Hartmann, Schutz and the Hermeneutics of Action

Hartmann, Schutz, and the Hermeneutics of Action

Robert Welsh Jordan

ABSTRACT

Hartmann's way of conceiving what he terms "the actual ought-to-be (aktuales Seinsollen]" offers a fruitful approach to crucial issues in the phenomenology of action. The central issue to be dealt with concerns the description of the "constitution" of anticipated possibilities as projects for action. Such these are termed "problematic possibilities" and are contrasted with "open possibilities" in most of the works published by Husserl as well as those published by Alfred Schutz. The description given by Alfred Schutz emphasized that the projecting of possibilities is thoroughly conditioned by the agent's habitual beliefs and interests. Schutz, however left open the possibility that other factors might affect the projecting of courses of action and the choosing of one in preference to others. In particular, he left open the possibility that the agent come to take an interest in possibilities in which she had no prior interest. More recent interpretations of his position on this issue have left this possibility undiscussed or else excluded it altogether. The result has been that a sort of value nihilism (subjectivism, sociologism, lingualism, anthropologism, historicism, psychologism, etc.) came to prevail in the phenomenological description of actions.

A quite parallel development occurred in interpretations of Heidegger's account of actions (of "explication [Auslegung]" in the vocabulary of Being and Time). Heidegger expressly and emphatically rejected most ways of conceiving values in discussing the forms of action (circumspection and assertion in the vocabulary of Sein und Zeit). it came quite generally to be assumed that he subscribed to some variation of nihilism regarding values despite his insistence in the "Letter on Humanism" that he meant no such thing. The literature' on this subject has concentrated on Scheler's work to the complete exclusion of Hartmann's axiology — as happened in Parvis Ermad's Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Values, His Critique of Intentionality, foreword by Walter Biernel (Glen Ellyn, Illinois: Torey Press, 1981). Scheler's view entails the radical separation of ontic traits from axiotic traits, of what-is from what-ought-to-be. However, for Hartmann, the set of ontic traits that becomes actual when laws about what-ought-to-be are satisfied is identical with the set of traits that ought-to-be,

Hartmann's way of conceiving the ought-to-be, the actual ought-to-be, and the three-fold structure of the finalistic nexus seems entirely compatible with Heidegger's way of thinking about actions. They are also an enlightening supplement to Schutz's description of "Choosing Among Projects of Action" (in Collected Papers 1, 67-96). That description requires that choice and action be thoroughly conditioned by psychological, social, and historical facts about the agent. However, nothing of this vital determination of actions is sacrificed when these concepts that are so central to Hartmann's "absolutism" with respect to values are introduced into the description.

Their introduction provides an elaboration that Schutz himself neglected, perhaps due to pragmatic deference to biases which were prevalent then in the intellectual climate of philosophy and sociology in the U.S. Still, the transformation they bring is a significant improvement. It shows decisively that being conditioned linguistically, psychologically, socially, and historically does not enclose the choice among projects within a "Hermeneutical Circle" such as would exclude the possibility that agents be open to previously unfamiliar values. Hartmann's conception of the plurality as well as the absoluteness (or "objectivity") of primary goods allows: put in Kantian terms, that an agent may, however rarely, take an interest in possibilities such as she may never before have been interested in at all; or, put in Heideggerian terms, that she may come to care about possibilities such as have never concerned her before.

HARTMANN, SCHUTZ, AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF ACTION

Twentieth Century accounts of purposeful activity tended to ignore certain vital issues entailed by one of the concepts central to Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology and cosmology as well as to his axiology and ethics. What he called the finalistic nexus characterizes, he insisted, all telic processes, all processes involving events that are teleologically conditioned. All telic processes, and they alone, entail the efficacy of ideal and universal values. Moreover, purposive activity is a distinguishing characteristic of persons and so is an essential trait of members of our biological species insofar, but only insofar, as they are moral,[1] i.e., personal beings. Purposive activity and the finalistic nexus that is its essential form were central themes in Hartmann’s work, motifs to which he returned in most of his writings. Throughout his career he faced squarely and unambiguously the issues about absolute values and freedom of the will that are essential to moral beings as he understood them. His conception of these issues seems never to have changed. In contrast, these issues remained entirely peripheral to the otherwise extensive and detailed descriptions of action given by Alfred Schutz.

