review of Edmund Husserl's Vorlesungen über Ethik and Wertlehre, 1908-1914

Husserl Studies 8:221-232, 1992

BOOK REVIEW

Edmund Husserl. Vorlesungen über Ethic und Wertlehre, 1908-1914, ed. Ullrich Melle (Husserliana, Vol. 28) (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).

Between the winter semester of 1908/09 and the end of summer semester in 1914, Husserl held three lectures courses, each two hours weekly, on ethics and value theory. Husserliana 28, Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, 1908-1914, publishes the content of these lectures together with appendices to them and supplementary texts reproducing manuscripts dating from 1914 back to 1897. These appear to be the earliest of his writings on these subjects to have survived except for some fourteen fragmentary pages relating to earlier courses Husserl had given as Privatdozent in Halle on the same and related subjects. [1] (Hua 28, xv) The main body of the volume is the texts for the three lecture courses; these are set in reverse chronological order except for their appendices:

A. Lectures on Basic Issues of Ethics and Value Theory, summer semester,
1914: 159 pages. Appendices I-II, 5 pages.
B. Introduction and Conclusion of the Lectures on Basic Problems of Ethics and Value Theory, summer semester, 1911: 60 pages. Appendices III-VII, 8 pages.
C. Second Division of the Lectures on Basic Problems of Ethics, winter semester, 1908-1909. 108 pages. Appendices X-XIV, 33 pages.

To read the materials in something approximating a fictive order of delivery, it is necessary to start with the Introduction in B, followed by A, then C and the Conclusion from B. The volume's editor, Ulrich Melle, explains that the decision not to print the texts in chronological order was taken largely because portions of the manuscripts for the 1908 lectures have been lost and because the 1914 lectures present an enlarged and revised version of the First Part of the 1908-09 lectures, which had been presented in an already somewhat revised and enlarged version as the here omitted core of the 1911 lectures. The version of his course on value theory and ethics that Husserl presented in the summer semester of 1914 is here presented first as it was not just the latest but also the best developed and most complete of the three courses.

More than in any of Husserl's other writings the lectures on axiology and ethics follow step by step the work of Franz Brentano, explaining, commenting, and — above all — elaborating and correcting in great detail the work of his teacher. Brentano's views on value theory and ethics were at least as innovative as any of his century, and they have been, amongst phenomenologically oriented thinkers, the most fruitful of nineteenth century ethical theories. Brentano's ethical theory was an ideal utilitarianism that had yet to acquire the name. As a variety of consequentialism, the theory had to fend off the accusation of excessive rigorism. As he understood it, the highest practical good ranges over the entire sphere of <222> events subject to our rational influence; the whole world, including the remote future are to be considered. Every action should further the good in this widest sense.[2] To promote this goal under all circumstances is the one absolute principle of right action, the single categorical imperative. As elaborated by Oskar Kraus, Brentano's closest follower, there is no single highest value , no once and for all materially determinable highest good, such as general happiness. There is no one sort of thing that would be under all circumstances the best thing attainable. For Brentano's ideal consequentialism, there is no concrete, non-formal end the pursuit of which would always be of positive value. But there is in all circumstances a highest duty. In each set of circumstances there is something which is the best outcome; and it has a material content that is definite in every case, no matter how that content may vary with the circumstances. This strictly formal end with variable content is the end of every right action. It dictates, therefore, that the end to be promoted by legislation and by economic policy is the objectively most advantageous distribution of goods. That best distribution is the one that brings about the highest attainable increase in value realization, the greatest possible increase in the realization of primary ("intrinsic") values.[3] The right end would appear a practically impossible target were it not for the accompanying deterministic postulate making failure impossible: the moment, the kairos, is what differentiates, appearance from truth, good from evil.

