Axiology

Axiology

The epistemic certainty and objective lawfulness that are associated with the concept of the a priori are important in ethics. Scheler proposed to develop ethics understood as “primarily the formalizing in judgmental form what is given in moral knowledge. And it is a philosophical ethics if it limits itself to the a priori content of what is evidently given in moral knowledge” (Scheler 1957–97: Vol. 2, 88). Ethics must re-experience in phenomenological intuition values themselves upon which specific moral judgments are based. The material a priori structures moral judgments and founds specific normative rules as, for example, phenomena such as justice, goodness, or the sacred structure our perception of human actions and situations and found the value judgments typical of our ethos. In this re-experiencing, we gain access to these essential contents that function in normative judgments. Scheler sought coherence and unity within the remarkable diversity of human beings and among the conflicts he discovered within human nature and in the world. The key conflict that appears in the earliest work is that between human rationality and human emotions, and it may be characterized as a concern to overcome the dichotomy in Kant between the rational goodwill that founds the dignity of the human person and the chaotic inclinations or desires that drive the human person from her obligations. The key to his solution to this problem was to insist upon the cognitive function of the emotions. His phenomenology of human emotions demonstrates that not chaos, but rather an Ordo Amoris, an order of loving and hating, can be identified and re-enacted phenomenologically to give us a vertically structured order of pure values according to their relative worth. The highest valuetypes are those of the holy or sacred (and their disvalues, the profane or demonic), secondly the spiritual values of beauty, truth, and goodness, and the disvalues of ugliness, falsity and evil, thirdly the vital values of health and nobility and the disvalues of the diseased and the common, fourthly the utility values and disvalues, and finally the sense-values of pleasure and pain. Corresponding to these levels is a structured order of feeling, to which each of these values and disvalues, and their related kinds are given. The materials of our moral experiences are values, given a priori in acts of feeling or emotion. Feelings, like perceptions, are intentional acts directed upon the values carried by the objects given in perception. Feeling (Fühlen) is entirely a mental act, and may or may not be accompanied by physical feelingstates (Gefühle). Thus one may intend in feeling the beauty, nobility, and grace carried (or expressed by) a work of music without feeling viscerally moved by it.