, an axiotic impossibility (an evil) occurs. Violations of axiotic laws can and do actually happen. Their occurrence does not falsify the axiotic laws involved; it means rather that something contrary to value, something bad, naughty, wicked, evil has happened. It would be quite wrong if someone — even Kant at some stage of his career — were to believe that a morally bad will is that of a person who is simply not affected by what values require (by the moral law). On the contrary, it is a will that is aware of the moral law but nevertheless does not conform to what this awareness reveals. And because this is so, it is an ontic necessity that such a will is axiotically impossible, is truly bad, is in this regard not as it ought to be {Hartmann, WsF, 302}.
Axiotic states-of-affairs and the laws regarding them are independent of the feelings that apprehend them; their validity is entirely independent of their being apprehended. Such requirements are inherent in the nature of values as universal laws regarding what ought to be.
That values entail requirements and can be legitimately conceived to be laws has often led to a grave error to the effect that such requirements must issue from a mind or spirit. On the one hand, this misinterpretation leads to the idea that moral laws must originate from a supernatural mind that then may be conceived as a transcendent personal being or a transcendental aspect of all persons. On the other hand, it leads to the view that values are a matter of authority and are identical with positive laws: here, they are taken to be conventional or else they may be considered to be a matter of prevailing morality (geltende Sittlichkeit). The error common to either interpretation is equally catastrophic on either hand. Each misunderstanding subjectivizes good and evil in its own way.
To be stated, a universal requirement must be formulated in a syntactically formed judgment and expressed in a sentence in some language. The validity, the truth of the requirement is, however, entirely independent of these conditions: pain did not begin to be evil when some animal said so nor when some animal believed so. It does not even require that there actually exist entities to whom the law, the universal truth, applies. That pain is evil and, other things being equal, is to be avoided or eliminated did not begin to be true even when there came to be organisms in nature capable of experiencing pain. And neither its being evil nor even emotional experience of the fact that it ought not to be implies the existence of any person, whether divine or human or corporate. Hartmann insists, however, that the essence of values is not exhausted either by the ought-to-be or by the laws that values entail {Hartmann, Ethik, 215-16; E1, 303-04).
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2. Values: Their Way of Being - the Ideal Ought-to-be
Values have an ideal being that is entirely independent of their being actualized by ontic states of affairs. The requirements that every value entails concerning what ought to be are ideal. Through these requirements, every value necessarily refers to some entity or entities possessing traits whereby the relevant requirements would be satisfied so that the traits and their bearer ought to be. The traits whereby requirements of a value or a disvalue are satisfied are its bearers or exemplars; they are traits that ought to be real, and the same value requiring them to be real requires that the entity bearing them ought to be real insofar as it bears or would bear them. Properly speaking, such bearers or exemplars for values (or disvalues) are what genuinely ought (or ought not) to be. The emotional sensing of value is directed most properly toward these entities; they are most properly what ought to be approved (disapproved).
This reference is inseparable from every value but is not identical with it: they condition one another {Hartmann, Ethik, 172; E1, 248}.. Thus, the value seems to entail something like a necessary connection between some definite set of ontic universals and a way of being that distinguishes values as essences: the connection is such that whatever exemplifies the relevant set of ontic universals exemplifies the value involved. There are, for example, laws regarding the chemical composition of what more or less normal organisms of our species can digest and metabolize, and these would not be axiotic laws (values). Some definite set of values does, however, make it true that real entities having properties whereby they satisfy those ontic laws ought to be real and that whatever it takes to assure that there really are such entities and that they really are available to human beings ought to happen.
“Ought-to-be” designates this way of being and differentiates the being of values as universal essences from the being of those ideal essences that make it possible to formulate true or probably true laws regarding the real as such (ontic laws). Values, in contrast, are universal essences that make it possible to formulate laws regarding what ought to be real (axiotic laws). The laws belonging to the latter set are not reducible to laws belonging to the former set: “The ideal ought-to-be is the way of being of value, its distinctive modality, which is never absorbed into the structure of the material” {Hartmann, Ethik, 172; E1, 248}. Given Hartmann’s necessitarian ontology, the two types of laws are distinguished by differing types of necessity: what is real conforms necessarily to law of the ontic sort just insofar as it is real, and, just as necessarily, what is real is as it ought to be insofar as it conforms to laws of the axiotic sort and is not as it ought to be insofar as it is contrary to laws of this sort. The ought-to-be involved in all values includes a tendency to transcend their status as ideal entities, to transcend it toward reality. This is not a real force but is rather a particular sort of necessity, which seems under some real conditions to be more like the ideal of a force.<182> When reality already conforms to what ought to be, that state of affairs “is affirmed”, is exemplar for the relevant value, is of value. However, this axiotic requirement or axiotic necessity arises without any regard to whether the required realization is or is not possible: every value entails an ideal ought-to-be, an unconditional requirement that the real conform to it.