Small wonder then that Brentano and his followers, like the hedonistic utilitarians before them, tried hard to limit the obligations imposed by so sweeping an imperative to a quite narrow compass. And it was no less to be expected that opponents of consequentialism, so-called deontologists as well as noncognitivists and other relativists, would find these efforts futile. The position of Brentano and Kraus continues to generate anxiety in those who prize individual autonomy in valuations. It does so despite repeated disclaimers to the effect that the proposed system is an ethics of autonomy since personal insight, rather than any positive prescription, is the sole ultimately decisive authority regarding what is good and what bad. [4]

Those who are made uneasy by theories like Brentano's will also find suspect Husserl's preliminary characterization of "ethical absolutism." As the denial of "skeptical anthropologism," it seems as if absolutism might entail the severest sort of rigorism. Ethical absolutists know their practical behavior to be bound, he says, just as strictly by ethical principles as calculation is bound by arithmetical principles. Only later does he make clear that those principles which are absolutely binding upon ethical practice, being purely formal, cannot of themselves require any single concrete choice. As he distinguishes sharply, in pronounced disagreement with Brentano's psychology, between emotional or affective phenomena on the one hand and strivings or conative phenomena on the other, so Husserl also distinguishes [5] between the unconditional way in which axiological principles bind evidentially correct emotions (insightful valuings) and the way practice or conation must be bound by ethical principles if it is to be correct.

The purely formal categorical imperative and its purely formal corollaries must assuredly be binding on any choice whatsoever, but only if certain ideal conditions be met. The supreme practical good leads Husserl — <223> as it had Brentano before him — to formulate a supreme practical principle. The principle, just as Brentano had formulated it, requires that, in all cases of choice, the course of events be chosen which is the best of all those attainable. Both Husserl and Brentano emphasize that the principle is a purely formal one. Husserl, however, makes a more convincing case that their "categorical imperative," just because it is purely formal, does not place unbearable burdens upon the human agents who must not violate it if their efforts are to be correct. In doing so, he takes a long step toward the differentiation between goods value and moral value that would be drawn a few years later by Max Scheler in Formalism in Ethics [6] (1913-1916). Very shortly thereafter, Nicolai Hartmann, was beginning work that would lead to further refinements of the same basic distinction.[7]

Husserl draws a basic distinction between ways of valuing and their correlative values which does not correspond to any distinction made in Brentano's work. It is a classification by the way in which the bearers of the values are valued and cuts across the differentiation between positive and negative valuings. There is a sort of valuing through which something is disclosed as attractive, alluring, charming, etc., regardless of whether or not it is considered to exist. Such a valuing occurs, says Husserl, in the case where I imagine a delightful female form; she is there for me as quasi-existing: imagined , yet not posited as non-existent. With respect to her existence or non-existence, I take no position. The being aesthetically pleased is nevertheless a genuine, serious taking of position, an actual valuing of what is imagined as it is imagined, in the How of its being imagined. (Hua 28, 154) Values of this sort are said to belong to a region of "attractive values." The meaning and validity of the attribution of values in this region is unaffected by the existence or non-existence of the bearer of the value. (Hua 28, 47). On the other hand, the word 'good' is applied only insofar as the valuing is conditioned by belief in the existence or non-existence of what is being valued. Wishing, wanting, joy, and sorrow are valuings of this sort. These correlates of positive existential valuings belong to a distinct region and are distinguished terminologically as 'goods' while the correlate of any correct negative existential emotion is some ill or harm.[8] (Hua 28, 47) Values belonging to either "region" — what is alluring <repulsive> on the one hand and what is good <ill> on the other — can undergo summation and can increase. The addition of objects of value to a collection increases the collective value of the set. And the good events whose chances for occurring are enhanced by an earlier event increase its value.[9]

There are very serious objections to the way Husserl presents the accumulation and summation of value. Professor Melle, whose labor has made the Lectures accessible to us, points out that Moritz Geiger, during a 1909 visit with Husserl, had argued that values are not all of them comparable so that, in such cases, summation cannot occur. Husserl's note dismissing the objection has been included in the volume as Supplementary Text 5. Professor Melle suggests that Husserl had, in the 1909 note, not taken the full measure of Geiger's objection and later changed his opinion about the summabliity of value when, as a later note — probably written after 1919 — indicates, he decided that the concept of the supreme practical good and the laws of formal ethics, formulated in these lectures, provide no real guidance <224> for casuistry. This latter note refers back to sharply critical remarks Geiger made in a meeting which Husserl recalls as having occurred in 1907. Professor Melle also suggests that Husserl erred here in dating these remarks and that they actually occurred at the 1909 meeting. (Hua 28, xlvii) These suggestions are not altogether convincing. The two remarks that Husserl refers to by Geiger refer to quite different aspects of the theory, and the one about the summation of value probably deserved no more than summary consideration. Husserl had made careful allowance for such objections in the lectures themselves. Values which cannot be assimilated otherwise are said nevertheless to affect the accumulation of value algebraically. Unless some other evidence indicates that Husserl changed his mind about this sort of summation — and no other evidence is cited — then there is really no evidence that Husserl later rejected his view that values can be cumulative. [10]