Schutz did no more than acknowledge that they are pivotal issues in traditional philosophy, but his acknowledgement was cursory at best. His work has serious shortcomings in this regard and needs urgently to be supplemented by comparison with Nicolai Hartmann’s efforts. One principal point of contact is their respective interpretations of the motivations for action. Schutz insisted upon broadening the concept of action so as to apply the term to much of what was excluded from the class by rationalistic views such as those of Max Weber. Schutz argued that the line between action and nonactive behavior is less sharp than Weber had represented it to be. Thus, quite customary and habitual actions can occur even though the person acting does not attend to or deliberate the action. Such behavior may nevertheless be goal-oriented and have “subjective meaning,” and it includes teleological causation no less than more deliberate action does. Hartmann was interested in action and motivation primarily from the standpoint of <328>axiology and ethics. He therefore used deliberate and attentive behavior as his paradigm. He tends to ignore some of the more frequent ways in which action occurs. What follows will be simply a comparison of the respective conceptual frameworks within which Hartmann and Schutz dealt with actions. The aim will be merely to indicate their main points of contact and a few of the important differences that lie behind a superficial similarity.

Schutz’s reluctance to deal with issues about absolute value and freedom of the will was almost certainly due in large part to his lifelong effort to establish the moral sciences[2] on a basis more appropriate and rigorous than what had been achieved before, or since. That effort, as he understood it, required that his writings not affront the biases of positive scientists in the various fields of moral science. Throughout the Twentieth Century and into the present millennium, those biases have favored relativism and extreme skepticism toward all conceptions of absolute norms and natural laws.[3] Schutz’s having quite cautiously done much less to affront positivist dogma would explain why his work continues to inspire some degree of interest among moral scientists. It is almost certainly an effect of Hartmann’s admirably unambiguous stance on these issues that his work is still largely neglected in what very extensively fancies itself a postphilosophical epoch. For its genial ambiguity, Schutz’s work is penalized by being enlisted to support some forms of skeptical relativism that he surely viewed with distrust if not abhorrence.[4]

Values as Hartmann understood them may be best conceived to be axiotic laws, i.e., laws that include what he termed an ideal ought-to-be [Seinsollen]. They are, however, laws that can be yet need not be explicated by syntactically formed judgments that are both universal in form and true. Moreover, values are aprioristic rather than empirical laws; there are no possible circumstances under which an exceptions to an axiotic law might occur. In this sense, values are entirely independent of things or events in time. This also means that ideal laws are independent of whatever is mental, for whatever is mental is real and not ideal. Values are in no way subjective; Hartmann rejects every form of subjectivism whether psychological or transcendental or divine. Values are not contingent on any moral facts whether those be psychological, social, cultural, historical, or economic.[5] Values entail requirements regarding what ought to be. Any object, whether real or ideal, has value or is of value insofar as it satisfies such a requirement: insofar as a mango is nutritious it belongs to the class of goods; it bears and has a certain value; the mango exemplifies or instantiates whatever value it has. The relation of exemplification or instantiation is not a whole-part relation. The value that the mango instantiates and so entails[6]

(or 'has’) is an ideal entity and cannot become real; <329> all of the mango’s properties are themselves real entities. In this respect, the common way of talking about values as being actualized or realized through events or through actions is misleading, but it will be heard in what follows rather frequently all the same.

That values are to be satisfied by an entity only insofar as this entity ought to be distinguishes them as axiotic laws from laws that an entity must satisfy just to be at all: distinguishes values, that is, from ontic or ontological laws. These latter, laws of being, are universal in that nothing can occur that would be contrary to them. Exceptions are ontologically impossible. Insofar as an entity’s properties satisfy these laws they will be called ontic traits or properties to differentiate them from traits the thing has or might have insofar as it ought to be; insofar as an entity has traits that ought to be, it is good and ought to be. What is real can, however, be contrary to what axiotic laws require, can be contrary to value [wertwidrig]; what is contrary to value is an evil, an ill. Evils are not simply axiotically lawless; they are axiotically impossible, i.e., evil. Necessarily, they ought not to be. There are laws regarding what ought not to be as well as laws regarding what ought to be. The former are disvalues. The traits by virtue of which an entity is as it ought to be together with those through which it is not as it ought to be are the entity’s axiotic traits. The laws that the thing satisfies insofar as it is good or evil are axiotic laws, are values or disvalues respectively.

