Values

Scheler's ethics places morality squarely within a larger view of the experience of value. Where other ethical theories argue that practical reasons, or sentiments, or pleasure and pain, or prima facie duties are the fundamental building blocks of ethics122, for Scheler this central role is taken by values. These values range across the whole range of human practical experience and some are experienced even by children and animals.123 Values can be identified as part of the wider family of phenomenologically recognisable ideal essences. They are the affective, practical side of this family and are indispensable to practical cognition (as essences in general are to cognition in general) and form the basis of rational understanding of ethics. These values are experienced as embodied in objects but through phenomenological reflection can be brought to givenness separately from any object, and can then become the basis of an a priori ethical theory.

When I consider a piece of food, for instance, I look at it as a thing and I can think about it theoretically as having a certain size and shape, of consisting of certain chemicals that I know my body can usefully digest. Through remembering various feelings and experiences my brain represents it as being likely to be sweet or savoury, and through feelings of hunger pushes me to eat it. But those feelings of hunger do not push me to eat it on the basis of its size or shape or chemical composition, or even, fundamentally, on the basis of its taste, but on the basis of it being recognised as ‘food’. What is this recognition of food-ness? Scheler argues it cannot be broken down into any theoretical or even feeling statement but can only be accurately described as a recognition of the object bearing a certain valuable essence, in this case that of 'food' or ‘nourishment’.124

This designation cannot be nailed down to any particular physical facts about the object or even feeling facts but is clear none the less. One could even clearly imagine a different animal for which, due to differing body chemistry, entirely different objects are food, but that regardless this essence of ‘nourishment’ remains the same and entirely recognisable. Of course this is not the sole story of any item, it will also have at least the agreeable values of sweetness and savouriness that dictate precisely how alluring it appears to me, but these are secondary and dependent on the original recognition of it as food.

122 _{Scanlon’s Buck-Passing theory, sentimentalism and non-cognitivism, hedonism, and Ross’}

deontological intuitionism respectively.

123

Scheler, M. Formalismus, p105

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Values, like that of ‘food’, cannot be defined in terms of physical properties, but also cannot be defined in terms of internal feeling states either. The feeling states of hunger or the experience of a certain taste does not define 'food', rather these are the subjective states whose object is the essence, food. One can recognise food, and eat, without any sense of hunger, and without appreciating its sensuous taste. In the previous discussion of Husserl's theoretical universals the object of universal thought was not the thought but the ideal object intended by that thought, the ideal universal. So in this case the value is the object of the intentional feeling responses, the ideal essence, but not the feelings states themselves. The difference in the practical sphere is that this representation occurs largely through affective and conative material rather than in theoretical outer or inner sense, as is the case with theoretical essences. This is the basis for Scheler's arguments for the objectivity of value ethics that are explained later in this chapter and the next, particularly in section 4.7, titled ‘the objectivity of ethical knowledge’.

Values cover the whole range of human practical experience. At the basic level there are the modalities of 'agreeable' values, 'vital' values, 'mental/spiritual' values and 'holy' values.125 These different modalities are always naturally experienced through bearers, but can be brought to immediate and separate givenness through phenomenological reflection. They are attached to a whole range of different possible bearers, particularly the ‘agreeable’ to things, the ‘vital’ to living beings, and the ‘moral’ to persons.126

They are not just attached to objects either, but also acts and interconnections.127 Within each of these modalities there are numerous distinguishable individual values that cover every element of human practical reason. Examples of these basic categories would be the agreeable value of comfort, the vital value of health, the spiritual value of beauty, and the holy value of faith. Scheler's vision of our ethical world is one richly drenched with different values that we are all used to dealing with and experiencing on a daily basis but which, like theoretical universals and essences, only reveal their particular, precise nature after a process of phenomenological clarification. The values Scheler refers to are the practical essences like nourishment, or courage, or beauty that we all commonly are aware of and interact with, and as such are commonly referred to in ethical theories besides his own. What Scheler adds is the thorough phenomenological analysis of these values that alone can accurately clarify their nature and relations.

This seeming embarrassment of riches when it comes to essences in Scheler's ethics is actually, I argue, a great source of strength. This pluralism makes it a more thorough and adaptable ethical theory, reflecting the richness of the human experience of value in its varying forms. It also provides the next part of the argument for the objectivity of an ethics based on values. The recognition of qualitative variation among values themselves means it is possible to describe a rational ordering among values based on their structural features, as clarified in

125 _{Ibid, p105.} 126

Ibid, p86.

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phenomenological analysis. This mirrors one of the key means by which we recognise external physical reality as objective despite the subjectivity of individual perceptive experience. That is the ability to make rational statements about physical reality that are independently assessable by other elements of physical reality, as well as on an intersubjective personal basis. We measure a length with a wooden ruler as 1m, walk out of the room, come back in and then measure the object on a totally separate basis with a tape measure and it is still 1m. In other words its length is objective, it has a structured and stable relation to other objects that does not alter wildly dependent on our experience of it. Statements about the qualitative relation of values, what Scheler refers to as their a priori ordering, can play the same role in demonstrating the 'objectivity' of value-relations and hence their use as a foundation of an objective ethics. Values are always given in ordinary experience through the objects, acts or persons that bear them, referred to quite naturally as their 'bearers'. Scheler argues that we experience objects always as a combination of 'good' and 'thing' where the thing-ness of the object is its physical, theoretical profile and the good-ness of the object is its practical dimension of instantiating a certain value, as valuable.128 Objects are naturally experienced as a unity of these two perspectives and only through reflection are the value nature of objects and their theoretical nature distinguished. All objects are experienced as goods, as bearers of values, whether physical or mental acts, persons, things, conations or feelings. But values do not yet appear clearly in goods. “A good is related to value-qualities as a thing is to the qualities that fulfil its properties.”129 It is only phenomenological reflection on the value-complex given in the good that allows the values themselves to be brought to immediate givenness, just as this is possible with the theoretical essences of physical things. Values, once clarified, can then begin to be analysed and compared in terms of structure and just how qualitatively valuable they actually are, which can then form the basis for an a priori and objective ethics in the manner I briefly described, and consider further in chapter four.