Still, these views, if they do refer to a genuine phenomenon, are likely to be misunderstood. He might have stated more explicitly and emphatically that those axiological characters an object has that are conditioned by its relations to other objects having value are not necessarily supervenient to the other moments of the object's sense: a sharp-edged rock's value as a cutting tool is founded on, not alien to, other components of its sense. Through successful use of the thing to cut, its utility is explicated (given), not imparted. To have had this value-quality as part of its meaning does not require that the thing be valued or that it be used. 'Summation' does not designate any mental process through which the rock's objective sense is altered or augmented.[11] It refers instead to moments of the rock's meaning which make certain sorts of correct affects possible. Summation is not some act through which a new moment of form would be acquired by an indifferent factual content. Certain sorts of misunderstandings might have been less likely had Husserl included such barriers to misinterpretation. Yet they would indeed be misreadings and unlikely to occur to a reader not otherwise predisposed to misrepresent. That value qualities be other than factual is not implied in the doctrine that axiological qualities are founded on ontic characteristics. Nor is any such error implied when Husserl states as a law, "[W]here the existence of one good has another good as a consequence the value of the first one as something good undergoes increase." (Hua 28, 132)

As in other cases in which the sense which an object has for the ego acquires a further sense for the ego — such as disclosure of an object's membership in a certain set of things to the ego through an act of collecting, the state of affairs being referred to here needs to be described very differently. The law about the cumulative value of a good and its consequences might, perhaps, be better stated: If the value, V, of a certain good, G, is founded on the properties through which it exemplifies a set, O, of ontic species, and if the existence of G leads (would lead) to some other good then V is greater than would be the goodness of any object exemplifying O but not leading to another good. When stated in this exceeding awkward way, the law is less likely to suggest that correct valuing of the first good for its worthwhile consequence generates rather than explicates the further value it discloses. Husserl would, after all, have understood as well as anyone that the state-of-the-valued [Wertverhalt], disclosed by an evidential affect, is not numerically different from the thing valued (Hua <225> XXVIII, 249-50) any more than a state of affairs formed syntactically through an evidentially true judging is numerically different from the state of affairs as it is and is given.[12] Evidential valuing discloses that what is valued ought to be rather than increasing the worth of the valued. When the state of the valued is then objectivated, as it might be in judging the valued object to be good, then the belief that what has been valued is good is a further acquisition beyond the already acquired habitual valuing of the thing. Should it occur to me that trustworthiness such as I have admired for years in a friend is the realization of a necessary condition for the existence of communities based on justified mutual trust then my friend's trustworthiness may come to be prized in this respect as well. Neither the trustworthiness nor the friend has derived new allure from the enabling relation between them and the still higher order goodness of communities based on justified mutual trust. Even if I have only now come to value them in this relation, the valuing, if well founded, acknowledges and discloses a way in which they had already been of value.

Without apt ways to formulate laws for something like the accumulation of values, it will not be possible to formulate an indeterministic way of understanding how new value, which events in the world would otherwise not have, can accrue through the decisions taken by persons. In that case, it would also become impossible to understand how any course of events, including any projected striving could make a real difference in the world's goods and how any co-projected world could be better than another. For persons rightly to project potentialities worth caring for would be impossible. It would be impossible, that is, unless there were already a cumulative value of worldly events, future as well as past: the sole function of striving and valuing in that case would be to bring to light the predetermined world and the predetermined value of the events that it entails.[13]

That accumulation of value occur seems to be implied by the Brentanesque and Husserlian conceptions of a highest practical good and a supreme formal ethical principle. It may even be the case that principles implied in the accumulation of value imply a highest and purely formal practical principle. If so, it entails the principle as a regulative ideal in a strictly Kantian sense. It would be a principle whose instantiation in valuational and practical experience could never be established. There are frequent intimations in the Lectures that Husserl suspects such a principle to be Widersinn <that is, to be something materially absurd, something that does not fulfill some necessary and non-formal (synthetic) condition for possible truth>.

