<This essay was published as an article in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree, Elizabeth A. Behnke, et al. (Dordrecht, London, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997)724-728. As in the published article, names that appear in all small capital letters refer to the titles of other articles that are available in the Encyclopedia…The page numbers of the article as published are inserted into the text within bold faced angle brackets of this color.
The typescript that I
submitted included occasional citations, sometimes with page numbers. Since
these might be useful to some readers, I have also inserted these, using the
same sort of brackets.>
Phenomenological theories of value have been based
very largely on the work of EDMUND
HUSSERL and, through him, FRANZ
BRENTANO despite the fact that Husserl did not publish in these fields
and despite very important divergences between his work in them and that of
subsequent phenomenologists. The path they have tended toward, differentiating
the subject matter of ethics from that of value theory, was predelineated by
Husserl's departure from Brentano's classification of mental phenomena. Brentano
had conceived volition as a form of emotion and subsumed both under a genus he
called "feelings." Instead, Husserl orders mental phenomena under three mutually
exclusive basic classes: the doxic (cognitive), the affective (emotional), and
the conative (volitional). In the Prolegomena (1900) to his Logische
Untersuchungen, Husserl proposed a corresponding classification of
theoretical, normative, and practical sciences.
There is a foundedness of the intentional object of valuing as such which
parallels, in many though not in all, respects the foundedness of valuing on
doxic or cognitive consciousness. Feelings, as intuitions of
axiological-predicates, cannot occur except insofar as they entail doxa
intentive to non-axiological, ontic predicates, and these are there for
consciousness through non-affective, doxic mental processes intentive to the
valued entity as having characteristics whose manner of original givenness is
not affective and whose being or non-being might be truly affirmed or denied or
might be questioned, doubted, etc. As it is emotionally intuited, any
axiological characteristic of an object, that this particular object ought to
be, for example, is founded upon and conditioned by certain ontic properties
intended by doxa implicit in the emotional intuition. The utility and perhaps
the aesthetic value of a certain stuff as food might, for example, be founded on
properties involving its chemical composition and involving in turn some
organism's digestive organs, metabolic processes, and sensory organs. However,
the distinction between axiological and ontic characteristics is a distinction
among the constituents of the bearer's objective meaning. Thus, every valued
object is a synthetic unity intended in at least two ways: doxically and
affectively. Mental processes of both sorts are here intentive to the self-same
noematic object, but to entirely distinct features of the object. What each
discloses about the object is different from what the other discloses, yet the
object is synthetically identified, is a single polar unity to which both sets
of features are intended as belonging. That what possesses the doxically
intended characteristics possesses the affectively intended characteristics is
not formally or analytically true.
__. Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1969. The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, Tran.
Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind. London and Henley: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1969.
Scheler, Max. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer
Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Pedrsonalismus, 4th ed. Ed. Maria
Scheler Gesammelte Werke 2. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1954. Formalism in Ethics and
Non Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical
Personalism. Trans. Manfred S. Frings and Robert L Funk. Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
The general theory of volition would include a subdiscipline establishing norms
for correct and veridical volitions and a practical one establishing procedures
for promoting correct striving (volition). The general theory of affects would
include subdisciplines establishing norms and procedures for correct identifying
norms and procedures for correct emotions. Since Husserl's considered opinion
was that all emotional mental processes are valuings at least implicitly, the
general theory of affects would coincide with the general theory of valuations
and would include the theory of what can be correctly valued, disvalued,
preferred, etc. (axiology). subdisciplines of the general theory of cognition
would differentiate correct or veridical (evident) cognitions from their
opposites and establish norms for cognitions and procedures for promoting
correct cognitions. What might be called ethics would unite the several
practical subdisciplines.
Although Husserl published no works on value theory and ethics, he lectured
repeatedly on these topics. Very extensive notes on the earlier of these lecture
courses — Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908-1914 — have been
published and another volume of lectures from the Nachlaß has been announced for
the near future. The earlier lectures present a view of axiology and ethics that
remains remarkably close to Brentano's strict ideal consequentialism. The
volume's editor reports that the later lectures (1915-1923) present a quite
different approach largely under the influence of
JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE, perhaps
the most extreme of deontological theorists. Subsequently, phenomenological
axiologies (such as those of DIETRICH VON
HILDEBRAND, MAX SCHELER, NICOLAI HARTMANN, and HANS REINER) have tended
to acknowledge that strivings do indeed have distinctively moral value
characteristics that are independent of their factual consequences but few would
go so far as Fichte to declare it morally wrong, sinful, and blasphemous to
weigh the utility of morally good strivings.
