THE RELATION OF VALUE AND THE OUGHT
IN the characteristics of values as principles, which we have just been considering, the concept of Ought is distinctly contained. It adheres to the essence of ethical values and makes itself felt even where it is not brought into the foreground. It can be especially detected where valuational materials which are not realized are in question, materials from whose mode of existence the opposition to reality and the tension between the spheres cannot be separated. To them belongs somehow the tendency to reality, although in themselves they are purely ideal essences, and although it is impossible to understand how such a tendency could be compatible with their ideality.
This difficulty can be met only by a modal analysis of the Ought. For the moment, independently of it, the relation of value and the Ought is to be determined.
There is something absurd in the thought that a value is a thing that ought to be only in so far as its matter is unreal. That a man ought to be honest, straightforward, trustworthy, is something which does not cease to be because somebody actually is so. The man ought to be even as he then is. That is by no means a statement without significance; it is also not a tautology. We may reverse the sentence and say: “he is just as he ought to be.” Thus it expresses a valuational judgment which is sensible and perfectly clear. And this judgment has the form of an Ought. Hence it follows that the Ought belongs to the essence of the value and must be already contained in its ideal mode of existence.
Ought in this sense is not Ought-to-Do, which refers to a volitional subject. It is only an ideal or pure Ought-to-Be. Because something is in itself a value, it does not follow that someone ought to do it; it does mean, however, that it Ought to “Be,” and unconditionally—irrespective of its actuality or even of its possibility. Accordingly, there is sense in saying that universal peace among nations ought to “be.” That has a meaning, not in so far as peace is actual or possible, but in so far as it is in itself valuable. Yet it would be senseless to say that a single individual ought to bring peace about. Conversely, it holds true of goods provided by nature that they ought to be just as they are; yet with them there is no place for an Ought-to-Do. A place for that is not possible until someone is in need of the goods and someone can acquire them by effort. Consequently Ought-to-Do is always conditioned by Ought-to-Be, but Ought-to-Do is not attached to every Ought-to-Be. I ought to do what ought to be, in so far as it “is” not, and in so far as to make it actual is in my power. This double “in so far as” separates these two kinds of Ought. Between goods and moral qualities there is in this respect no difference. The ideal Ought-to-Be inheres necessarily in them, but Ought-to-Do does not.
The Being of values, as ideal, is indifferent to real Being and Non-Being. Their ideal Ought-to-Be subsists independently of the reality or unreality of their matter. And, again, their ideal Being is also not indifferent to real Being and Non-Being. The ideal Ought-to-Be includes the tendency towards reality; it sanctions reality when it exists, and intends it when it does not exist. It transcends ideality.
This antinomy inheres in the essence of values themselves. It announces the inadequacy of ontological modalities for their peculiar kind of Being; it is an exact expression of their essence as principles which are ideal and yet are at the same time drawn towards reality. This double nature is the ideal Ought-to-Be in them: it is the idea of their being directed to the sphere of the real, the idea of their categorial transcendence and of their breaking forth out of the ideal into the real.
In this sense value and the ideal Ought-to-Be are indissolubly bound together. They are not on that account identical. The Ought signifies direction towards something, the value signifies the something itself to which the direction points. The goal conditions the direction, but the direction towards it conditions the mode of being of the goal. Value and the ideal Ought-to-Be stand in strict correlation, in reciprocal conditionality. The ideal Ought-to-Be is the mode of being of value, its proper modality, which is never lost in the structure of the matter. But the value is the content of the Ought; it is the categorial structure, the existential mode of which is that of the ideal Ought-to-Be. In the older—of course inexact—conceptual language, one could say: The ideal Ought-to-Be is the formal condition of the value, the value is the material condition of the Ought-to-Be. The correlation is balanced, not like substance and attribute, but like substance and relation. On neither side is there a greater weight. The relation is stable, poised.
The positive Ought-to-Be can be clearly distinguished from the ideal Ought-to-Be. It occurs where the ideal finds itself in opposition to reality, where the self-existent values are unreal.
This kind of Ought adheres to the structural non-agreement of the spheres, to the tension between them. The tension is precisely the actuality. For the real is indeed indifferent to the disparateness of the ideal as such; it has in itself no sympathy with it, no tendency towards it: but the ideal is not indifferent to the real; in it something presses beyond its own sphere into the real—irrespective of the possibility and impossibility of actualization. Nevertheless, the positive Ought-to-Be is indeed not an Ought-to-Do, nor does it necessarily draw any such thing towards it; for not everything that is not, but ought to be, comes into the domain of striving. But it is just as fundamentally distinct from the ideal Ought-to-Be; it does not adhere to value as such, it is added thereto. In the positive Ought-to-Be, for example, the ideal Ought-to-Be of the value is only one element; the other and equally essential factor in it is the opposition of the spheres. It therefore stands midway between the ideal Ought-to-Be and the Ought-to-Do proper.
The positive Ought-to-Be accordingly presupposes in a given situation the Non-Being of what ought to be. Hence it is only possible within a real self-existent world—that is, it presupposes this real self-existent world, together with its real determinations which deviate from the constitution of what ought to be. It has, as condition, the whole ontological system. First, against this, in its isolation and indifference to values in general, the positive Ought-to-Be is contrasted in its own kind of Being, as something unfulfilled. For the fulfilment can take place, if anywhere, only in exactly this real, indifferent, self-contained world. But the disparateness and the resistance first make what-ought-to-be non-existent and thereby make the Ought-to-Be itself positive. Tendency itself is first possible, where there is something which resists it. Without such a something, it fulfils itself unchecked; therefore there is no tendency.