He is not convinced, as Brentano and Oskar Kraus clearly were, that the principle has genuine application. In discussing concrete choices, Husserl emphasizes that the best of the currently considered alternatives cannot be evidentially preferred as being the highest practical good. (Hua 28, 133-34) There may be unforeseen ways in which the best of the alternatives so far considered enters into value summations, and there is also an open horizon of other ways of seeking alternatives that would be better still. As long as there remains the open possibility that something new be drawn into the selection it is obvious, he insists, <that> there is no positive practical demand for just the best of the alternatives so far considered. (Hua 28, 233) If there be a point at which the regulative ideal of the highest practical good does enter into moral experience, the most obvious reference to it would be involved in a felt demand to continue the quest for a potentiality <226> better still than those so far considered, a demand which the agent must reject in all conative taking of position. Husserl does insist that his categorical imperative holds, for all decisions, within the range of the alternatives considered. But it seems clear that it holds only with the proviso that some of these possibilities be rightly preferable to all of the others.

As later writers such as Hartmann and Sartre emphasize, it is impossible concretely to determine any such thing as a single best result in any given situation. The categorical imperative, being a purely formal principle, would show a priori that if there be such a thing as the best of all possible sets of results that might issue from a given situation then that set ought to issue from it. Agents who possessed the insight that they were acquainted with all the value-principles, material and formal, applicable to all of the various possible outcomes of the situation, would know a priori the alternative which ought to issue from it. If, on the other hand, values are genuinely objective principles then the insight that exhaustive acquaintance had been achieved with those <principles> applicable to the situation would seem impossible.

Only through the decision taken does there come to be such a thing as the of alternatives that were considered beforehand. In case several of the alternatives are equivalent in overall value then the emotional sense of value could not of itself indicate a correct preference between them. It could not do so even if the valuing ego is of a sort to whose affective consciousness value-predicates of the kinds involved can and are given. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that the feelings of egos whose socio-cultural backgrounds are very different will be able aptly to respond to the same range of value-predicates. Differences of this sort indicate the need to distinguish sharply between the consequential value of a striving and its intrinsic moral value. A striving might be of much greater moral value than its noninsightful omission yet be, in terms of its consequences, so great an ill that its fulfillment should not occur. Such differences would co-determine what a given ego can aptly value and so would affect which decisions and actions are correct for such an ego.

A correct preference for one of the factually anticipated possibilities over the others would be a rational motive for a correct striving. Nevertheless, it would be impossible for there to be beforehand a correct doxic consciousness that none of the other alternatives considered in reaching the decision is better than the one chosen, for there would be no such fact before the decision. Only the decision itself converts the open-ended set of possibilities considered into the closed set whose members are the set of considered alternatives. That set does not have closed membership before the decision unless either the Hegelian conception of charisma or some other form of determinism be correct. In that case, however, it would have to be true that every successful agent ist sich in seinem dunklen Drange des rechten Weges wohl bewuβt.[14]

No valuing could be correct if it were incompatible with, in violation of, the formal laws of correct valuing. The analog holds for the formal laws of correct striving. The laws entail formal requirements which must be satisfied by any valuing in the one case or striving in the other if it is to be correct. But the formal laws do not entail sufficient conditions for correctness of valuings or strivings, respectively. In this respect, they are quite like laws of formal logic in that they establish sufficient conditions only for <227> formal correctness (analytic truth) and only necessary conditions for material correctness (synthetic truth). When he wrote that formal logic and formal ethics differ in this respect, Alois Roth misled phenomenological inquiry into ethics and value theory for twenty years.[15] In doing so, he also obscured some of the elements of continuity between Husserl's thought on these subjects and that of later phenomenologists.

