The Fact-Value Question
In Early Modern Value Theory[1]
- Prescott Johnson
Modern value inquiry took its rise in Germany and Austria during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the present century. The discussions in which the inquiry engaged centered around the antithesis of fact and value. Accordingly, my purpose here is to elicit the structure of that discussion so as to indicate the directions which the discussion took.
In the tradition, the value question stood before the forum of metaphysics, and this because the principle of end, or telos, was espoused as the principle of explanation. With the advent of the genetic principle, according to which things are understood in causal terms, the value question was brought to the forum of empirical science. To be sure, this change took considerable time. The genetic principle was first applied to the physical world, with the result that value was extruded from nature. The world of Newtonian physics tended to become a value-free world void of ends and purposes. While Kant accepted Newtonian physics and provided a justification for it, nevertheless the larger burden of his thought was the retention of values in the world. In all of his works, even in the First Critique, there are considerations of value which are directed to this end. The only observation that I have time to make here is this: that Kant was able, in his terms, to retain value within and alongside the world of nature because he refused to apply the genetic principle to man himself. On the contrary, mind is a value-laden being, possessed of a dignity and excellence untouched by the genetic principle. Man is thus the fulcrum which secures value in what otherwise must be a value-free world. It remained for Darwin to extend the genetic principle from physical nature to life, thereby opening its further application to mind and its conventions. Under the aegis of this way of thinking, the first and foremost condition of the origin and development of values lies in human desires and feelings, and ultimately in the impulses, interests, and tendencies which they presuppose. And the value ideas and judgments merely describe the conditions of their emergence and development in consciousness and function as instruments in the service of natural life and existence. They do not sustain any objective import bearing upon a metaphysical order of value and man’s relation to that order. All this, for example, Nietzsche saw, and saw consistently.
Value theory emerged as a philosophical discipline out of the tensions created by the application of the new genetic logic to man. The early value theorists believed that values were indeed bound up with organic and psychical phenomena, yet they tried to find a place for value and the validity of value as independent of its conditions in experience. It is this two-fold thrust in their thinking about value which I wish to present here.
Hermann Lotze introduced a line of thought which was destined to be of considerable significance. For our purposes here it is sufficient to observe that Lotze assigned to perception the task of intuiting the immediately given facts of reality, and to reason the task of formulating the necessary truths expressed in the science of logic. Now reason and its necessary formulations cannot be explained in terms of any facts, including those facts of empirical consciousness which admit of a mechanical explanation. The necessary truths of reason are completely independent of existence, cannot be explained or justified by an appeal to existence or causally ordered processes of existence. Here any genetic or causal consideration is wholly irrelevant.[2] What, then, is the status of these truths? They possess a peculiar status of their own, that of “validity” (Geltung). What is validity? Validity is a unique form of reality which is absolutely independent of being or existence, and accordingly cannot be understood in any terms of fact. In more modern language, the realm of validity is the realm of autonomous value. Thus Lotze says:
. . . We must not ask what is meant by validity, with any idea that the meaning which the word conveys to us can be described from some different conception; . . . . the conception has to be regarded as ultimate and underivable, a conception of which everyone may know what he means by it, but which cannot be constructed out of any constituent elements which do not already contain it. . . . This conception of validity (is) a form of reality not including being or existence . . . .[3]
Although he insisted that validity is independent of fact, at least as viewed from outside from the perspective of science, Lotze could not bring himself to give it a wholly free-floating status. Thus he constructed a metaphysical synthesis which finally anchors value, as well as finite fact, in a spiritual reality. But since that synthesis raises precisely those difficulties which occasioned the dominance of the scientific understanding of the world, the details of the synthesis are not germane at this point.[4]
In the attempt to acknowledge simultaneously the claims of fact and value, the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism placed increasing emphasis upon the notion of validity. In many respects the founder of the school, Wilhelm Windelband, was close to Lotze. Windelband ties values, including the cognitive values, to the psychological conditions of experience. He says of value that it
. . . is never found in the object itself as a property. It consists in a relation to an appreciating mind, which satisfies the desires of its will or reacts in feelings of pleasure upon the stimulation of the environment. Take away all will and feeling and there is no such thing as value.[5]
When faced, however, with the question of the evaluation of values, Windelband requires a standard which transcends individual appreciations. This standard according to which some of our values are over-individual and absolute cannot be, obviously, a product of individual minds, yet it cannot, on the hypothesis that values are products of mind, be wholly unrelated to mind. Thus, Windelband requires the postulation of an absolute mind to effect this synthesis. For example, he says that truth, or the truth-claim, is entirely an affair of the formative act of judgment. Yet truth is validity, that which ought to be affirmed, and constitutes a norm for judgment.[6] Thus it is required that the validity which is immanent in judgment and yet transcendent to individual judgments be a function of the divine mind. In sum Windelband remarks:
. . . our conviction that for human valuation there are absolute norms, beyond the empirical occasion of their appearance, is based upon the assumption that here also we have the sovereignty of a transcendent rational order. As long as we would conceive their orders as contents of an actual higher mind, on the analogy of the relation we experience of consciousness to its objects and values, they have to be considered contents of an absolute reason‑-that is to say, God.[7]
The resort to analogy for the purpose of aligning the descriptive and normative problems of value appeared questionable to Windelband’s successor in the Baden School, Heinrich Rickert. Rickert very well insists that, however it be related to psychological phenomena, value cannot be restricted to these phenomena. On the other hand, it cannot be grounded in a spiritual metaphysics. Instead, value sustains a unique status of its own. Just what this status is can be brought to view by a brief consideration of Rickert’s analysis of the structure of cognition.