Real entities need not be as they ought to be. When something real is not as it ought to be or when a state of affairs that ought to be is not or when something that really is as it ought to be might cease to be, then the ideal-ought-to-be is also an actual- or exigent-ought-to-be [aktuales Seinsollen]. Whatever is good ought actually to be insofar as it requires or calls for purposive activity. That an ideal ought-to-be becomes exigent includes that this ideal has ceased to be just ideal, for its relation to the real world has become exigent; it has become a relation through which the ideal entity can indicate a threat to the real world, a threat that the Real not be as it ought to or that it become worse than it might or that it become worse than it is, etc. As exigent the ought-to-be is not just ideal; it can inspire interest in something that, however tremendously or however trivially, ought to be yet might not be. Note that the respect, the reverence that is inspired is for what is real; it is not, as it is in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, an affective attitude toward the axiotic law, not toward the idea of the good but toward what is of value. Where there occurs an awareness of something that actually ought to be, there is in the first instance a consciousness of a potential material end. The awareness of good and evil is primarily an emotional response; where the ought-to-be is actual or exi- <330> gent, the impressional consciousness of it is a positive emotional response to a potential state of axiotic affairs [Husserl: Wertverhalt]. Many such states of affairs occur unnoticed. Only an animal of a certain definite sort can be affected by an axiotic state of affairs of a given sort; she must fulfill a multitude of conditions: physiological, psychological, social, historical, economic, perhaps linguistic and educational.[7]

The person’s reaching ahead in projected time and being affected in this way is a constituent of the finalistic nexus whose other two constituents or strata are the discerning of potential intervening means and resolve to carry through the action. Purposive action necessarily involves these three aspects; Hartmann calls them strata to emphasize that they must not be taken as occurring sequentially. The finalistic nexus is a form that is necessarily embodied by any purposive action whatsoever, and purposes occur in the Real only as they are included in purposive actions. The potential state of affairs affecting a person’s emotions includes a claim that were the state of affairs not realized then the Real would (to that extent) not be as it ought to be. This claim is categorical, unconditional; every value requires absolutely that the Real conform to its requirements. The future as foreseen in the consciousness of internal time (in time-intuition, i.e., time as represented intuitively) is a field wherein the exigent-ought-to-be evokes concern for potential events whose actual occurrence is axiotically necessary yet, in the absence of intervention, either would be or might be ontically impossible. This state of affairs elicits interest in other potentialities whose occurrence would increase the likelihood that the evocative exigent-ought-to-be become real. The axiotic state of affairs that the potential end ought, in the exigent sense, to occur elicits an interest in potential means. The second stratum in the finalistic nexus is this quest pastward from the potential end to potential means. In this quest, the moral being draws upon what her given life-situation offers her in the way of means. Here there occurs, from the future, a 'teleological’ determination of events. This telic process must lead to an occurrence that the potential agent has some ground for believing would be within her power immediately. That is, it must do so if the exigent-ought-to-be is to determine something that she ought actually to do. Otherwise, she will not be a possible agent for the exigent potentiality.

If, on the other hand, the person is aware of measures which she might take to influence the chances for occurrence of what ought-to-be then these measures are for her things she actually ought to do. That is, they are things that she ought to do if she is to conform to the requirements of this ought-to-be. Resolution, resolving to put such a course of action into effect, is the third stratum of the finalistic nexus. Unlike the other two strata, the <331> action itself can occur only in real time or real space and as part of the real causal nexus. The other two strata do not and cannot occur in real time or in real space. Real spatial or temporal future events cannot be given to the agent’s consciousness. What can be an object of anticipating consciousness can be only future events as represented (presentiated), irreal objects. The consciousness of the actual-ought-to-be is real feeling, real emotional anticipation; it is therefore bound by laws of real time and space and of functional dependence on real spatio-temporal events. The agent’s resolve is also bound by them. In any normal case, the irreal event-types projected in time-intuition correspond more or less roughly to what transpires in the real action. However, these real events cannot occur in time-intuition and there can be no identity whatsoever between what is anticipated and what really transpires.