The Lectures on Ethics and Axiology show Husserl at work on limited tasks concerning formal axiology, formal ethics, and the analogies among theoretical, normative, and practical disciplines. His handling of these is skilled, thorough, and usually masterful. There seems no doubt that those elaborations and corrections he proposes for Brentano's theory are genuine improvements. The purely analytic laws derived are correct. They are not even just trivially true; they may not be lightly dismissed as foolish effort to compare the incomparable. Of most lasting and general interest to phenomenologists and psychologists will be the carefully elaborated details of how, on the one hand, mental phenomena of the three basic sorts and, on the other hand, the corresponding ontic, axiological, and practical states of affairs are related as conditioned or conditioning. But for efforts and insights in the various fields of normative ethics, Brentano has not even been approached here, much less surpassed.[16] The editor's Introduction gives clear indications that, largely on this account, Husserl himself in the 1920's found all this work unsatisfactory, whether he found it wrong will not be clear until the relevant manuscripts in the Nachlaβ are edited and published. Whether he found more satisfactory the ethical theories of Scheler and Hartmann emphasizing material values of personal and moral kinds cannot be established from the material published here.[17] In any event, the Lectures contain no recognition of moral or personal values as distinct value species. There are, however, a number of passages intimating how recognition of an urgent need for differentiating personal values would arise from Husserl's work.

Husserl considers only what is called "consequential value" or "goods value" — by Scheler and Hartmann respectively — in his discussion (Hua 28, 134) of choosing the lesser evil. He says that every decision or willing that is directed toward something of disvalue is incorrect when considered in itself: if the alternatives are all bad then the correct decision is to reject them all without raising the question of greater or lesser evil. When he adds in a footnote that there are laws of correct preference even here, that deciding for the lesser evil is itself less evil than deciding for a greater one. (Hua 28, 134 fn. 1), Husserl is again close to noticing the need to differentiate between the moral rightness of the act — founded on a correct preference among its intended alternatives — and, on the other hand, the harm stemming from the chosen results, considered apart from the positive value of the nonoccurrence of the still more harmful anticipated alternatives. The former is a feature of the act's positive moral value; the latter is an evil that will result in case the act succeeds. This harm would be the source for the factual disutility, which will detract from the act's utility as a means of preventing still greater ills. Husserl left unmentioned some points which urgently needed to be made:

In terms of its moral quality, the decision is 'attractive' and may even <228> be of high moral quality.
In terms of its intended results, it is also a good since the result sought included averting more serious ill.
In terms of its actual effects, the action is an impure good. The effects remain partly evil. The harm they involve does not disappear by their having been brought about through a correct preference and a correct choice.
There is something repugnant and perverse in the approval of situations in which people must make such choices.[18]

There is clearly a need for the distinction Scheler later draws between moral quality and utility, and Husserl probably did come to favor Scheler's work over his own ideal consequentialism. In a 1914 manuscript commenting on the "1914 Lectures on Basic Questions of Ethics and Value Theory," Husserl writes:

…Valuing anything good is itself good; willing to will only what is good is a good…The present willing through which I will for the future the best future, however, does not belong to the coming good but is a present good, a good which is recognized by a subsequent retrospective reflection as something which was good. It is thus a practically possible good to be resolved always as new horizons open in the future to seek to attain insight as to what the best is and to will the best to the best of one's powers. But what role does the resolve to be so resolved in the future play…?

I ought to will with insight the best of what is achievable for any ego whatsoever, 'ego' being understood in the strictest universality. Still I must consider what this best of what is achievable is. What am I able to do; what all is achievable? (Hua 28, 158, emphasis added.)

Neither the supreme practical principle nor its corollaries are going to tell us when to stop puzzling over how to satisfy its requirements and do something about the demands being placed upon us by material values. The passage continues:

…Yet while I weigh all this, time passes. Perhaps something of special value escapes me in the meantime. Yet, by acting without insight, I could choose evil as well as choose something of value. So rather delay the choice and deliberate.

But how long should the deliberation last? What should I do for the next minute, the next hour, the whole future?… (Hua XXVIII, 158)

The passage goes on to consider what ought ideally to be true of the ego who must do the valuing and make the decision. The non-ideal ego who, like it or not, is all the while doing either something or nothing about the anticipated goods and ills can go on waiting indefinitely for inspiration from the Supreme Practical Principle. Nothing will ever be valued or done by an ego taken in strictest universality however.

There must surely be facts regarding the valuing persons which condition the range of values they are likely to be affected by. Valuing is itself a <229> bearer of value and that value is conditioned by characteristics of the subject. The attractive value of persons of a given type insofar as they are suited to respond emotionally to a given range of values would be a specifically personal value. The trait which founds this personal value conditions the range of conations that would be rational for a given person or type of person. Considered as having a definite range of rational conations, the person has a distinct sort of attractiveness, regardless of the actual occurrence or non-occurrence of these conations. Through this trait, the person would possess a distinctive value quality of a sort that is not only personal but ethical or moral and would possess it independently of whatever influences it may have on the course of future events.