In this stage of the problem ontology and ethics become sharply separated through their fundamental modalities: To-Be and Ought-to-Be. But in so far as the latter is something positive, subsisting only in opposition and in a state of tension, the correlation of the two is not in balance. The excess is on the side of existence. The Ought as positive is dependent upon existence, not indeed upon the special structure or the content of the existent, but upon the presence of a real existent in general. But the existent is not dependent upon the Ought: the same actual world can be there, even if no Ought-to-Be exists, and even if there is no tendency thrusting itself into the real world. A real world at rest, moved indeed, but only moved ontologically and in its movement closed within itself, without a tendency towards anything, without striving or activity towards an end, is very well possible. And it is actual, so long as there is no entity in it, which beholds values and is capable of tendency.
This does not contradict the qualitative superiority of values as principles, over existential categories. Within the existent the Ought-to-Be is active, the Ought-to-Be which proceeds from values and becomes positive through the resistance of the existent, a thing which the categories never could achieve. Dependence and superiority are not in antagonism to each other. In the graded realm of principles it is precisely the dependent which is always and necessarily at the same time the superior: the higher principle is always the more complex, more conditioned and in this sense the weaker; but the lower is always the more unconditioned and more general, more elemental, and in this sense the stronger, but at the same time the poorer. The higher cannot dispense with the lower nor break through it; it can construct nothing by violence against the lower determination, but upon the lower as a basis and upon its structures it may well form another and higher edifice. In this alone consists its superiority.
This and no other superiority is possessed by values in their passage out of the ideal into the real world. The whole ontological formation of the latter stands over against this act of transcendency. And this opposition is at the same time an obstacle and a condition to the mode of Being of the positive Ought-to-Be in its relation to the real.
(c) RANGE OF TENSION, DEGREE OF ACTUALITY AND THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF THE OUGHT-TO-BE
In itself the real world is neither a value nor in antagonism to value. It is neither wholly as it ought to be, nor wholly as it ought not to be. Single values may be completely actualized in it, others altogether non-existent. But in it, on the whole, what ought to be is always in part real and in part unreal. It stands half-way up the scale of values. The good floats in it midway between Being and Non-Being; and man, as the only real carrier of the good who comes in question, stands midway between good and evil, being wholly neither, participating in both. The Platonic image of Eros in its relation to the eternal Ideas is the image of man in his relation to the ethical values—to the mode of Being of the moral essence, as it exists in the real world.
For the positive character of the Ought-to-Be, this position of its content, between Being and Non-Being, is essential. Its positive character itself, as intermediate, increases in proportion to the distance of the existent from what ought-to-be. The range of the tension between man-as-he-is and man-as-he-ought-to-be determines the degree of positivity. The ideal Ought-to-Be, on the other hand, the pure validity of value, does not affect it. As against this the range of tension is something general and indeterminate. It presupposes in the ideal the fixed point of relation. The other point which rests in the real is movable, it is the shifting opposite of value in its transcendent relation to actuality.
This relation again evidently presupposes a dimension in which the capacity to shift plays a part. Ontologically it is simply one among many other qualitative dimensions which are valuationally indifferent. There are interesting attempts to determine it as such—for example, Aristotle’s attempt to understand it as a mean dimension between the extremes of too much and too little.1 Here theoretical thought has wide scope. For the problem of the Ought, such attempts are indifferent; they do not touch the ethical essence of the dimension. This rests only in the nature of the Ought-to-Be itself as a direction or tendency towards something. The dimension of the Ought is primarily the purely axiological dimension between value and disvalue. And the fundamental law of the Ought-to-Be consists in this, that its direction within this bipolarity always points unequivocally to the positive pole, the value. If one adds that the real, the value of which is in question, always stands between the two poles, one derives from this law, as a consequence, that on any momentary level the “good” is always that which lies higher on the upward curve towards the value, the “bad” is that which lies further down towards the disvalue. Good and bad, when seen from the point of view of the real, are directional opposites on the ethical dimension of the Ought-to-Be.
This is not a definition of good and evil. It is only the minimum which may pass current concerning them, even in more precise definitions of them.
(d) PLURALITY OF DIMENSIONS AND VARIETY OF VALUES
The essence of the Ought-dimension with its polarity of value and disvalue is identical for every Ought. But only in its universal structure. It differs materially with the content of the Ought. And this content pertains to values.
So far as there is a variety of ethical values, and so far as every value has its own independent Ought-to-Be, we obtain variety in the dimensions of the Ought. How these stand to one another is not to be learned from the essence of the Ought, for this is one and the same in all. If the system of the dimensions is to be learned at all, it is only from the system of values. For direction and situation are determined by the ideal pole of every dimension. Only the inner connection of the valuational materials can here furnish an explanation.
However much these dimensions may intersect, they cannot in any case coincide. And thence it follows for the real which moves within them, that it can include, at the same time, different levels of height in different dimensions, and therewith, at the same time, different ranges of tension and different positive gradations of the Ought-to-Be; and, indeed, so much the more, the more values there are, for which there is a potential carrier.
But this variety of directions and of grades of actuality by no means signifies a plurality of the Ought-to-Be itself. The Ought-to-Be is only a modality, and in the first place a tendency. Both of these are only in the singular. The variety of both lies exclusively in the contents. The plural therefore is an affair of the values; there is only one Ought-to-Be. This is one of the historic reasons why a strict valuational concept could not be developed, so long as ethics believed in the concrete unity of a principle. Here the concept of the Ought was sufficient.
It became inadequate as soon as the variety in the ethical sphere of principles itself was discovered.
1On Aristotle’s theory of the μεσ+της, cf. below, Chapter XLVIII (a).