3. The Exigent Ought-to-be
When the real is not as some value requires then the ought-to-be presses beyond its ideal sphere toward what is real, toward its being as required. Contrasting it with the purely ideal ought-to-be, Hartmann calls the ought-to-be “exigent” (aktuales)4 insofar as the relevant value requires in this way that the real be other than it is (or that it continue to be as the relevant value requires when its continuing to do so is in question). Whereas the ideal ought-to-be does not depend upon the state of what is real, the ought-to-be is actual <exigent> only insofar as it concerns the Real. This sort of tendency-toward-realization becomes prominent wherever the Real does not conform to what-ought-to-be regardless of whether that state of affairs is or is not felt {Hartmann, Ethik, 171-73; E1, 247-51}.. However, the axiotic state of affairs that what is real is not as some value requires it to be is given only to those subjects who fulfill the (psychological, social, cultural, neurological, hormonal, etc.) conditions necessary for feeling it. Even the actual <exigent> ought-to-be is, therefore, not an ought-to-do, and need not generate an ought-to-do. The ought-to-be seems to be actual <exigent> rather than merely ideal insofar as it is given to the emotional sense of values and insofar as what feeling is directed toward is the fact that the Real is not as it should be.5 Although it is not dependent upon what is real, even the ideal ought-to-be is not indifferent toward the real. The real is, however, altogether indifferent toward the ought-to-be: a world whose variations and motions would be entirely without any tendency, without any purpose or telos could very well nevertheless be real. That is exactly how the world is so long as there is in it no being with value-insight and the tendency to act on it {Hartmann, Ethik, 171-74; E1, 247-51}.
<183> The actual <exigent> ought-to-be originates from the ideal sphere, from the ideal ought-to-be, but does enter the real sphere and so has its locus there. Insofar as a real entity is affected by it, this ideal way of being is nevertheless a determining force. Since the sense of values is really determined by what-ought-to-be and so by the ideal value. the influence of the value is a real bringing-to-the-fore (Hervorbringen),6 is a real making-happen (Schaffen). Bringing-to-the-fore through being affected by what ought-to-be is a basic trait of every approving or disapproving, of every taking-position toward something and feeling about something. Every such occurrence is a real event that is conditioned by an ideal ought-to-be. All ethical actuality is constituted by such occurrences. In all personal relationships and in all the purposes involved in public life, ideal axiotic states of affairs become actual <exigent> as real powers.
This locus is therefore the Archimedean point where the actual <exigent> ought-to-be originating from an entirely different region affects the otherwise blind occurring of the world’s course; it is the point where the energy of an ideal power can become a real power by moving a real entity whose way of being is entirely other than that of the ideal. This entity must be real and an integral member of the real world, subject to the laws and conditions of real being, including having a beginning and an end like every real being. Yet it will be distinguished from all other real beings by being subject to the influence of imperishable ideal entities.
4. The Ought-to-do — Moral Values and Goods-Values
What-ought-to-be-done is a subclass of what-ought-to-be. Not everything that ought to be is something that ought to be striven for (something that ought to be done). It is unconditionally true that exemplars of a value ought to be or that bearers of a disvalue ought not to be. Nonetheless, every bearer of primary value (everything that is good in itself) is not bound to be something that can be rightly sought as an end (an end in itself): “Consequently, every ought-to-do is conditioned by an ought-to-be, but there is not an ought-to-do attached to every ought-to-be” {Hartmann, Ethik, 171; E1, 248}. Hartmann finds absurd and perverse the claim that when things do not have to be made by us are not things that ought to be. Naturally occurring goods such as non-toxic and otherwise harmless air and water to breathe ought to be and ought to be appreciated. The world is full of entities that <184> ought to be and that ought to be appreciated. It is an all-to-human trait that we learn to appreciate what ought to be primarily when it is lacking or when it is threatened. What ought to be is also something-that I ought to do only if it is either lacking or threatened and it is in my power to affect its future reality.7 That there ought to be international peace is an ideal ought-to-be regardless of the fact that there is none and regardless even of whether international peace can happen now, but it cannot be the moral obligation of one person to make it happen now and alone: a moral being can have a moral obligation to promote international peace only by means that are within her power.8
Distinctively moral value attaches only to actions involving effort to do something that ought to be done and to persons as moral beings, entities capable of such actions. An act is a bearer for a certain moral value only insofar as it involves an intention to realize some value other than the moral trait it bears; the intention, for example, to be useful or beneficial in some definite way. Should it succeed in promoting the benefit intended then it will also be useful in the intended way: it will then also have what Hartmann calls “goods” value (Güterwert). This intended benefit appears to be exactly what Kant called the content or material of the act. This value-content of the act is an inherent property of the action since it aims from the outset at this anticipated outcome; it does so whether its effort succeeds or not. The act’s material content is just as independent of the actual outcome as the act’s moral value is. It is, however, not identical with the act’s moral value trait, is not the trait whereby the act satisfies the requirements of the specific moral value it exemplifies. The act’s intended goal, its “material value,” is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for its moral worth, the sine qua non for its bearing the specifically moral value. The action’s moral worth will depend on other, perhaps many other factors as well: what alternatives had to be rejected in choosing this action; what did the agent sacrifice in order to pursue this course rather than those rejected?
