1.1 Overview of the Phenomenology of Values
As demonstrated in the introduction to this book, the question of values has long had a central position both in the field of philosophy generally and in the specific subfield of phenomenology. Quite apart from the historical pedigree of this project, however, any rigorous philosophical investigation must also be capable of being justified on its own terms. Philosophical traditions like phenomenology may be rich sources of insight into the problems that arise in our attempts to understand the world around us, but we should take care to ensure that years of accumulated tradition do not blind us to the real objects of our study. Above all, we want to be certain that our investigations are on track to make genuine progress, and that we are not merely building castles in the air!
These concerns are of particular importance in the context of this attempt to carry out a phenomenology of values. It certainly cannot be denied that the notion of value in general informs a great deal of our ordinary experience; after all, who could go even an entire day without finding some object or event to be beautiful, or tiresome, or impressive? Nonetheless, the goal of giving a fundamental account of values themselves as real elements of experience requires further justification.1 That is, this project does not aim at explaining values as the mere epiphenomena of some more fundamental aspect of reality, as if values could be understood simply as properties of objects or situations, or as subjective judgments about them. Rather, the claim that supports the necessity of a phenomenology of values is that the valuative experiences that we encounter throughout our lives must be understood as stemming from an entirely independent region of consciousness, one that is irreducible to any other (e.g., that of perceptual consciousness or of mere introspection). The task of this chapter will be to examine the outlines of this region, in order to prove that it indeed deserves its own specialized phenomenological inquiry. In particular, I will argue that values themselves must be thought of as really existing elements of consciousness if their impact on experience is to be understood at all, and that any worthwhile investigation of values must take this independence into account.
In overview, this chapter will begin its argument by laying out Husserlâs view of consciousness (taken from Brentano and most fully expressed in Husserlâs early ethics lectures) as divisible into three distinct regions, which he terms Vernunftarten (âreason-typesâ). In addition to the acts of intellectual consciousness that constitute the usual field of phenomenological study and the volitional acts that will be discussed later in this book, Husserl grants the status of Vernunftart to acts of valuation (i.e., acts of Wertnehmen). Just as perceptual experiences, for instance, are possessed of certain unique conscious structures (e.g., those of adumbration in the case of visual perception), so too are our experiences of value. Employing Husserlâs own arguments and supporting them with further phenomenological evidence, this division will serve as an excellent point of departure for the present task of justifying the necessity of a phenomenology of values in general.
Nonetheless, this chapter will also venture beyond Husserlâs claims in support of a genuine and thoroughgoing independence for valuative consciousness. The observant reader will notice that Husserl describes all of these regions of consciousness as Vernunftarten (âreason-typesâ), thereby allowing for the possibility of their ultimate dissolution into a generalized set of structures that we might term those of pre-theoretical reason. In contrast, this project sides on this point with Husserlâs contemporaries, Scheler and Hartmann, who argue for the need to understand valuative experience as a genuinely sui generis region of consciousness, completely irreducible to any more general terms. The overarching aim of the chapter is to demonstrate that a dedicated and independent investigation of values and valuative consciousness, one untainted by any assumptions not taken from value-experiences themselves, is a vital component of a proper phenomenological understanding of the world of lived experience.
1.2 Husserlâs Three Vernunftarten
Far from the opinions of his critics, who often hold the great phenomenologist to be overly concerned with the strictly logical and passionless aspects of human consciousness, Husserl was deeply aware of the great breadth of possible experience. Indeed, he so greatly respected the diversity of experience that one major goal of his phenomenological method was to separate out the various modes of these experiences, in order that each could be studied and evaluated in its own terms. At the time of his early ethics lectures (1908â1914), Husserl formalized the major divisions that he had discovered among conscious acts, leading to his central notion of what he called the three Vernunftarten: acts of intellectual understanding, including everything from the (pre-theoretical) perception of visual objects to mathematical thinking, acts of valuation (with which this project is primarily concerned), and acts of volition or the will. Like Brentano, Husserl held there to be an analogy among these three modes of conscious experience. Although different, and so deserving of special attention, each Vernunftart would necessarily subject itself to some form of (rational) phenomenological investigation of the essential laws under which it stands, according to Husserl, thereby permitting the enterprising phenomenologist to develop, for instance, a âscience of valuesâ parallel to the rigorous study of intellectual consciousness through logic for which Husserl was already well known. This doctrine of the analogy of the Vernunftarten will be, in broad terms, taken up by the present project; after all, what would such a science of values be, if not the rigorous phenomenology of values that I propose to carry out?