He observes that the cognitive judgment, which is a psychological act, involves more than just that act. The judgment asserts a content and in so doing makes a claim to truth. Now, this content, which cannot be reduced to act, is not merely an immanent content within consciousness. Perhaps we might say, in more contemporary language, that it is not merely a phenomenological object bound to the intentionality of some consciousness. It is something transcendent. As transcendent to both act and immanent content, it is not, however, a real existent. This is evident, Rickert says, when we realize that a judgment of existence, that something exists or exists as such and such, sustains a meaning content which does not have the existential status that characterizes the referent of the judgment. For the same kind of reason, the content does not have ideal existence, the existence which the referent of a judgment of an ideal object, say a mathematical object, possesses.[8]
However, Rickert argues, the transcendence of meaning over empirical reality neither requires nor warrants a metaphysical synthesis, such as those resorted to by Lotze and Windelband. On the contrary, the content of the judgment is objective and transcendent purely as a value, or validity. To be sure, when the cognitive judgment is considered subjectively as act, it is seen to involve valuation or appreciation, the acceptance of meaning and truth as value. That is, theoretical knowledge presupposes a priori that we place value upon knowledge, that we esteem knowledge as a value. But, he continues, this appreciation in no sense constitutes the value. When the judgment is viewed objectively, it is seen to sustain a meaningful and true content, which is a value in this sense, that meaning and truth are validities which ought to be affirmed. Such imperative values which devolve upon us in our judgments and appreciations are not our own creations. Nor are the values existing things, because existing things are, for us, the referents which cognition brings to view and are as dependent upon and subsequent to value as is cognition. The objectivity and transcendence of value is precisely its validity.[9]
After Rickert proposes the concept of negation as the criterion by which value as autonomous validity is distinguished from being, thereby showing that meaning is such a value, he sums up his position:
For that value is valid without any consideration of existence
. . . is precisely what we understand by its transcendence. the science of theoretical values is concerned with that which is conceptually prior to all sciences of reality, with that which is prior to their material which is assumed to be “real” or “actual.” . . . As understood in this way, the much debated concept of the a priori . . . is a form of meaning, a theoretical value, which is transcendentally valid. Apart from such validity, there would not only be no experience, but no “perception,” or any other “a posteriori” knowledge.[10]
The last school of thought which I shall mention in this discussion is the Second Austrian School of value, which included Franz Brentano, Christian Ehrenfels, and Alexius Meinong. These men had breathed deeply of the scientific atmosphere of their day and, rejecting any purely speculative or metaphysical resolution of the value question, demanded that the question be brought to the forum of empirical science, in particular the science of psychology. Yet, with the possible exception of Ehrenfels, after their elaborate psychological analyses, the ended up by projecting value beyond natural fact. I propose to treat the Austrian school very briefly, merely to indicate this line of their thought.