The goods whose reality morally good actions aim to promote or to preserve are exemplars for other (for the most part non-moral) values. The occurrence of actions having moral value presupposes, Hartmann maintains, the agent’s prior acquaintance with kinds of value that are borne by kinds of entities other than morally worthy actions. He refers to the occurrence of what morally ought to be as being founded on the occurrence of entities that are bearers of nonmoral <185> goods-values. Goods-values necessarily entail requirements concerning what ought to be regardless of any other considerations, but they require that something ought to be done about these requirements only when the actualization of those requirements is within someone’s abilities, including the ability emotionally to sense the relevant requirements. Only then do they require an activity. All real occurrences that instantiate moral values are necessarily more complex structurally than the instantiations of goods-values need be. Since the realization of moral value presupposes the givenness of goods-value, moral values are a higher sort of value compared to goods-value.
Moral actions do not at all require a preliminary acquaintance with moral values; the acquaintance with them is entirely acquired, as it is with all values. Moral values certainly ought to be instantiated by actions, but the good that a moral action has as its goal or end need not be any sort of moral goodness, and cannot be its own moral goodness. Hartmann agrees with Max Scheler in rejecting the idea that the aim of every morally good action is its own moral goodness. In doing so, he believes like Scheler that he is rejecting the crux of Kant’s formalistic ethics {Hartmann, Ethik, 107-19; E1, 166-80} . A morally right action cannot have its own moral goodness as its purpose. However, the principle commits Scheler to conclusions that Hartmann ha no need to accept. Scheler identifies the moral goodness of an action with the universal values it exemplifies. He, therefore, concludes from the principle that no instance of moral goodness can be the end of a morally right action {Scheler 49; E 27}.9 Hartmann escapes this disastrous and perverse conclusion since he differentiates sharply between universal essences and the real qualities and things that instantiate them. He therefore has no need to proscribe actions that aim at promoting moral goodness. On the contrary, he can very well side with Kant’s insistence that promoting human welfare as a way of promoting moral goodness is not only morally allowed but is higher in the scale of moral goodness than it would be to promote the welfare of persons without respecting what Kant would call their dignity, their capacity to act with a good will.
5. Human Foresight, Providence
The real motility of a person in the actual world is limited through her inevitable relation to space and time {Hartmann, PgS, 93-98}. Like the life of every vital subject, moral being is not transmissible from one individual to another; each person must begin it anew. Being organic restrains every personal moral being. The conditions of vital existence restrain the actions of persons even though personality has neither spatial shape nor a real spatial location. Moreover, a person is bound to <186> have an intuition of space and is thus conscious of space and so is able spontaneously to affect what happens in real space. Since her actions must be real events, she is localized spatially through them, and she has no freedom of real motion; she cannot be freed from the point in time she lives in. In real space she enjoys only the limited freedom of movement that bodiliness permits her. This is a restriction on the person’s entire field of experience, not just on her field of cognitive experience. She has, however, another sort of mobility through the space of intuition and in the time of intuition {Hartmann, PgS, 149-52}.] Real space and the intuition of space are not identical; neither real space nor real time is intuitively given in experience, in memory, or in imagination. Even an inadequate representation of real space suffices, however, to allow a freedom of movement in imagination or fantasy and suffices to connect imagined events to the real space-time field, since the categories of intuition are so related {Hartmann, PgS, 92-94} This allows persons a different sort of mobility; while still bound to its spatio-temporal locus in the real world, the moral being is released from the bonds imposed by bodiliness. She is free; she can displace herself into the world as a field of Objects (Objekte) beyond the real world. This freedom is the root of whatever changes the person effects spontaneously, all advertance. It also frees her from bondage to the present, the near, the given. The personal subject thus gets the power to live in a setting Mitwelt) other than the one wherein she must really live and must really stay. That setting may be a represented past or a coming time as represented; it may even be an ideal world, or one of value or of beauty or of eternity, or one of Utopia or even of fancy: when conditions permit, a person can dwell in such a world even to the point of forgetting the actual world.10