Ways of using the crucial word value vary widely even within the
phenomenological literature. Husserl used 'value' for the goodness belonging
solely to some particular bearer of value, and, in his use, what the word
denotes could only be an individual object (never an eidetic object) when the
bearer is itself an individual object. Although Max Scheler uses it with the
same denotation, he conceives what it denotes to be both a quality and a
specific material axiological universal (hence an eidos accessible through
eidetic method). Although
Hartmann, on the other hand, agrees with Husserl about what the word connotes
when it denotes a property, he often applies it to the axiological laws which
objects must satisfy in order to have a given kind of axiological property so
that it sometimes does and sometimes does not denote, in his use, something
universal and eidetic. When such ambiguities threaten, the more awkward terms
value characteristic, axiological characteristic,axiological predicate, or
value predicate will be employed. Phenomenological literature on value
and valuing tends, following Husserl, to insist that original acquaintance with
values and disvalues is acquired. Axiological predicates of objects — their
goodness, their badness, or their lack of either — can be given but can
only be given through affective, that is, emotional mental processes.
With most of what follows, the several figures mentioned could agree.
<725> Phenomenological value theories are
both anti-nativist and intuitionist. Affective consciousness as such is
receptive to axiological predicates so that "impressions" of value
characteristics such as goodness, badness, indifference, etc. are strictly
affective. This is a major deviation from Brentano's position that only
experiences which are perceptual — and so cognitive or, in Husserl's terms,
doxic — and not affective could be receptive and that only the internal
perception of itself that is implicit in every veridical emotion can give
rise to the concept that the object of the emotion is good or bad and so is
worthy of love or of hate, respectively. Thus Brentano's view had held that the
impressional consciousness of value is necessarily a direct consciousness of
something mental and only indirectly a consciousness of something about the
emotion's object. Instead, Husserl maintained that an evidently correct positive
emotion, for example, is implicitly an intuition that what it approves of
ought to be, much as an evident belief is evidence for the being of
what is believed in (perceiving being intuition that the object is actual and
clearly imagined perceiving being intuition that its object is possible).
The ontic states of affairs toward which affects or feelings are directed are
always co-intended in some cognitive (doxic) manner — perceived, remembered,
imagined, anticipated, judged, etc. However, an approving of something can be
evidence that what is approved ought to be regardless of whether the
founding doxic consciousness is evident with regard to the existence or
possibility of the object as doxically intended. This suggests strongly that
valuings as such are infallible and that disagreements in judgments about values
and value characteristics is reducible to disagreements regarding the founding
ontic characeristics for which the relevant objects are valued — a thesis in
which phenomenological axiology would concur with non-cognitivist theories. Even
if valuing as such is infallible, incorrect valuings still would occur when the
beliefs through which the valuing is grounded are themselves incorrect. That
their grounding doxa be correct is a necessary condition for fully correct
valuing, whether simple or preferential.
As a valuing, an affective process may be intentive to its object either
positively (loving, approving, liking, etc.) as something that ought to be,
negatively (hating, disapproving, disliking, etc.) as something that ought not
to be, or in an affectively neutral way as something that is neither good nor
bad. Thus, affects or feelings and their noematic correlates have "qualities"
analogous to those of judging and other doxic phenomena.
Besides simple affects such as loving, hating, approving, disapproving, liking,
and disliking there are comparative affects that are intentive to something not
just as being of value, disvalue, or indifferent but also as better than, worse
than, or neither better than nor worse than something else. Preferential affects
are basic to the conative phenomena which are a principle theme of ethics as the
theory of correct striving since striving-for or, in any event, any veridical
striving-for would be founded on a preferring of the existence of what is
striven for to its nonexistence, as striving-against would be founded on
preferring the nonexistence of what is striven against to its existence.