Nonetheless, given that Husserlâs overall view of the task of phenomenology in this context is so influential for this project, it is important to understand precisely what he means by his division of consciousness into its various regions. For Husserl â and for the phenomenologist in general â the study of reality is intrinsically bound up with the study of the way in which that reality is apprehended. If we want to understand fully some object within our experience, the proper focus of our investigation is the experience by which that object is apprehended. But this experience must be taken as a whole, thus with the recognition that it consists of both a subject-pole and an object-pole, noesis and noema, etc. Once this fact is understood, the method for such investigation is clear: we are to examine reality precisely as it is experienced in order to uncover the necessary conditions whereby that reality can exist at all.2 All of this is no more than the basis of phenomenology as a philosophical discipline. When applied to the study of values in particular, what this method entails is that we must look at the experiences whereby such values are apprehended if we want to understand their real nature â just as we look at the nature of perceptual experiences to understand what the physical objects that we perceive truly are (at least, as noemata).
The relevance of Husserlâs doctrine of the Vernunftarten, in this context, is the insight that these experiences are not interchangeable. This fact was, of course, evident from the very beginnings of phenomenology: the adumbrations of visual perception, to refer to a common Husserlian example, are certainly not a factor when it comes to auditory experiences. Each conscious act that can be imagined is possessed of its own unique experiential structures, which it is the task of phenomenology to discover. Nonetheless, these differences are, in some sense, relatively minor; although an experience of visual perception has its own idiosyncrasies, our understanding of that experience is not so very different from our understanding of experiences belonging to the other senses.3 The same does not hold true, Husserl rightly maintains, in the case of the differences among the three Vernunftarten. To illustrate the point: the acts that he identifies as lying in the region of intellectual consciousness â all forms of perception, for example, or the more abstract, mathematical consciousness that forms the basis for the natural sciences â all have in common a certain essentially dispassionate character. The idea of passion or involvement only arises when valuative consciousness is brought into play, and this element of consciousness stands wholly outside the bounds of anything that could be described in purely intellectual terms. Rather than merely bringing to light another form of perception or intellectual contemplation, it represents a new mode of consciousness entirely. Although valuative consciousness remains, according to Husserl, linked with the other modes â even with the dispassionate mode of intellectual consciousness â this âparallelismâ relates primarily to the fact that each mode stands under its own essential laws, which may themselves be investigated in similar (though not identical) ways. As Ullrich Melle puts it, Husserlâs chief purpose in making this comparison among the Vernunftarten is to emphasize âthe parallelism and the analogy among the a priori doctrines of principles: logic, axiology, and practologyâ (1988, 114).
Indeed, Husserl goes so far as to claim that the various Vernunftarten do not merely represent three different possible relations that consciousness could bear towards its objects, but rather must be thought of as grasping different elements of experience entirely (a task which is accomplished through distinct, though parallel, operations of consciousness). He lays out the parallel between acts of the intellect and those of valuative (here, specifically ethical) consciousness clearly in the late ethics lectures:4
With respect to these [i.e., pure things, pure Sachen], truths and falsehoods and the logical grounds and logical consequences that belong to them, logical proofs, etc., are not things [Sachen], but rather objects of reason, specifically objects of logical reason. And likewise the ethical oughts [Gesolltheiten] and the objectivities that are related to them, e.g., appeals, goals of justice, specifically objects of practical reason and not merely things and objective predicates. Theoretical reason, which investigates everything, investigates sometimes the world of things, the empirically real and the ideal, and at other times it investigates reason itself, therefore first of all itself, theoretical reason itself, then, however, other modes of reason, however many there are, e.g., practical reason and the predicates and objectivities that specifically appear in it.
(Hua XXXVII, 193)
There are elements to be encountered within the world of experience that answer to a wide variety of different experiential laws, and it would be a grave mistake to fail to recognize that diversity.5 Thus, passion-inspiring, value-infused aspects of reali...