For ethics, the most significant aspect of the freedom made possible by openness to the irreal is that it enables a person to reach ahead temporally. Being bound as it is to the uniform flow (Gleichfluβ) of real time, the vital spirit cannot rush ahead in real time, cannot be ahead of itself. Hartmann emphatically rejects what he takes to be Heidegger’s concept of time and personal temporality {Hartmann, PgS, 150 and fn.}. Heidegger had asserted that to be ahead of itself is a trait of any possible moral being as existent (is an existential) {Heidegger, 191-96, 259, 315-17} . In opposition, Hartmann insists that a sharp distinction be maintained between real time and time-intuition {Hartmann, PgS, 150, 95-96}]. As with space so, too, with time, “a contrasting, limited and deformed image” of real time is enough to allow a moral being to move freely in presentification or presentiation11: in time as experienced and presentiated in memory,<187> anticipation, and imagination. Whereas real time flows uniformly and events in it are necessary, this need not be the case with time and temporal events as they appear. He asserts that Heidegger illegitimately transfers to real time characteristics that may belong to time-intuition and that he does so without noticing the error. A moral being can run ahead of itself only in foresight. Foreseeing, for Hartmann, must occur in real time, but what it foresees is foreseen only in time-intuition so that what is foreseen cannot be real things or events but only irreal objects.12
A person does indeed have freedom of movement, however, in time-intuition; here, she can rush ahead, reach ahead, run ahead of herself. Her being bound to real time is untouched by her doing so. Vital spirit lives in foresight out ahead of the time-index and so is capable of “providence” {Hartmann, PgS, 150}.. The providence that every person continually exercises elevates her above mindless forms of consciousness that are imprisoned in the present. It lifts her higher than does her consciousness of Objectivity, that is merely the world’s being for her. Through the providence that makes a moral being’s activity possible, the person is able to become what she is for the world; she becomes the world’s formative power by learning to see where the world allows her to lend her hand [Zugriff].
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6. Predestination
Providence makes predestination possible. It is, however, only the presupposition for possible initiative; it does not itself include any initiative. Foresight only opens the field for predestination. It enables a moral being to affect the world; it affords a place where her energy can be set free {Hartmann, PgS, 152}. This opening is where predestination, the genuinely creative power [the Demiurgical], in the person, occurs.13 Although this fact is thoroughly familiar in practical life, it has yet to be adequately recognized philosophically. Predestination is a categorial moment in the being of the person. Not to understand the providence in human persons is not to understand anything else about them. A person who would be affected by things or events but unable to affect them would be entirely passive, receptive and reactive. The human person has genuine initiative within the limits of her foresight and of her power to carry out what she wills to occur. Within these limits, however, she is essentially a willing, an active being.
Without initiative, the power spontaneously to intervene, the person would have foresight without being able in any way to affect the course of coming events. Spontaneity of a moral being is ontically different in kind from that of a vital but amoral being (Lebewesen). Whatever amoral consciousness does it does only reactively. Brutes are free to seize what they desire but have no freedom to desire anything but what stimulates them. For the brute there is no openness, no open field for initiative, no opening wherein to seek what might be worthy of desire albeit not yet desired. The spontaneity of a moral being is not bound within just those limits set by her drives. She exists in contrast to subjective but amoral entities through “purposeful activity.”14
Purposeful activity is a higher form of determination or conditioning than the operation of prior or “natural” causation; it presupposes that real events are dependent on prior causes, and it adds to them a different sort of determination. Purposeful activities have a categorial form peculiar to them, which Hartmann calls “the finalistic nexus.” This nexus is distinguished by three-fold structure of strata, and it differentiates the actions of moral beings from all other occurrences.15 Two of its strata play out, Hartmann maintains, in consciousness alone and presentiate occurrences that cannot take place in real time however much they may <189> be intended as if they were types of events such as occur in real time. These two components of the finalistic nexus are, therefore, objective states of affairs syntactically formed by consciousness (objektive Bewuβtseinsgebilde). Thus, these two components of what is intended in purposeful activity are made possible through the special type of mobility within time-intuition that comes with foresight. Foresight has opened up within the real the field where the actual <exigent> ought-to-be evokes concern for irreal objects whose actual occurrence would otherwise be ontically impossible although axiotically necessary, and this elicits interest in occurrences that would further the chances of realization for what (even though it is not yet an end) entails a claim that without its realization the Real will not be as it ought to be.