Each valuing is founded on a definite set of doxic mental processes, and each
member of that set belongs to one or more particular doxic species. Other
mental processes of the self-same doxic species could occur without grounding
any mental process of the same affective species as the one which this set of
doxic mental processes has made possible. The occurrence of a doxic mental
process of the relevant species is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition
for the occurrence of feelings of the relevant type. The thesis of foundedness
seems quite defensible so long as it is not misunderstood as if the logical
priority of the founding (conditioning) doxic-ontic predicates entailed temporal
priority as well. Husserl does not always pronounce the separation emphatically
and seems at least once
The foundedness of valuing on doxic phenomena and the corresponding grounding of
correctly valued axiological characters in the ontic characteristics intended by
the founding doxa entails an implicit abstraction. If an object x is correctly
approved simply on the basis of a set of ontic predicates which x is correctly
believed to have and through which x exemplifies a certain set of ontic
universals then all examples of the same set of ontic universals must have the
selfsame type of goodness for which this particular thing is approved.
Nevertheless, if anything be correctly loved simply for having a doxically
intuitable trait of a certain sort then everything having a trait of the same
sort can be correctly loved and is good. <Jordan, 1987, 293
f.>
The distinction between ontic and axiological predicates is misconceived if the
ontic properties are represented as objective while the axiological ones are
represented as being in some sense subjective. It would be no less a
misrepresentation if axiological characteristics were represented
noncognitivistically as if they could not be truly predicated of the object. The
distinction may be the genuine one that is misrepresented in traditional
fact-value distinctions, but it has otherwise no clear relation to them.
Nevertheless, it is far from obvious to what category value-predicates such as
good, ill, better, and worse belong. Metaethical issues of this sort are
important themes for further thinking, and thinking about them seems most likely
to occur among phenomenologically oriented thinkers, if at all. The very
great dangers involved in misinterpreting them seem to have been involved in
MARTIN HEIDEGGER's effort to discuss them without using the traditional
vocabulary of ethics and value theory.
Even Scheler's conception of material values may carry, as Heidegger points out,
very questionable elements of the fact-value differentiation. Scheler argues
against the dependence of value-characteristics upon ontic properties. As
eidetic objects, values would be qualities that are entirely independent of and
indifferent to the ontic characteristics of what is valued; its ontic traits
would be valueless, absolutely without value <Formalismus in der Ethik, 1913, p.
221>. Scheler's conception thus separates the ontic properties of x altogether
from what, in Heidegger's terms would make x worthy of care, concern, etc. In
"Brief über den Humanismus" (1947) Heidegger condemns this way of thinking in
terms of values as the greatest conceivable blasphemy against being
<Heidegger,
1976, 179 f.; English translation in Basic Writings 228>. In the same passage,
he repeatedly asserts that to think against "values" in Scheler's sense is not
to champion nihilism regarding values. Scheler's thesis was based on the fact
that something may be pleasant or agreeable to us without our being able to say
what makes it so. Heidegger would surely counter that failure successfully to
explicate what makes x agreeable has no relevance to the question whether what
makes x agreeable has or has not been understood. According to Hartmann's
Ethik
(1926) <Chapters 4-7> explicating which things are indeed val-
<727> ued and for
which ontic traits they are correctly valued is a complex hermeneutical
undertaking. There seems little doubt that Heidegger considered affective being
in the world (Befindlichkeit) to be grounded in the being of what is understood
through affects. If his position on this point is indeed closer to that of
Husserl and Hartmann then what he calls dread (Angst) shows that the
potentialities which are threatened by death are worth caring about since that
whose non-being is to be dreaded ought to be: the appropriate affective attitude
toward the non-being of what ought to be is necessarily negative
<Jordan, 1979>.
As belief-phenomena underlie and are implicit in all valuings so valuings
underlie and are implicit in all strivings. And as there are norms for correct
believing so there are norms for correct feeling and for correct volition. As
correctness of its implicit beliefs would be a necessary condition for
correctness of a valuation, so correctness of its implicit valuations would be a
necessary condition for correctness of a volition. Norms for correct volition
are a theme for ethics. The position of JEAN-PAUL SARTRE regarding the relation
between values and ethics illustrates quite well the differentiation between
axiology and ethics.
In L'être et le néant (1943) <p. 512>, Sartre holds that actions have meaning
only by reference to a hierarchy of ideal values. Such a hierarchy entails laws
regarding kinds of entities that are related as better and worse. Thus there
would be eidetic laws to the effect that entities of one kind are better than
entities of another so that entities of the one kind are, other things being
equal, to be preferred to entities of another specified kind. Yet Sartre insists
in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme that an aprioristic ethics is out of the
question. The two theses are altogether compatible if axiology and ethics are
entirely distinct disciplines, especially so if the theory of correct volitions
must take into account necessarily a posteriori beliefs concerning the likely
results of actions.