In time-intuition the agent never confronts a future such that there is only one anticipated course which events might take. Here contingency is included in the very meaning of events as anticipated. For Hartmann, what is anticipated is never a mere essential possibility neither is it a real possibility. Instead it is what Alfred Schutz termed a 'problematic possibility’ following the terminology of Edmund Husserl. Husserl considered this differentiation of what he also called attractive from essential or open possibilities important enough that he discusses it at length in each of his major publications starting with Logical Investigations.[8] Quite elaborate discussions of the same distinction occur in virtually all of Alfred Schutz's major publications. Husserl had differentiated between possibilities that are projected and possibilities that are anticipated with what he terms "simple certainty." Open possibilities are anticipated simply as things that will happen or else simply as things that will not happen: there is no question as to whether it will be so. There would be therefore no suggestion of intervention in such a case. As Schutz applied the concepts,

...the taken for granted can be defined [thus]: what is taken for granted is always that level of experience which presents itself as not in need of further interpretation. Whether a level of experience is taken for granted depends on the pragmatic interests of the ego whose reflective glance is directed toward it and so depends upon the particular here and now of the ego. The taken for granted may be positive, negative, or neutral in positionality...Nevertheless, a change of attention can always transform something taken for granted (an open possibility) into something problematical, something to be explicated. [PSW 74]

In Schtuz's terms, whenever there is some question as to whether what is anticipated will occur, the anticipated possibilities are called problematic. When anticipation is simply certain there would be for the ego no discrimination between what can be and what will be; there would be no question whether what is anticipated but has yet to occur will occur.[9] Problematic possibilities on the other hand are in question as to their future <332> factuality (though not as to their possibility).[10] When what is problematic is the object's being then the self's taking of position [Stellungnahme] is cognitive ("doxic") and uncertain. When the problematic consciousness is a striving then what is problematic is whether to strive for or not to strive for the actualization of a potentiality, whether it will or will not become a goal. In these terms, the consciousness of an exigent-ought-to-be would always be a consciousness of a positively valued problematic possibility.

Schutz and Hartmann seem quite in agreement that real events can be anticipated only as to type and so are ideal insofar as they are objects of anticipating consciousness. An action that is not being done is not experienced and does not exist. To anticipate doing something is not to experience doing it but is rather to anticipate an occurrence’s belonging to the class of happenings designated by the word 'action'. Still, even an event that does not yet exist must nevertheless have meaning for any person to whom it appeals. Hartmann and Schutz seem to differ emphatically and importantly about how this meaning is there for the person. For Hartmann emphasizes that the meaning of action for the agent arises only in and through "emotionally transcendent" experience that includes a "being seized" by the ideal state of affairs that entities of a certain kind ought to be. The extensive works of Alfred Schutz are virtually barren of reference to feeling and to emotion.[11]

As it is thus anticipated Schutz applies to this object the term 'act'. If and when the person is resolved or committed to carrying out the act, then the anticipated act has become action; it does exist in its initial phase and is already either turning out to be as anticipated or to be different from what was anticipated. What is common to the act as well as to the action itself can only be a set of types of which both are examples. Schutz and Hartmann agree that every action is a real occurrence and unique; only one action can be what I was doing on the way to this morning's meeting. No action may be a type although every action includes the intention to actualize or to realize a type. What Schutz calls the act is, however, identical with a certain type, viz., a course of action type.[12]

What Hartmann conceived to be the anticipated ought-to-be that solicits its actualization is called by Schutz the act's 'in-order-to-motive’. This motive is identical with the potentiality that initially elicits the interest of the potential agent and would be the agent's intended end. Since the in-order-to-motive is a type of future event, it may well be a type of motive such that both you and I can observe and can understand its way of operating. The act is in fact necessarily given to the potential or actual agent. Its being given is essential to its functioning as a motive. It is, however, not a sensuously given fact at all. If it is not just given to but observed by <333> the agent then the agent is introspecting. Observing the given potentiality will make objective for the agent the fact that the future act has been anticipated. The self-same course of action type and in-order-to motive can be given to and observed by anyone else who emphatically understands (apperceives) the action insofar as it has occurred. Indeed, Schutz maintained that others can observe and comprehend my actions in progress while I can observe them only retrospectively. However, the identity of the in-order-to motive as originally experienced by the agent with the in-order-to motive as understood by others can be only partial. Indeed, the identity can be only partial even in the case of the introspecting agent herself, for she will have grown older in the meantime so that the meaning of her prior action will have been modified.[13] A special effort of recollection would be needed if she were to try recalling the action's meaning just as it was lived through.