a. Reaching Ahead (Not Being Ahead) Toward the Purposed Event
The new form of determination begins with the pre-positing and pre-forming of the purpose. (No such activities are required where “goals” are set just by drives.) Any moral being can in foresight pre-form the object of her action as something to be made to be, can pre-determine how it is to turn out; she can foresee objectively (as inner object before the fact) what is thus pre-formed. Through purposeful activity a person reaches in foresight ahead of real time into the causal course of impending events to an irreal event that is emotionally given as an occurrence of a kind having value, i.e., exemplifying a value, hence as an occurrence such as ought to be in an anticipated situation but one whose actual occurrence is problematic. Here the ought-to-be is actual <exigent> rather than merely ideal. The anticipated occurrence is not yet the goal of any real striving. Nevertheless, it is posited by the agent’s consciousness as being of value, being an object such as the felt value specifies ought to be. Even as a posited, as an irreal predetermination ahead of the real causal process, this object is what genuinely determines that process and will mark the real process as either for or against what the felt value calls for. Here, an irreal object affects and is the precondition for a real process {Hartmann, Ethik, 196-97; E1, 275}.
b. The Pastward Determination of Means
In the second stratum of purposive determination consciousness runs against the irreversible direction of the real time flow. In anticipative presentiation the person determines the means pastward. This pastward movement back from the future toward the real present entails the reverse determination of the earlier by the later that characterizes finalistic causation. This movement enables the finalistic nexus to be that form in which an ought-to-be is realized, the only locus at which such realization can occur. In this presentiation of what she ought to do, the moral being draws upon what the given life-situation offers as potential means. The pastward tracing of means must lead back to an initial means for the potential act, and this <190> must be an occurrence that would be the agent’s own because it is within her power immediately. Without such an occurrence, she would not be genuinely involved in the predelineated course of events, and she would not be called on to intervene in the flow of real time. The actual <exigent> ought-to-be becomes her ought-to-do and her being for the sake of what ought to be. The anticipated moment of initiative will be something she alone can do and is where the third stratum in purposeful activity must begin.
c. Resolution: Really Carrying the Action through
Making the realization of the projected goal happen, putting the anticipated act into effect, carrying it out is the third stratum. Here, the anticipated and so irreal relationships of means to end are converted into what is throughout a real nexus of cause and effect {Hartmann, Ethik, 194; E1, 275}.. The action itself can occur only in real time. The action itself is in this regard like the intending of the other two strata. What they intend is no real time event. There is normally a greater or less structural correspondence between the real action and the states of affairs that have been intended in time-intuition; however, the two cannot be identical in any way.
7. The Place of Humanity in the World16
The finalistic nexus so constituted is the sole location where finalistic determination through moral action occurs, and it is the essential form for any teleological determination whatsoever. The realization of an ought-to-be is impossible except through a process structured in this threefold way. A different form of teleology is impossible {Hartmann, Ethik, 198; E1, 281}]. Purposes occur in the Real only through occurrences having the categorial form of the finalistic nexus. Such occurrences require both commitment to further the real future occurrence of something that ought to be and the agent’s belief that she can influence real events and things suitable to promote the chances that the event, whose realization she is committed to further, will happen. All of this makes it very clear that there can be purposes only insofar as something is intended in this way by someone’s consciousness. Genuine actions can be wrong or stupid or perverse or disastrous but never blind {Hartmann, PgS, 153}.. There may be blind or purely instinctive drives, but the conceit of a blind will to live or will to power is oxymoronic.
<191> This sort of “teleological causation” is immediate determination of real events by a real person, and it is direct but mediated determination of the Real by the Ideal. It presupposes the immediate determination of the Real by value, operating through a person’s affective consciousness of what ought to be. No naturalistic moral theory can make a place for genuine teleology.
Whether there are moral beings who are not human is a matter of speculation. If there are other moral beings then the power they exert to determine the real course of events is subject to the essential limitations of the finalistic nexus regardless of whether they are morally our equals, our inferiors, or our superiors. The conceit of a teleological cosmic force not subject to such limits does not just exceed the bounds of rational metaphysics. It does violence to axiology and is utterly destructive to ethics.
However, that values can determine real events through a will operating within those essential limits is a readily conceivable and an experienceable fact of human life. This means that ethics
…does — and must do — what is blasphemy in the eyes of the pious: it gives Divine attributes to each human being. It gives back to her what she, misconceiving her own being, alienated from herself and conferred upon God. Or else ethics has — if one wants to express it differently — the Divinity abdicate her throne as Sovereign over the worlds and dwell in human willing. The human being inherits the metaphysical estate of God {Hartmann, Ethik, 198; E1, 282}.