Brentano develops implicitly a theory of value on the basis of his “new empiricism,” which in turn rests upon an act psychology. He argues that the emotions of love and hate, one class of psychological phenomena, have their intentional objects. In distinction to its being a property of objects, value is a product of these phenomena. Value is founded in the attitude of the subject which qualifies the presentational content as pleasant. Value is therefore amenable to psychological analysis.[11]
However, if value is a product of emotional acts, it becomes subjective as relative to those acts. Brentano attempted to avoid this “psychologism of values” by arguing that certain emotional phenomena are so characterized as to confer a measure of validity and objectivity upon the values which they sustain. Analogously to self-evidence which evinces the truth of certain judgments, such as the principle of contradiction, there are certain emotions which evince a rightness with a comparable self-evidence, for example, the pleasure which men take in knowledge. From this basis, Brentano defines value in normative terms: “That which can be loved with a right love, that which is worthy of love, is good.”[12]
Thus Brentano’s implicit claim is that value is founded in an emotion which possesses an objectively valid character. But he did not, perhaps, show clearly or adequately either the foundations of implications of the fact that such psychological phenomena possess the character of rightness. Certainly his extension of the criterion of self-evidence beyond the sphere of the analytic tends to vitiate his argument. Hence, he was not too successful in his effort to combine the descriptive and normative in a unified concept of value.
Ehrenfels was almost exclusively preoccupied with the descriptive side of the value question, while Meinong went on to address the normative side as well. Ehrenfels defined value in terms of desire. “We do not,” he said, “desire things because we perceive a mystical, intangible essence called ‘worth’ in them, but on the contrary, we ascribe ‘worth’ to them because we desire them.”[13] As the object of desire, value is personal and relative. And since, for Ehrenfels, judgment is not an internally constitutive factor in the formation of desire, but performs only a collateral function as the enhancer of the idea of the object of desire in consciousness, value is deprived, ultimately, of any objectivity which the intellectual judgment might bring to it. On the other hand, some measure of uniformity is brought to desires and valuations, hence values, as a result of pre-established behavior patterns‑-“feeling-dispositions,” as Ehrenfels calls them‑-and, finally, the unconscious mechanisms of evolution. This, however, is quite consistent with his thesis that value is a function of desire. For him, value always consists in the fact of desire; in nowise is it, or does it issue in, and extra-factual or extra-psychological element.[14]
Meinong begins his value analysis by bringing value to the forum of psychology. Here he differs from Ehrenfels in two significant respects: 1) he interprets value in terms of feeling rather than desire, and 2) he makes the judgment an integral part of the value feeling, rather than a collateral accompaniment of it. Thus, he says that “. . . with respect to value it is sufficient to designate value experience as essentially emotional in nature.”[15] Again, he remarks: “. . . the value-object does not cause the value-feeling. The cause of the value-feeling is a judgment of the existence of the value-object. The judgment provides the connection between the value-feeling and the value-object.”[16] Meinong’s basic point is that a judgment, or at best an assumption, of the existence of an object is necessary to occasion the sort of feeling‑-an “existence-feeling” or “judgment-feeling”‑-which, in distinction to a merely hedonic feeling, constitutes the value emotion and thereby qualifies the object as valuable, i.e., institutes the value. Although value is personal and relative, the fact, however, that a reference to existence via judgment or assumption is an integral part of the value emotion brings, in principle, an element of objectivity to value meaning.
There is yet a further and very important respect in which Meinong secured an element of objectivity in value so as to complement the subjective element. He does this in connection with his theory of objectives. According to Meinong, the objects which we may experience fall into two great classes, which may be designated as objecta and objectives. In distinction, however, to both objecta and objectives, the content, e.g., of an idea, is grasped in the wholly passive and non-intentional experience of presentation. The reference of the content to an objectum, so that the presence of an object is acknowledged or the nature of an object is recognized, is accomplished by the active and intentional experience of assumption or judgment. However, while the judgment, for example, is about an object of the properties of an object, the judgment grasps directly and primarily, not the object of its properties, but a certain “that” which is judged to hold for the object. In the judgment that there is snow, or that snow is white, what is given is neither the object nor the property white, but the complex circumstance that, or that it is the case that, snow exists or is white. The class of those entities, of which some are and others are not the case, is given the name of objectives. And the mode of being which is peculiar to objectives is that of subsistence rather than existence. Objectives which are true, as 2 + 2 + 4, have factuality over and above their mere being. And the factuality of an objective is a genuine property of the objective, in a way in which existence is never a property of an objectum, and it is given to us by a peculiar, luminous quality of experience known as “evidence.”[17]
We have seen that for Meinong value meaning involves the assumption or judgment of existence. And both assumption and judgment signify objectives, which, even when they concern existence, are ideal and possess property of factuality‑-a property disclosed in the experience of evidence. Accordingly, value meaning, which is an emotion to which assumption and judgment are integral, is ultimately ruled by purely ideal entities, objectives, whose factuality is certified in the experience of evidence. The point I am making is this: Meinong insisted that value be given a psychological interpretation in terms of feeling. But when he requires an element of assumption or judgment to be integral to the value emotion and insists that this element involves objectives whose factuality is given in the experience of evidence, he has introduced considerations which transcend a strictly descriptive, naturalistic account of value. Implicated in the value situation are not only states of feeling and assumptions or judgments of existence, but, finally and definitively, ideal entities, objectives, and the inner experience of evidence in which the factuality of objectives is disclosed.