The in-order-to motive motivates both the second and third strata in purposive action as Hartmann conceived it: that is, it motivates both the agent's concern about ways in which the course of events may be influenced in favor of the anticipated and valued potentiality and the agent's resolution or commitment to realizing what becomes her goal through the commitment. This way of presenting the relation of any potential end to its potential agents is a point at which Hartmann disagrees, I hope, in very important ways with Schutz.

Schutz's presentations make it seem as if anything taken for granted by the agent can come to stand out as a problematic possibility that might be chosen as an end only on the condition that it conflicts with or interferes in some way with other possibilities that the self is interested in. Schutz seems to hold that anticipated possibilities become ends only insofar as they are relevant to interests or ends that the subject already has and so to what he calls the self's "plan of life." Anticipated events can stand out as potential ends only in relation to preexistent interests of the potential agent living in the world as taken for granted.

As a valued but problematic possibility, the in-order-to motive calls into question the relevance to that project of items in the agent's biographically determined situation. [Schutz, Collected Papers I, 78, 82] This transforms open possibilities that are implicit in the world as taken for granted yet would, so far as the agent is aware, be relevant to the realization or non-realization of the project into problematic possibilities that stand to choice.

The comparative weight of any such possibility: "...is positive or negative merely with reference to...[a system of projects of higher and lower orders within which]...all particular plans are subject to our plan for life as the most universal one which determines the subordinate ones even if the latter conflict with one another’ [Collected Papers I, 93 f.]. Besides this <334> system of priorities, Schutz mentions no other factor determining which open possibilities will be relevant to the person and able to become her goals.

The person's stock of knowledge at hand together with what is given to her in the present situation predelineates the range of open possibilities that will be anticipated. The system of priorities or of projects to which the person is already committed completely determines which possibilities within the range of open possibilities will become problematic for the agent. There are standards or priorities through which an open possibility comes to have weight for the person and so to attract the agent's attention. Through this attraction there arises an inclination for the agent toward adopting the now valued means for influencing the course of events in favor of the one possibility.

Something similar is happening at the same time, however with respect to other anticipated possibilities. Moreover, while acquiring this inclination, the agent has grown older, and the intervening experience gives new meaning to projects to which the agent was already committed: Shall I go on as planned or assimilate this new possibility into my plans? The formerly merely open possibility has become problematic. This does not mean either that it has become less possible or that it has become less probable. Indeed, the probability of an act of this type in the given situation goes unnoticed by the person so long as this act remains an open rather than a problematic possibility. Having become problematic, the act now stands to serious choice in a way in which merely fancied possibilities would not. It is an act of a type which will have taken place if a certain sort of result should occur, and it is a sort of act I shall have done in order to bring about that sort of result. It has now become a project even if not one which has already acquired the person's fiat.

The person is now favorably inclined toward the act. It is attractive, has a certain importance or weight to the agent, a value for the agent.

...The standards of weights, of good and evil, positive and negative are not created by the projecting itself, but the project is evaluated according to a pre-existent frame of reference. Any student of ethics is familiar with the age-old controversy on values and valuation here involved. For our problem, however, we need not embark upon discussing it. It is sufficient for us to point out that the problem of positive and negative weights transcends the actual situation of a concrete choice and decision and to give an indication of how this fact can be explained without having recourse to the metaphysical question of the existence and nature of absolute values. [Schutz, Collected Papers I 93]