The highest of values are not religious but moral values, and the bearer of moral value must be capable of genuinely wrong as well as of genuinely right decisions. Every attempt to explain away evil as merely apparent and so every theodicy as well as every form of optimism (in William James’ sense of the word17) is morally perverse {Hartmann, Ethik, 168-69; E1, 242}.. To maintain this concept of human dignity, Hartmann must revise the Kantian conception. Like all ideal essences values are transcendent, non-mental entities. As Hartmann understood values, they <192> would be principles of heteronomy. They entail laws regarding what ought to be, and they also entail requirements concerning what a person ought to do. If they determined univocally what she ought to do then the person would be no moral agent at all. Responsibility for human behavior would lie with the values themselves. The person would be only an instrument through whom they bring about what ought to happen. The behavior they generate might have a high order of utility but would have no distinctive value independent of its utility. Human beings would not be persons at all.
The moral phenomena of responsibility, choice and agency are not illusory, however. A moral being is confronted in every situation with a plurality of axiotic requirements, and every value requires unconditionally that what it requires be fulfilled. The values neither contradict nor conflict with one another. The conflicts involved in every situation are conflicts for the person; she will be unable to meet all of the requirements. Situations are ethically relevant insofar as the person is faced with values whose requirements in that situation are such that satisfying some will result in transgressing others. Thus, no matter what decision is made, some requirements will be violated, and decision in unavoidable. Decisions may but need not, include deliberation, but they will be conditioned by the agent’s affective consciousness. And every decision will give precedence to some felt values over others.
If all of the values that are sensed in a given situation were on a par or if there were no way to differentiate higher requirements from lower ones then there would be no differentiation either between right and wrong preferences or between morally right and wrong actions. Such differences require that there be hierarchical relations among values. For there is a plurality even of primary goods, i.e., a plurality of kinds of entities such that each entity of the kind is good regardless of other considerations. Hartmann agrees with Scheler that moral value implies a hierarchy of values.
What the good is for the relevant situation is conditioned by the teleology of the higher value or values. However, whether a decision is correct or not will never depend solely on the height of the value that the will chooses {Hartmann, EP, 168-70}.. Scheler identified the comparative height of the value striven for as the principal criterion for right choice and comparative depth of the satisfaction that fulfillment brings as a principal index of the height of the value of what was striven for. Hartmann does not dispute this claim, but holds that it is woefully inadequate when it is considered as a criterion of right choice.
Someone who must starve and freeze cannot enjoy herself over spiritual values.-The fact that transgressing lower values is the worse offense stands opposed to the demand that the higher values be chosen...generally speaking, the <193> lower values are the basis for the higher ones. When the lower values are overthrown, the higher are annihilated as well {Hartmann, EP, 170}.
To deprive people of non-toxic air to breathe or to withhold needed food, shelter, medical care is far worse than to deprive them of opportunities to volunteer for charitable causes, support a political party, study philosophy, practice a religion, or exercise free speech. Values are to be preferred based on their strength as well as on their height. Sets of moral traditions, customs, practices, and theories can often be distinguished by the emphasis they put on higher values (Hartmann mentions wisdom, affluence, loyalty, love, beneficence) more than lower ones (justice, mastery, restraint, innocence). Philosophical ethics, however, requires that these ostensible conflicts be synthesized wherever possible, and the conflicts are for the most part amenable to this demand {Hartmann, EP, 170-71; Hartmann, Ethik, 40-42}.. The values do not contradict one another, and the requirements they involve prove to be for the most part reconcilable; they are complementary rather than contradictory. Genuine morality requires that what is of lesser value not be neglected in efforts to achieve what is of higher value. It is no less true, however, that moral life is parochial and base when confined to the pursuit of what is of lower value. Respect for the lower values finds its most authentic meaning when their fulfillment promotes what is of higher value.