Husserl is on the verge of introducing this sort of modification into Brentano's[19] consequentialist views when he corrects Brentano's law that "Something good and recognized as good is to be preferred to something bad and recognized as bad." Husserl insists that the noetic laws involved in this state of values should be differentiated from the ontic ones. The noetic law, he says, should be formulated to begin with more generally, "It is rational to prefer something taken to be good to something taken to be bad." That is, a relevant fact about the preferring subject must be considered in judging the rightness of preferences. The noetic law holds even if the taking to be good (bad) that founds it is objectively incorrect. (Hua 28, 91) Something similar would presumably have to be said of an action motivated by the correct preference. Even though an underlying simple valuing be incorrect, the striving, rationally motivated by the incorrect preferring, would be right <of positive moral value>. It might still be the <morally> right action for a person who has made this error, even though it may have quite harmful consequences.

Apparently Husserl modified his consequentialist views significantly in later writings on ethics. Melle (Hua 28, xlvii-xlviii) quotes passages from writings of the 1920's which acknowledge a "voice of conscience, the call of "the absolute Ought," which "can require of me something that I would not by comparing values at all acknowledge to be the best. What is stupidity so far as the understanding recognizes by comparing values is countenanced as ethical and can become object of the greatest admiration." A proper understanding of the context for such passages will have to await publication of the subsequent writings on ethics which, Melle tells us (Hua 28, xlv fn 4, xlvi fn 2) is in preparation. In the summer semesters of 1920 and 1924, Husserl presented a four hour lecture course (Hua 28, xlv-xlvi), under the titles "Introduction to Ethics" and "Basic Problems of Ethics" respectively and these are among the manuscripts referred to as in preparation for Husserliana. Passages such as that just cited suggest a radical shift in Husserl's position away from the claim presented in the present lectures that correct practice ought to follow correct preference. Melle cites evidence that by November 1917 Husserl was in sympathy with Fichte's extreme deontological position.

However, the extensive passages that Roth used from the lecture courses of the 1920's (primarily F I 24 and F I 28) show no trace of any conversion from consequentialism, much less to Fichte's extreme deontology with its strange duty not to weigh consequences:

<230>…This is the only possible confession of faith: to do what duty prescribes and to do this gaily and naturally, without doubt or calculation of consequences…
True atheism, unbelief and godlessness in the real sense, consists in calculation of consequences…

To what extent Husserl in his later ethical writings came to agree with Fichte's position remains to be seen.

Robert Welsh Jordan
Fort Collins, Colorado

NOTES

[1] A complete list of the courses Husserl gave on ethics is given by Alois Roth [Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchen. Dargestellt anhand seiner Vorlesungsmanuskripte, Phaemenologica 7 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960) x]. They include three and two hour lecture courses on "Ethics and Philosophy of Law" given in 1894 and 1897 respectively.

[2] Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, ed. Oskar Kraus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1969) 30 f. [English translation, The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, by Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) 32 f.].

[3] Oskar Kraus, "Bentham, Kant und Wundt," Introduction to Jeremy Benthams Grundsätze für ein künftiges Völkerrecht und einen dauernden Frieden (Principles of International Law), tr. C. Klatscher (Halle a.S.: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1915) 47 ff.

[4] Franz Brentano, 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) 22 [English translation edited and translated by Elizabeth Hughes Schneewind, The Foundation and Construction of Ethics (New York: Humanities Press, 1973) page 24]. Though he does not apply the term 'autonomous' to it, Kraus (op. cit. 39 ff.) denies that the system is heteronomous. So, too, does Anton Marty, who speaks of natural utility as the ultimate "authority" in moral issues, following Brentano's notions of the natural sanction for objective moral principles; see Marty's "Über Sprachreflex, Nativismus und absichtliche Sprachbildung" in Gesammelte Schriften. ed. J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus, I. Band, 2. Abteilung, Schriften zur genetischen Sprachphilosophie (Halle a. S.: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1916) 223.

