Realms of Value by Ralph Barton Perry. Harvard. $7.50
The realm of value—or as Professor Perry pluralistically and more wisely says, “realms” of value—is one of the most important and most baffling of the provinces of philosophy. Its importance as a primary point of contact between thought and actual living is seldom given proper emphasis in either professional or lay thinking. The reasons are many, among them our chronic inclination to take values for granted. But on the professional philosopher rests also an ample share of blame. Not only have the older philosophies turned their backs on the vital link between values and life, pursuing their abstractions into transcendental absolutes of idealistic metaphysics, but many, if not most, of more recent philosophies—realism and positivism—have likewise gone astray by pressing their value analyses into a disembodied stratosphere of transcendental mathematics. It is both a notable and welcome exception to encounter an analysis of value that, without loss of scholarly depth examines values in the vital context of their actual functioning, and as in the case of Realms of Value, yields cumulative insight into the role of values in motivating and sustaining our behavior and in providing sanction—rational and rationalized—for our civilization.
Professor Perry’s book is a leisurely revision of his “Gifford Lectures” of 1946–47 and 1947–48, and it marks the climax of a lifelong specialization that began with The Moral Economy and includes the definitive The General Theory of Value. Like William James, Professor Perry gives full weight to the practical and creative controls of ideas and ideals. In this Jamesian approach, which he has not only maintained but matured, Professor Perry has a viewpoint ideally suited to the task of analyzing the basic values of Western civilization. This huge task, it can be reported, has been accomplished in urbane and integrated fashion, with a singular absence of dogmatism. By carefully maintaining the historical approach, he has obviated all need for the specious generalizations and overall rationale that cripple so many other systematic studies of values. A consistent realism has also aided materially, and the prudent pluralism already mentioned has safeguarded against such likely pitfalls as the illusion of automatic progress or involvement in the blind provincialisms of our own culture. As an end result, we are the richer for an enlightening review, easily comprehensible by the layman, of the way in which civilized man has worked out effective and progressively inclusive integrations of his human interests and their supporting values. This review is a notable achievement.
Although Realms of Value offers no solutions and no formulae of progress, it is far from being a colorless and noncommittal study. Here and there are quiet, firm hints of constructive insights and saner goals. No careful reader will come away with his provincialisms or partisanships untempered, nor is he likely to persist in the conviction that values are absolute, sacrosanct and automatically universal. He may have shed any previous notions that values are best professed or understood in their original perspectives, or most sanely practiced in their traditional loyalties and sanctions. In the light of what the history of value development and conflict alike indicate, he will be more prone to consider humanity’s best hope to be the discovery and implementation, through reason and experience, of more and more generic underlying values toward which future co-loyalties and collaboration can be directed.