Every value, the lower no less than the higher, requires absolutely that reality conform to it: ideal essences cannot compare themselves to one another. Yet there are genuine differences of strength as well as of height between them. When the actions of a moral being increase wisdom or morality then their effects are greater in value than those of actions that promote health or that increase agricultural output; the former effects would be better than the latter, and this difference is what is expressed in saying that the values fulfilled through the former effects would be “higher.” When human behavior leaves unchecked the pollution of the air that citizens of Denver must breathe to live and so harms the health of a multitude of life forms, these evils are worse than what happens when the behavior of those citizens leads to miseducation of their children or to the bankruptcy of their symphony orchestra. This sort of difference is what is expressed by saying that the axiotic requirements violated by the former evils are “stronger” than those violated by the latter evils. Generally speaking, the lower a value stands in the axiological hierarchy, the greater the evil entailed when its requirements are unfulfilled or neglected. The higher a value is in the hierarchy the lesser is the evil entailed when its requirements are unfulfilled or neglected. Analyzed this way, height and strength are predicated of a value by virtue of the relation in which what it requires of (its ideal ought-to-be) concerning reality stands to the realization of other values within the value hierarchy. Insofar as realization of one set of values would, in a particular situation, conflict with (prevent, eliminate, diminish, inhibit, etc.) realization of the <194> requirements of another set, the ought-to-be of each of the values involved in the conflict is an actual <exigent> ought-to-be. In case the behavior of a person in that situation can affect the chances that one of these eventualities will in fact take place — provided she is at least vaguely aware that this might be so — then that actual <exigent> ought-to-be defines an ought-to-do for that person. Indeed, every actual <exigent> ought-to-be satisfying this condition defines an ought-to-do for that person in that situation.
This person’s emotional value-sense can be attracted by a given ought-to-be only if she fulfills a variety of pre-conditions (such as the historical, sociocultural, psychological, and physiological ones referred to above in passing). Despite Hartmann’s insistence that the sense of values is not free, he seems to consider this set of preconditions insufficient (even if necessary) to draw the potential agent’s affective consciousness. He emphasizes that the sense of values is (to varying degrees) open to as yet unfamiliar axiotic requirements, open to the discovery of unfamiliar values. He suggests, moreover, that a person who is more open to unfamiliar values is, to that extent, of higher personal and historical and cultural value than a person whose sense of values is less open {Hartmann, PgS, 167-69 see also; Hartmann, Ethik, 16-17, 45-45; E1, 45, 82-86; Ethik, 402; E2 205-209)
To the extent that someone’s feelings are appealed to in this way, she will not just anticipate occurrences but will anticipate some of them as things or events that ought to be or to happen and others as things or events that ought not to be or to happen. This is inherent in the finalistic nexus from the outset. Depending on her attitudes toward her abilities, she will be at least vaguely aware of some of these as eventualities she might purpose. Here, too, there will be differences in persons’ attitudes toward the range of their abilities, a sort of conative openness or narrowness involving willingness to test what they take to be their limits and to try even what might be beyond them. How, in the individual case, aspects (a) and (b) of the finalistic nexus are constituted is largely a function of such conative attitudes.
Such variations in the capacity for emotional and practical response to what ought to be are intimations that the real person is no less decisive a factor in volitions than are the ought-to-be and the various biological, social, cultural, and psychological determinants involved in a given volition. Hartmann agrees with Kant that free will is impossible apart from the consciousness of something that ought to be done, and he sometimes joins Kant in referring to this as “conscience.” {Hartmann, Ethik, 745; E3, 178} The human sense of freedom and responsibility is no illusion. He even agrees with Socratic rationalism generally that the human will is incapable of Satanism, is unable to choose evil as such over good: moral evil is always a matter either of choosing for the lesser good or against the lesser evil. That the values a person senses completely and univocally determine a human being’s will might seem to be excluded by the plurality of primary goods and the seeming impossibility that a person ever justifiably believe her sense of values to <195> encompass the whole range of what actually <exigently> ought to be in any given situation. And it certainly seems equally impossible for there to be an ideal synthesis of all of these axiological necessities. Still, the ideal of ethics as a practical science is to approximate such a synthesis. Such phenomena as the sense of responsibility or of guilt indicate, but they do not prove, that the actual <exigent> ought-to-be is not adequate by itself to determine the will but needs the person’s sense of values, decision and resolve if it is to exert an influence on the course of real events.
Abbreviations for Works Cited
E = English translation
E1 = Ethics, Vol. 1
E3 = Ethics, Vol. 3
E2 = Ethics, Vol. 2
EP = Einführung in die Philosophie
HN = “Hartmann, Nicolai” in Philosophen Lexicon
KS1 = Kleinere Schriften I
KS2 = Kleinere Schriften II
KS3 = Kleinere Schriften III
PgS = Das Problem geistigen Seins
SV = Spotlight on Values, E. Cadwallader,
TD = Teleologisches Denken
WsF = “Vom Wesen sittlicher Erkenntnis”
ZPG = Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen, A. Pfänder,
ZGO = Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie
Bibliography
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Cadwallader, Eva Hauel. Searchlight on values: Nicolai Hartmann’s twentieth-century value Platonism. Introd. by William Henry Werkmeister. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.