Not until Scheler's Formalismus in der Ethik (1913) were strivings and the
personal and character traits which condition strivings acknowledged in
phenomenological writings to have primary or intrinsic moral value that is — as
Kant insisted — altogether independent of their real utitility (real
instrumental value). The utility of a striving is a function of the axiological
characteristics of whatever factual outcomes are conditioned by that striving.
Every volition necessarily is intentive, however vaguely, to itself, through its
founding affects and doxa, as having utility. Following Kant, Scheler calls the
occurrences which, the agent anticipates, may be affected by the action its
material or content; the axiological characteristics of whatever sort which this
content is intended as bearing are the action's material value . Kant's
formalistic ethics asserts that the moral value of any striving must be entirely
independent of its material value. Against this formalism, Scheler insists that
a striving's moral value cannot be entirely independent of its material value
although the latter is certainly not a sufficient condition for the former. The
end of every correct action must be some anticipated utility or benefit that is
the material value of the striving. No correct striving could have its own moral
goodness (its own conformity to the moral law) as its intended end (subjective
end in Kant's sense). Thus, Scheler rejects the most basic thesis of Kant's
formalism. But the same thesis about value-predicates leads him to reject as
well Kant's cosmopolitan conception of morality and of the teleology of human
history: the very conception that was assimilated — much more than any thesis
from Hegel's conception of morality — into the anthropology of Feuerbach and
Marx. Since no morally right action can have its own moral goodness as an end
and since he is convinced that the moral value predicate of an action is the
eidos moral goodness, Scheler concludes that moral goodness cannot be the end of
any correct striving at all, that moral goodness can never be a material value.
Striving to promote moral goodness in the world could in that case never be
morally correct. The alternative conception of value predicates which is shared
by Husserl and Hartmann (and seemingly Heidegger) allows for the
preservation of Kant's view of teleology and of the highest good
<Jordan, 1987>.
Moreover, Hartmann also rejects Scheler's interpretation of the hierarchy of
values and its relation to moral goodness. Scheler proposed to determine moral
rightness just by the rightness of the action's underlying preference, which
must give priority, if it is to be correct, to the highest of the values
accessible to the agent that can be realized in the given situation
<Formalismus
in der Ethik, 45 ff.>. Hartmann maintains that values in the hierarchy have what
he calls strength as well as height, and their strength is inversely related to
their height. There is <728> indeed higher moral goodness in striving to fulfill
the requirements of superior material values. To violate lower order values is,
however, a more grievous offense than to violate the higher ones. Right
preference must involve the greater weight of the lower values. It is not enough
to consider only that the fine arts are much greater in height when deciding how
to allocate public resources between them and public health if choices must be
made that will promote one at the expense of the other. Such issues are topics
in the theory of correct preference and conation, even if they also
differentiate a Husserlian left from a Husserlian right.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Brentano, Franz. Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik, edited by Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand
from the lectures on Practical Philosophy" in the literary remains. Bern: A. Francke Ag.Verlag, 1952. The Foundation and Construction of Ethics Ed. and trans.
Elizabeth Hughes Schneewind. New York: Humanities Press, 1973.
Hartmann, Nicolai. Ethik, 4th ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1962. Ethics.
Trns. Stanton Coit. London: George Allen & Unwin and New York: Humanities Press,
1932.
Heidegger, Martin. "Brief über den Humanismus." (1946), In Gesamtausgabe, Volume
9. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1976, 313-364.
Husserl, Edmund. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908-1914. Ed. Ullrich
Melle Husserliana 28. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1988.
Jordan, Robert Welsh. Review of Edmund Husserl's Vorlesungen uper Ethik and
Wertlehre, 1908-1914. Husserl Studies 8 (1992) 221-32.
__. "Das transzendentale Ich als Seiendes in der Welt," Perspektiven der
Philosophie, 5. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1979, 189-205.
__. "Unnatural Kinds: Beyond Dignity and Price." Man and World 20 (1987)
283-303.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. "Phenomenology" in Encyclopedia of Ethics, vol. 2. Ed.
Lawrence C. Becker, Vol. 2, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992,
960-63.
Reiner, Hans. Pflicht und Neigung: die Grundlagen der Sittlichkeit erörtert und
neu bestimmt mit besonderem Bezug auf Kant und Schiller. Meisenheim am Glan: A.
Hain, 1951. Duty and Inclination the Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and
Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1964.