[5] The distinction is drawn, as is indicated below (pages <225 f., 228>, although less explicitly than by implication and certainly not with the sort of emphasis placed by Nicaolai Hartmann upon negative freedom of the will vis-à-vis the axiological principle on which it acts; see his Ethik, fourth ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1962) Chapters 19-21, 74, 80, 82. [English translation, Ethics, by Stanton Coit (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932) Vol. 1, Chapters 19-21; Vol. 3, Chapters 10, 16-18]

[6] Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 4th <231> ed, Maria Scheler, ed. (Bern: Francke Verlag. 1954) Part 1,Chapter 1.2; Chapter 2.B.2 and 2.B.4. [English translation, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.]

[7] Nicolai Hartmann, op. cit., esp. Chapter 27 [English translation, Vol. 2, Chapter 2.]. For the history of the work, see Stanton Coit's "Translator's Preface" to the English version, p. 10 f.

[8] It is very misleading that Husserl treats these values as belonging to a different axiological "region" or category from the values which he calls "goods." Whatever is good in Husserl's sense can be valued as something attractive when an affect is directed toward it in such a way that it is approved just for those (non-axiological) characteristics for which it is approved as a good. But his meaning may well be that the attractive object is then not the self-same object but some object of the same non-axiological kind. Moreover, objects having the same non-axiological properties which make a given object attractive can be goods.

[9] When determinism is rejected, as Husserl was inclined to do not later than 1920 or so (Hua XI, 102ff. 493), this feature of value enhancement implies that past occurrences will vary in their value depending upon present and future actions and their results.

[10] Ulrich Melle, "Einleitung des Herausgebers" (Hua 28, xlvi f.). Nevertheless, there certainly are very serious reasons — see below — for Husserl later to conclude that his "categorical imperative" really has little or no relevance to casuistry.

[11] Husserl appears to use 'Wertsummierung' and 'Wertsteigerung' interchangeably. 'Augmentation' or 'increase' translate the latter well; the more perilous yet more literal 'summation' probably should be used for the former but with warnings to the reader of translations.

[12] What needs to be fended off here is exactly the sort of error in talk about values which Heidegger — in case I understand him aright — regards as likely to conceal and obfuscate more than it reveals; see his Sein und Zeit, Erste Hälfte, 6th unaltered edition (Tübingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1946) [English translation, Being and Time, by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962)], esp. 99 f.

[13] Cf. William James, "The Dilemma of Determinism" Essays in Pragmatism, edited with an Introduction by Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1957), pp. 55 f.

[14] Goethe's Faust, Prologue in Heaven, lines 328 f.: Der Herr: …Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklem Drange/ Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuβt [The Lord: …Through their obscure impulses, the good are well aware of the right path].

[15] Alois Roth, op. cit., p. 64: "In ethics," Roth wrote, "deciding formal correctness according to principle means at the same time deciding material correctness. The analogy with logic is wanting in a decisive point."

[16] Husserl's reasons for concentrating so onesidedly on formal axiological and ethical laws will probably much biographical and psychological speculation from a wide range of antifoundationalists. Whatever the fact may indicate about his character he is concerned to extend the refutation of skeptical relativism by establishing distinctive formal eidetic laws for possibly true judgments in these fields as well. Ethical skepticism was even more widespread in the first two decades of our century than was Mill's radical <232> empiricism in logic. Ethical skepticism is involved in countersense as is skepticism about analytical-logical laws, but the debate in the field of axiology and ethics had to remain on a more primitive level since historically an analytical ethics was not as yet formulated. (Hua 28, 245) Even Brentano did not admit until 1904 that there are a priori cognitions of goods and evils which are nonanalytic, and the admission occurred only in correspondence with Oskar Kraus (Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung… 109-112; English 111-113).

[17] The volume contains no reference to Scheler whatsoever. Although he may have found Scheler's work equally unsatisfactory, some measure of approval for Scheler's work is indicated by the fact that the first draft of Husserl's Encyclopedia Britannica article refers only to Scheler under the heading "Ethics" in the section listing recommended phenomenological literature. (Hua 9, 255)

[18] Correct disapproval of such situations may have distracted Husserl into disapproving wrongly of any choices at all when all alternatives are ills.

[19] Brentano himself may well have moved away from extreme consequentialism sometime between his Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik (342 ff.) and 1901 since he came to differentiate between moral preferences and others which lack moral character (see Vom Ursprung…, Appendix VI 129-130.