For Schutz the anticipating and the interest taken are therefore determined only by facts about the self who anticipates so that interest is necessarily a function of prior interests, however vague these may be. This seems to mean that novel valuations can occur only as modifications of preexisting <335> "interests." Hartmann's position, on the other hand, allows that previously quite unfamiliar axiotic states of affairs can, however rarely, affect someone's interests so that genuinely novel ways of valuing can occur. He emphasizes that persons differ in the extent to which their sense of values is open to the disclosure of as yet unfamiliar axiotic requirements. Moreover, he holds that, other variables being comparable, those who are more open to unfamiliar values are for that reason of higher personal, historical, cultural value than those whose sense of values is less open. [PgS 167-169; Ethik 16-17 (E 45); 44-45 (E 82-86); Ethik 402-406 (E2 205-209)] The two do indeed seem to hold conflicting positions on this issue. There is no mention in Schutz’s works of anything like a sense of value except in reporting without approval on Scheler's conception of such a sense.

Moreover, Schutz very well may have misapplied Husserl's notion of "open possibility" when he identified what is "taken for granted" as a class of open possibilities. His notion that some acts are anticipated in a simply certain way seems contrafactual. There may be no agents at all who anticipate acts in this way unless there be at least one omniscient agent. Only an ego or self whose beliefs about the future have never been shown to be other than true would anticipate assertorically and with simple certainty. We fallible selves do no such thing. With this Hartmann would, I think, agree though he would also insist that the contingency that is entailed in our uncertainty is gnosiological rather than ontological. With this qualification, he could almost join Heidegger in thinking anxiety an inevitable feature of personal life: almost, but not quite for Hartmann holds that there are emotionally prospective acts that are quite gullible except in their certainty that something is coming. The "taken for granted" is an important category in the psychology that Schutz operated with and he was quite mistaken in defining what the phrase refers to as "...that level of experience which presents itself as not in need of further interpretation." It is surely true that interpretation of experience or of what is experienced always goes only so far and leaves a vast horizon of unexplicated meaning, but there is no such thing as a level of experience where coming events present themselves as needing no further explication.

The description of action and choice provided by Alfred Schutz does indeed provide a powerful set of concepts for understanding much of human action. Specifically, it provides insight into the way in which action occurs when it does not include current insight into good and bad, better and worse. The same concepts can give Hartmann's perspectivistic intuitionism excellent ways of understanding and describing how valuations and choice are conditioned by psychological, social, historical, and cultural differences. The operation of these determinants is not unimportant even <336> when foresight, predestination, and resolution do include genuine emotional givenness of axiotic traits and laws. Suitably corrected, Schutz’s way of describing the choice among projected actions goes far toward:

1. showing why our emotions are affected so rarely by novel ways of valuing,

2. showing why it is rarer still that a newly disclosed axiotic state of affairs is favored with the agent's commitment,

3. showing in great detail how volitional habits (and therefore social institutions) continue to be valued and practiced when they have ceased to be of significant value,

4. and toward showing how this continues to happen even when their consequences are mainly of disvalue and their moral value has gone quite seedy.

Notes

[1]Calling an entity ‘moral’ as the word is used here connotes neither <correct> approbation nor <correct> condemnation but does refer to a condition for the possibility of either. 'Moral’ here translates geistig and seems far preferable to the the quaint and antiquated 'spiritual.' See note 2.

[2]The phrase 'moral science’ is from John Stuart Mill’s justly famous chapter "The Logic of the Moral Sciences" in his System of Logic; it expresses a concept that is coordinate <337> with the German 'Geisteswissenschaften’, denoting the social sciences and the study, in contrast to the practice, of the arts, i.e., to the social sciences and the humanities.

[3]These biases drew and still draw philosophical support from Viennese and later forms of logical empiricism and analytic nominalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they are strengthened by various forms of pragmatism, lingualism, and neomarxism. Some sense of the strength and persistence of these dogmas that Schutz had to deal with is revealed by Marvin Farber‘s lead article for an anthology in Schutz‘ memory,

An essence should not be said to exist or to be real independently for it is a cognitive instrumentality...[essences belong] to the order of hypothetical knowledge...The choice of a value system will...depend upon its usefulness in enabling us to set up organized programs of conduct for the fulfilment of human interests..." ["Values and the Scope of Scientific Inquiry" in Phenomenology and Social Reality. Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz, ed. Maurice Alexander Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) p. 11].

How an essence‘s being a cognitive instrumentality makes its existence without being used impossible, Professor Farber does not explain.