So far forth Meinong has argued that the content of ideas presents objecta and that the content of judgments and judgment-like assumptions presents objectives. In line with this direction of thought, he was led to the view that the emotions, feeling and desire, involve contents which present objects of a higher order than either objecta or objectives. there are emotional experiences of feeling and desire in which certain properties of objects come before us without appearing to have anything to do with ourselves and with our attitudes and experiences. These are the dignitatives, presented by feeling, and the desideratives, presented by desire. Thus, for example, the value feelings, the earlier analysis of which had implicated the psychology of feeling and the epistemology of judgment, now present the good, or value, as an ideal object which is independent of the conditions of experience. It should be observed here, however, that while value is emotionally presented as a dignitative having phenomenologically objective status, the question as to whether the value qualifies objecta and objectives, i.e., has being, is a question of fact and involves a new objective whose factuality is evident in the same manner which holds for any objective. In sum, then, Meinong’s early theory which finds value to consist in feeling as internally qualified by assumption or judgment, and therefore amenable to psychological analysis, has changed to an impersonal and objective theory, according to which value, although cognitively occasioned by emotion, is an ideal entity enjoying a unique status beyond experience and existence, but capable of a real and normative implication in reality.[18]
In this discussion I have shown how, with the increasing disaffection with metaphysics, the value question was brought to the forum of scientific description. At this forum value became a natural fact of psychological experience. I have further shown that, nonetheless, there was instituted a powerful counter-movement in the attempt to sustain the validity and normative objectivity of value over the facts of existence, including those of psychological experience. Value then became an autonomous validity or ideal entity whose unique status is that of independence of, or transcendence over, being. From this opposition of the descriptive and normative ways in value philosophy, there has come the hiatus which has brought such disarray in modern value theory. On one side of this hiatus stands the various forms of naturalism, while on the other side stand the various forms or non-naturalism. Deeper, perhaps, and underlying this schism is the horror metaphysicus, the repudiation of that vision in which reality and value are fused in metaphysical synthesis, and apart from which, in some form, we may not expect to bring order and meaning to our value thinking.
- Prescott Johnson
Monmouth College
[1]Presented at The Conference on Value Inquiry at The University of Akron, April 14-15, 1967.
[2]Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus, translated by Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones, 4th edition (Edinburgh: T & T Clarke, 1885), II, 575ff.
[3]Hermann Lotze, Logic, translated by Bernard Bosanquet, 2nd edition (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1887), II, 209-11.
[4]Lotze, Microcosmus, II, Bk. ix.
[5]Wilhelm Windelband, An Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Joseph McCabe (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1921), p. 215.
[8]Heinrich Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkentniss, 4th and 5th editions (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1921, pp. 221-8.
[11]Franz Brentano, The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, translated by Cecil Hague (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., 1902), pp. 13-15.
[13]Christian Ehrenfels, System der Werttheorie (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1897), I, 43.
[14]Ibid., 116-31, 146-65, 195-107.
[15]Alexius Meinong, Zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Werttheorie (Graz: Leuschner and Lubensky, 1923), p. 35.
[16]Alexius Meinong, Psychologische-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie (Graz: Leuschner and Lubensky, 1894), p. 21. See also pp. 14-35.
[17]Alexius Meinong, Ueber Annahmen, 2nd edition (Leipzig: Barth, 1910), pp. 59-73, 88, 285-6.
[18]Alexius Meinong, Ueber emotionale Präsentation (1917), pp. 32-42, 113, 120-2, in J. N. Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Values (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1963), chap. x.