Hartmann, Nicolai. Einführung in die Philosophie. Osnabrück: Hanckel, 1960.
---. Ethik. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1962. First published in 1926. English translation (first published in 1932):
---. Ethics. Trans. Stanton Coit, Introd. by J.H. Muirhead. Muirhead library of philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962-67.
vol. 1, Moral Phenomena
vol. 2, Moral Values
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<196> ---. Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. Berlin: Gruyter, 1949.
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NOTES
1Translated into English by Stanton Coit and published under the title Ethics. Whereas the German is a single 821 page volume with 85 chapters, the English translation is in 3 volumes, corresponding to the three parts of the original. Each of the three has its own pagination and chapter numbering and a distinctive title. When citing this work, the German title and page number will be given followed in parentheses by E1, E2, or E3 and the page number of the English volume. When passages are quoted, the translation will nevertheless usually be my own rather than Coit’s.
It is crucial that one not think of this relation in terms of temporal sequence. The cognitive reference to what gladdens or is desired or feared or dreaded is a necessary condition for the feeling; the only temporal sequences excluded would be where the feeling precedes the cognitive reference.3That is to say, they are not real components of the emotional experiences through which they are given: being a form of consciousness to which a certain kind of value (an axiotic universal) is given is an inherent characteristic of every emotion. The value and the consciousness of it have, however, entirely different ways of being. As a universal, every value is an ideal entity and is therefore entirely atemporal. The value-consciousness is temporal and real, and the same is true of every part of the value-consciousness, whether it be a concrete part or an abstract part.
4The German adjective seems more frequently to mean present or current, less frequently to mean active; both meanings are at play here with the emphasis probably on the latter: the emotionally sensed actual ought-to-be carries with it an ought-to-do, a requirement that whatever will make (keep) the real as it ought to be happen. This requires that the person act to fulfill it if she can; that she do what is in her power to bring the Real to the fore as it ought to be. This connotation of Hartmann’s term is missed altogether in the English translation, which consistently renders ‘aktuales Seinsollen’ by ‘positive ought-to-be.’
5Or insofar as foresight (see below) is attracted to a certain set of possibilities, is attracted by them and aware of them as problematic (cf. Jordan 1997)..
6This is a bringing-to-the-fore on the part of what (it is felt) ought to be and of the value involved; the feeling itself , however, is brought-to-the-fore. As mentioned above, Hartmann repeatedly emphasized that the sensing of values is more a being grasped by them than it is a grasping of them. Effort to grasp what ought to be requires a further act, and what it tries to grasp is very likely to elude the effort.
7This is a modification of Hartmann’s formulation of the difference. His statement of the double condition is that an ought-to-be is also an ought-to-do if it is not already there and if it be in my power to do it {Hartmann, Ethik, 171; E1, 247}.
8Ibid; cf. Werkmeister, 1984, xv.
9See Jordan (1987) especially 291-292.
10See, for example, “A Passage to India” in Oliver Sachs’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987, c. 1970) 153-155 {Sachs, 153-55}.
11The German is Vergegenwärtigung, whose meaning here is that there occurs a consciousness of something (what is presentified or presentiated) that is not a consciousness of it as actually existing now.
12Concerning this last point, there is probably little real disagreement between Hartmann and Heidegger. Both surely reject the conceit of Hegel that there might be a person (even a “great” person) possessed by a monomaniacal passion that would be a perception of an actual future occurrence. There is a genuine and very basic disagreement between the two all the same, and Hartmann surely misrepresents it when he suggests that Heidegger is naively unaware of the difference between his conception of temporality and the concept of real time that Hartmann advocates.
13PGS 151-152; see also Ethik 3-5; E1, 29-32) where the English translation refers to “the creative power” in humans, Hartmann actually refers to the Demiurge and to the Demiurgical in us humans.
14In this phrase, the adjective is redundant and strictly for emphasis.
15The following account of the finalistic nexus is drawn from Ethik 192-200 (E1 274-282), ZGO 192-201, PgS 152-155, TD 64-99, EP 22-23.
16The title of EP (1949) part II, Chapter 2 (107-20) is “Die Stellung des Menschen in der Welt” and surely refers to Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen in Kosmos, which had been reissued in 1947.
17See James’s discussion of deterministic optimism in his well known essay “The Dilemma of Determinism.” Hartmann does not mention James in this connection. He would, however, scarcely agree with James’s version of creationist teleology:
…It is entirely immaterial…whether the creator leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by hiself, each when its proper time arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the possibilities are really here. Whether it be we who solve them, or he working through us…” {James 64}.