[4]Professor Farber‘s essay (ibid. page 9) once more illustrates the point well:

...In the recent past, the soul, the mind, the will, and purpose were the objects of critical scrutiny. The denial of the existence of consciousness by William James was a kind of concluding phase of a long process of reduction and elimination of transnatural entities and structures...

So far as human values were concerned, nothing was lost by the elaborate process of so-called naturalistic 'reduction.’ Value, defined in terms of the fulfillment of human interests, is descriptively founded in the biological and cultural interests of individuals and groups of people...

[5]I shall try to use the word ‘value’ only with the meaning just outlined. If I succeed in this effort then my use will be more consistent than Hartmann's own, for he sometimes uses the word to refer to the 'bearers’ of value; I shall refer to these, as having value or as being of value.

[6]The verb ‘to entail’ is used with something akin to the meaning given it by Roderick Chisholm (Theory of Knowledge [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989] 19): the property of being F entails the property of being G if believing something to have F includes believing something to have G where one property includes another if the first is necessarily such that anything which has it also has the second property. The mango‘s having the properties that make it digestible and metabolizable includes the axiotic state of affairs that the mango ought to be. This axiotic state of affairs is real, and it belongs to this piece of fruit and to nothing else; that it ought to be is a real fact about the mango. This real trait entails a set of ideal values that the mango exemplifies and entails through the real axiotic trait. The nature of this real axiotic trait is an issue. My own proposal is that it is a formal rather than a material trait; the values that the mango entails through its axiotic trait are formal rather than material universals. <SUBSEQUENT NOTE: Its being formal rather than material (generic or specific) would have the important consequence that ‘good’ is not the name for any genus and that there need be no single kind of trait that all goods exemplify, no one way in which they are all alike. That would seem to put an end to axiotic monism.>

[7]This assertion is made following what I assume would have been Hartmann‘s line of thought. The judgment it expresses should be understood to be empirical and problematic albeit highly probable.

[8]For an extended discussion of the importance of these concepts see R. Jordan's "The Part Played by Value in the Modification of Open into Attractive Possibilities" in Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, ed. J.G. Hart and L. Embree (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) Chapter 5, pp. 81-94.

<338> [9]Of open possibilities Schutz writes,

The world as taken for granted is the general frame of open possibilities, none of them having its specific weight, none of them as long as believed beyond question, contesting the others. All are believed to be of empirical or presumptive certainty until further notice, that is, until counterproof. [Collected Papers I 82]

[10]Husserl prefers the adjective “attractive” for possibilities of this sort, occasionally speaking of “problematic” possibilities as if they were a species of attractive possibilities. [Hua. 11, 43:10-17]

[11]This is the more remarkable since his 1957-1958 essay "Max Scheler’s Epistemology and Ethics" (in the Review of Metaphysics 11, also in Schutz, Collected Papers 3 143-178) was among the earliest reliable presentations of Scheler’s Formalism... available to North American intellectuals who could not read Scheler’s own writings, the vast majority since an English translation of Formalism... did not appear until 1973. Schutz’s concluding paragraph, however, stresses that Scheler’s religious crisis affected his ethical and his gnosiological positions, transforming the perspectival intuitionism that he shared with Hartmann "...into a new and highly original approach to a sociology of knowledge" [Schutz, Collected Papers 3 178].

[12]Thus, there may be partial coincidence between your and my in-order-to-motive and partial coincidence between your and my act. Even though we cannot be engaged in the self-same action, your action may entail an act and an in-order-to motive that coincide at least partially with my own.

[13]The principal goal of the moral sciences is, on Schutz's view, comprehension of the motives for the actions through which artifacts (in the broadest sense of that term) were generated. The above account indicates how such efforts might well succeed. Still, Schutz emphasizes that there is no guarantee for their success. In this Schutz disagrees strongly with those (Weber, Gadamer, Collingwood) who, like himself, hold that comprehension is the goal for these sciences yet either insist or assume that the investigator can, if she has the right touch or tact or method truly know the crucial identity of the action's "subjective meaning" with the meaning alleged by the investigator. Perfect identity of the meaning of the act as lived by the agent with the hermeneutically construed meaning is possible but not to be descried.