Repository | Book | Chapter

After a brief assessment of the programmatic application of phenomenology to value-theory (axiology) undertaken by Scheler in Formalism in Ethics, the salient characteristics of values themselves, their givenness, their nature and their functions are considered. We are subliminally aware of values in everyday mental acts of feeling and preference, and they precipitate in language as value-predicates, obligations, moral rules, and as norms of virtue. Their phenomenal content may be given specificity by eidetic experience. When considered as the objects of eidetic acts of feeling that is, ontologically, values are like Platonic forms (Hartmann), but they have no force over nature. They are realized either unintentionally by nature, or intentionally by human activity. They are a priori, that is, given before all human efforts to realize them. The emotional acts in which these eidetic experiences take place are stratified; some feelings are "deeper" than others are. Corresponding to these levels of the emotional life is the vertical step-like structure of the values themselves according to their relative worth. The contributions of D. von Hildebrand and E. Husserl to the phenomenology of value are discussed; specifically, the phenomenology of Husserl's attempt at a formal language of morals is evaluated in its significance for material value-ethics. A central question of material value-ethics is whether this realm of values is a unified structure, or whether there are ineluctable antimonies among them.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_2

Full citation: