(a) RELATION OF VALUES TO REALITY
EVERY kind of ideal Being has some sort of connection with the real, whether this consists of agreement or disagreement. In connection with our problems, the logical ideal structures, including the mathematical and all discernible essences, have their significance in this—that they are at the same time to a great extent structures of real Being. Upon their agreement with the real rests the ontological importance of logic, mathematics and the theoretical analysis of essence. The limit beyond which this agreement does not exist does not detract from its importance. Real Being has still other structures and other substrata. They do not concern the world of ideal Being, as such, which on its side also possesses structures which do not appear in the real and which to it are as indifferent as it is to the ideal. In short, the ranges of the ideal and real structures interpenetrate, while they are in part coincident and in part mutually exclusive, and every connection between the two realms of Being applies only to the sphere of coincidence. It consists simply in the agreement, in identity of structure—a fact which from of old has given occasion for far-reaching conclusions. The non-coincident parts of the two spheres stand there unrelated, they have nothing in common—a fact which has the same right to respect in the metaphysics of Being, although it is not conspicuous and has been hitherto almost entirely overlooked, as in that of knowledge.
In the ethical domain this relation becomes transposed. Here also there is a certain agreement of the ideal and real, just as there are limits to the agreement. But the limits of agreement are here not the limits of connection. The connection subsists in full actuality above and beyond them. Ethical ideal self-existence is not indifferent to the ethical reality which contradicts it; it fixes the contradiction as a relation of opposition and strain, and denies the real which contradicts it, however well-founded this may be ontologically; it stamps it as contrary to value and sets against it the Idea of its own proper structure. The moral consciousness feels this opposition in the form of an “Ought-to-Be.”
The self-existence of values subsists independently of their own actualization. But this independence does not signify indifference to actuality and non-actuality. We feel this immediately when we mistake the one territory for the other, taking the values of things as indifferent to attitudes of minds, the values of dispositions as indifferent towards things: but the values of things are not indifferent to things, nor are the values of dispositions to dispositions. Within the sphere of the forms to which as vehicles they are connected, values are not indifferent or inert towards what is in antagonism to them; rather do they have a quite peculiar way of denying them. This denial has nothing to do with theoretical negation. It does not at all question the reality of the thing denied; it is more a refusal to recognize it despite its reality, it is in tendency a nullification. Likewise in the affirmation of values that are unreal there is a tendency, a producing, an impulsion towards actualization. As merely ideal forms, values of course have no power to cause this impulsion and that nullification to prevail. But the actuality of the relationship quite evidently exists even beyond the limit of agreement. Indeed, the relation gains its full actuality in and through the realm of disagreement: here only exists a relation of tension and tendency. And it is easy to foresee that, where a real power is seized by it and is committed to the ideal tendency, this relation forthwith must be transformed into a real relation, and the ideal tendency into an actual one—that is, in the moulding of the actual.
(b) VALUES AS PRINCIPLES OF THE IDEAL ETHICAL SPHERE
Ideal self-existence, as such, is not a Being of principles. Every ideal sphere has much rather its own special principles, its own highest laws, axioms or categories. For example, logical and mathematical Being. But in the same way real self-existence has its own special principles. Existential categories of the real are themselves real categories. Their mode of Being is nothing else than this, that they are determining forms, laws or “categories of the real.” In the same way knowledge, as a special sphere of the relation of the real to a subject of possible objects, has its special principles, which, as those of knowledge, are not the same as the real or the ideal principles of Being.
This of course does not mean that these three realms of principles would lack agreement. On the contrary, it is evident that there can be a priori knowledge of the real—that is, of its principles—as there can be of the ideal, but only in so far as the two-sided categories of Being coincide in content with those of knowledge. In so far as ideal and real Being are rational, this identity must subsist.
This doctrine of identity—the fundamental thesis of theoretical philosophy—is naturally a restricted one; and indeed, as the question concerns the interpenetration of three spheres, their restriction is also different in a threefold way. The common territory of the ideal and real categories does not coincide with that of the real and cognitive categories; and the territory common to the real and cognitive again does not coincide with that of the cognitive and ideal categories. Ideal and cognitive categories, for example, coincide to a much wider extent than do the latter with those of the real. In agreement with this is the more restricted irrationality of ideal Being, and the more extensive of the real. It is natural to think that in the department of theory the centre of gravity of the entire relationship of principles rests in the real. For here we have that excess of categorial definiteness which in relation to knowledge gives overwhelming excess of weight to the object. The knowing subject only represents, and that only approximately. But the object remains entirely unmodified by the subject.
In the ethical domain the situation is different. Values are also principles. Even in them we could recognize the character of “conditions of possibility,” namely, those of the ethical phenomenon. Accordingly, we might expect that they are immediately ethical principles of reality, or at least of acts, for the phenomena belong to ethical reality and actuality.
This, however, is contradicted by the fact that these phenomena by no means thoroughly meet the demand of the values, that they challenge it on one side just as much as they satisfy it on the other. The material content of values in every connection detaches itself from the real as something beyond, something purely ideal. Its fulfilment in the real is at the same time something merely accidental, in any case not something necessitated by the content as a principle. To this is to be added the fact that valuational discernment always and under all circumstances regards the content as something independent of reality and of actualization. This independence is just as essential a constituent of its absoluteness as is its independence of the subject and of his opinion. Values are primarily and throughout ideal self-existents; and in so far as they are principles, they are from beginning to end only principles of the ethical ideal sphere.
This is by no means a tautology. Ideal Being and the Being of principles even here are not the same. The sphere of values is not exhausted by its own independent values proper. It embraces derivative values, and these likewise are purely ideal essences and subsist independently of reality and non-reality (for example, the whole sphere of mediating values, of the useful, the dependence of which upon the proper values themselves is an ideal relation of essences). But they are not principles. Genuine, proper values, however, are principles of the ethical ideal sphere.
(c) VALUES AS PRINCIPLES OF THE ACTUAL ETHICAL SPHERE
Now, if the character of values as principles were exhausted in the circumstance that they are principles of the ethical ideal sphere, all properly practical, actual significance would be stripped from them—that is, they would not be ethical principles at all. The ethos of man has actional character; it is no ideal form, not an essence. The essence of values, therefore, cannot evaporate in essentiality. It belongs to their essence as principles of the ethos that they transcend the sphere of essentialities and of ideal self-existence and seize hold on the fluctuating world of moral acts. They must be principles of the actual ethical sphere also.
How this transcendence proceeds is a metaphysical question, which at this point we can ignore. The fact is that it does proceed. There is a valuational consciousness—the primary discernment—and this is determinant for every moral judgment, every accountability, for the sense of responsibility and for the consciousness of guilt. The phenomenon of conscience is clear evidence for the actuality of values. Still clearer is it for the transcendent acts proper, the qualities of which are the object of valuational judgment for disposition, will and deed. Purpose, resolution, end, are necessarily determined by value. Indeed commonly there are other values which determine the end—the values of goods and circumstances; but these are not less actual, and they are not matters of indifference for the moral quality of transcendent acts, in which they are involved.
The whole sphere of ethical acts is penetrated by valuational points of view. The determination issuing from the values as principles is their presupposition throughout. Yet of the relation of transcendent acts to the moral values proper it holds good only conditionally, since disposition and will can resist values. But for the appraisement of values and for the acts related to it they are the condition of possibility. In this way, therefore, values are as a fact at the same time principles of the actual ethical sphere. And herein consists their specific actuality.
But of course this is true of them in a sense very different from that which holds in the ideal sphere. In the latter, values are inviolable, supreme determinants, decisive powers, to which there is no resistance, and to which everything is subject, as in the theoretical spheres everything is subject to the categories. Without exaggeration one might say: values are categories of the ideal ethical sphere. But one cannot say: they are categories of the actual ethical sphere. Here their role is of another kind, and thereby their difference from the categories appears. Here they are no longer inviolable determinants nor absolutely ruling powers. Here not everything is subordinate to them; the acts of the subject do not accommodate themselves to them unresistingly; they have their own actional laws, determinants of another kind. Desire shows a certain natural regularity in its connection with goods—at least in so far as a sense of their value is present. The higher forms of desire, however, manifest a much greater freedom towards the higher values, although these are distinctly felt or are known even in their detail. The will can counteract the consciousness of value. The same holds good of inner conduct, of the disposition.
One might think that at least the valuational judgment (including the phenomena of conscience) would be ruled unconditionally by values. But this is so only within the limits of the momentary consciousness. It, however, is restricted by its narrowness of vision; it marks out only a fragment from the realm of values. And only the values which fall within this section are momentarily “actual”—that is, are determinant for the judgment, “speak” in conscience and decide the inner attitude of the man to life.
Ethical values are therefore only conditionally, and not once for all, principles of the moral consciousness and its acts. And the additional conditions which convert them into principles do not lie in the realm of values, not even in the ideal sphere, but in the different law of the moral consciousness. This law is the function of a choice of values. It constitutes the basic difference between values and categories.
In one way, values are weaker in influence than categories. They do not rule unconditionally; without help they do not shape to their form the phenomena for which they hold good; of themselves they have not the strength to execute themselves in the actual sphere; they are thrown back upon an outside power which enters in. But this power is not always there; and, when it is there, it belongs to the actional realm.
In another way, they are stronger than categories. Categories rule the existent without check. The phenomena which are under them possess no laws of their own besides them. They are the only ruling powers in their own realm. Values, on the other hand, so far as they are at all actualized, must be carried out against a stable structure already present; they find in it an obstacle, passive indeed and inert, but nevertheless rigid and immovable. And, in so far as they succeed, they build upon the categorial stabilities of acts anew and higher formation which rises in the same way over these as over a material object. In another and more special sense they are creative principles. They can transform Not-Being into Being. The generatio ex nihilo, which is otherwise an impossibility in all realms of Being, here is possible.
All moral values have a tendency towards creative achievement. It inheres in the essence of them all, to be principles of the ethical sphere of action. That they are not always so is not their fault—or only negatively, in so far as categorial determinative power is lacking in them—but is due to the actional sphere itself. This basic relation between valuational principles and moral consciousness constitutes the special essence of the ethical phenomenon. If the acts of the subject were under the control of values as under categories, the law of which must be blindly followed, their essence would not be fundamentally different from that of a natural process; the values themselves would be throughout existential categories, simply, as it were, of a higher order, a rectilineal continuation of the ontological domain of the categories. That would involve the suspension of the ethical phenomenon as an actual sphere of a peculiar, non-ontological kind. We then could not say that values belong primarily to the ideal sphere; they would then be actualized just as primarily in the real acts of the moral subject. Will and disposition would then throughout render account to all values, and such a thing as being bad or being good would be excluded. And the opposition, the tension, between the real conduct of a person and the Idea of right conduct, in which lies its peculiar reality, would be annulled.
(d) VALUES AS PRINCIPLES OF THE REAL ETHICAL SPHERE
The possibility of conduct contrary to values gives to them, as principles of action, their specific quality of actuality. That quality becomes manifest in the fact that even in the case of disagreement the connection is not broken (as with the categories), but continues in full force and is even solidified in a tension sui generis. In metaphysical language, it is the tension between two different sorts of principle, it is the coexistence of ontological and axiological determinism in one world. This one world, the theatre of tension, strife and ever-new solutions, is pre-eminently the actional sphere of the moral consciousness; but subordinately it is the world of reality in general. For to this latter belongs the moral consciousness, which is drawn into the real world as a member of it and there expresses itself in transcendent acts.
Here we touch upon the third, and metaphysically decisive, characteristic of values as principles. They are also principles of the actual, of the real ethical sphere. Indirectly, through the actional sphere, they succeed in moulding the real—in line with the ontological categories. They achieve this of course only within a restricted area, since the radius of human activity, when measured by the temporal and spatial dimensions of the world, is narrow.
But the extent of the cosmos is quite an irrelevant matter; our whole concern is with quality, with grades in the scale of categorial formation itself. Here, in the smallest circle, a world of structures, which has not its like in nature, is unfolded, a cosmos within the cosmos, embedded in the real ontological whole, carried by it, dependent in a thousand ways upon its universal connections, and yet structurally superior, autonomous, with its own laws, not borrowed from elsewhere.
The real ethical world is not that only of the moral subject with his acts, it is also that of his living creations and his self-perpetuating works. For the individual subject is not alone, he has no existence in isolation. Every community carries in itself forms which are produced from valuational points of view—extending from ephemeral momentary situations to permanent communal customs, from the most personal emotional relations to historical life peculiar to nations and their constitutions.
All that has been said concerning the ethical sphere of action applies, mutatis mutandis, to the realm of ethical reality. Values have a conditionally determinative relation to it also. In it, too, they are not necessarily decisive, they do not fulfil themselves without resistance. They are always only in a restricted sense principles of the real ethical sphere, according to the ethos of the time, which within the scope of its own vision selects them according to laws which are unlike those of the realm of values. Also the conditionality of the principles is here greater, for the actional sphere is the mediating factor. In life the realization of values takes a route which is not accidental, along the consciousness of value, along disposition, will and deed. Only where a personal entity with its striving for a discerned value is at hand, can a value be productively realized. But if we add the mediation of the positive sphere as a further conditioning factor, if we include it in the way in which values generally arrive at being ontological, of actualizing principles, the proposition is essentially valid here, that values—despite their inability to execute themselves—nevertheless in their own way are stronger in force of efficiency than are the categories of Being, in that they, in the theatre of the world, oppose the force of the categories. In so far as in them, as values, there exists a tendency towards the real, it is this tendency to shape in higher fashion the categorial world already formed, supplementing this by their highest structures, personal entities, and building it up according to their own pattern, the pattern of the ideal essences.
(e) TELEOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS AND THE ETHICAL PHENOMENON OF VALUES
In following the above considerations one finds step by step traces of the fact that, behind the whole relation of the spheres and grades of values, a swarm of metaphysical problems springs up. How far these can be pursued, where thought may encounter the ever-pervasive limits of rationality, is not a question for ethics, but for metaphysics, to settle.
The relation of ontological to axiological determination is—although not under this heading—an old point of dispute. And many thinkers, with a correct feeling for the puzzling categorial superiority of values to principles of Being, have given precedence in their systems to values. Pre-eminently Plato, in that he raised the idea of the good to the apex of the realm of ideas, allowed values to rise “above Existence in strength and dignity”; likewise, Aristotle in the principle of the υoυς as the highest perfection and of the αριστoυ; so, too, the Stoics in the twofold concept of the logos as the primal principle both of morality and of the cosmos; in the same way, the masters of scholasticism, in so far as they accepted the ens realissimum and the ens perfectissimum as identical. But even Kant with his primacy of the practical reason gave precedence to values, as well as did Fichte and Hegel, who established on this basis a teleological dialectic of universal reason. Everywhere, except with difference of form, the axiological principle is made the foundation of the whole.
This metaphysic of value, however impressive it may seem to us, nevertheless does violence to the problem of value, and ultimately to ethics. Indeed, it is a failure to recognize man’s place in the cosmos. If there be a universal and real teleology of values in the world, then all reality from beginning to end conforms to valuational principles and is based upon them as constitutive. But in that case values are ontological categories and, as such, are entirely actualized. And man with his sphere of action is altogether eliminated. He is superfluous. The values prevail without his consciousness of them, and without his contributing to reality. The world-process then is universally an unfoldment of the valuable and before the tribunal of values is its own justification. Viewed as a whole it is perfect, it is the living theodicy.
Such a theodicy may be a metaphysical need of the human mind, but it has no ethical justification. The justification of evil in the world is from the start a perversion. Evil cannot be justified and ought not to be. To give value to that which is contrary to value is a falsification of it. So long as in the real there exists that which is contrary to value, we have a living proof of the fact that ethical values are not merely categories of existence, but prevail only in a very conditional manner. But the fact that the actional sphere of ethical consciousness plays here a mediating rôle must just as clearly be inferred from the circumstance that volition and action are conscious of value. It is only possible for man to have a task in the world, however restricted it may be, provided there are values which without his co-operation remain unactualized. But upon such a task depend the unique position and the dignity of man in the world, his difference from other entities which do not participate in the creative process.
Here the theory of value touches upon a fundamental metaphysical problem. In terms of the relation of “spheres,” the situation may be thus defined: In the theoretical realm it is the ideal sphere which mediates between the actual and the real, but in the practical realm the actual mediates between the ideal and the real. In the former the original determinations rest in the ontologically real, and their transmission to the subject is knowledge of the real: in the latter the original determinations rest in the ideal essences, and their transference to reality pertains to the subject who beholds, wills and executes values, and, what is more, it pertains to every preference, although purely inward, for one value as compared with another.
The naïve view always regards the world anthropocentrically; everything in it turns upon man, who is the essential kernel of the whole. The critical and scientific view sets up the antithesis: man in comparison with the whole is a speck of dust, an ephemeral, a negligible, phenomenon. Ethics synthesizes these extremes; the cosmic insignificance of man is not the last word; besides the ontological there is still an axiological determination of the world, and, in this, man plays an integrating role. In this his insignificance is overborne—without a reintroduction of anthropocentric megalomania. Man, a vanishing quantity in the universe, is still in his own way stronger than it: he is the vehicle of a higher principle, he is the creator of a reality which possesses significance and value, he transmits to the real world a higher worth. Nature is bound down to its own laws; man alone carries in himself a higher law, whereby he—or more correctly the law through him—creates in the world, or from Non-Being brings forth into Being, that which was prefigured in its ideality.
We may name this rehabilitation of man the miracle of the ethical phenomenon; it is the sublime in him, that which verily lifts him above his own mere existence in the world. Kant’s saying in regard to “the moral law within me,” which for sublimity holds the balance with the “starry heavens above me,” gives expression to the real sentiment of ethical self-consciousness.
But so much the more is it incumbent upon us to hold the metaphysic of this great vision within strictly critical limits. It gives neither ontological priority to axiology nor primacy to the practical reason. All that it really justifies is an axiological primacy of the ideal sphere, in contrast to the ontological primacy of the real sphere.