Metaphysics and axiology

If we take the definition of axiology: “the science of philosophical, aesthetic or moral values, with the aim of explaining and classifying values” (CNRTL), we immediately discover that there are values – of three kinds (philosophical, aesthetic and moral) – and that this science will simply consist of explaining and classifying them. In other words, there would be no need to search for these values; they would be given. What are they, then? We’ll have to find out.

With the Greek word axios meaning “value” or “quality”, and axion meaning “estimable” or “worthy of interest”, i.e. “to be the object of a value judgment”, we already discover that there is an indefinite multitude of values corresponding to the multitude of objects likely to be worthy of esteem. Secondly, the level of esteem in which they are held appears to be eminently variable, which would make the evaluation of values absolutely subjective, and their classification impossible. Finally, aren’t there some values that are esteemed by some, and despised by others? Equality at the expense of freedom, or vice versa. Think of the scatophile, whose tastes are not shared by all, or even the pedophile.

So, what are these values that seem to be “given”, undefined, not necessarily shared, and yet need to be explained and even classified? What, then, is this science of axiology, which has set itself an impossible task?

A science of pre-existing values

It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that philosophy did without this recent branch for millennia, until its appearance at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was invented by philosophers Paul Lapie (1869-1927)¹ and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), and initial contributions are listed for Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), Max Scheler (1874-1928), Louis Lavelle (1883-1951).

Nor is it surprising that, in its two preferred fields, axiology itself determines the values it intends to study. Ethical axiology, for example, deals with moral values and their hierarchy, examining the given values of the good, the just and the virtuous; while aesthetic axiology deals with the equally given values of beauty, art and aesthetic experience: the beautiful, the harmonious, even the artistically valid.

Alongside these historical pillars of axiology – ethics and aesthetics² – some philosophers have imagined its application to other fields:

• In philosophy of science, a dissertation proposes “a naturalistic and normative conception of contemporary scientific axiology”³ due to Helen Longino (1944), known for her studies concerning the influence of values on scientific research;
• In political and social philosophy, values can be used to understand the normative foundations of social institutions and practices, as in John Rawls’ (1921-2002) A Theory of Justice (1971) on social values;
• In philosophy of education, too, the appeal to values helps to focus (orientate?) educational systems.
• Outside philosophy proper, axiological approaches can be found in management (optimizing the match between people and jobs) or sociology, the typical example being the long-standing concept of “axiological neutrality”⁴ of Max Weber (1864-1920).

As we can see, axiological science does not develop as an autonomous field of philosophy, but the notion of value, unavoidable yet unfounded, remains necessary to a wide range of fields of thought.

This is because, when it comes to thinking about the nature and origin of values, we seem to come up against insoluble questions. In particular, the degree of objectivity or subjectivity of values, as well as their absolute or relative character – a program that seems impossible or illusory! It’s understandable, then, that this science has lost its autonomy, but it remains to be seen how it came into being in the first place.

A brief introduction to axiology

The birth of axiology can be seen as an attempt to compensate for a perceived deficiency in ontology, with value taking precedence over being, from its point of view. For all that, ontology will maintain that being is what is valid in itself – it is an absolute – whereas values are often only relative; they may only be valid for some.

Ultimately, the ontological approach, the study of being as being, constitutes a part of metaphysics, while axiology arrogates to itself a right of normative approach. Where does this right come from?

This helps us to understand the virtual disappearance of axiology as such – having become a marginal field of meta-ethics – and its dilution into other sciences, first and foremost aesthetics and ethics, disciplines that are intrinsically normative and require the notion of value – even if unfounded – but also other sciences (sociology, politics, education), which are also concerned with value judgements.

Axiology, a persistent question

However, true axiology is not dead, and today’s researchers are making it the primary question, putting it before that of being. Philosopher Cyril Arnaud, for example, intends to show the irreducibility of value to the notion of Good, finality and quality⁵. This is because it is necessary to find its foundation, and not its origin, as would be the case in a Genealogy of Morals; this leads to showing morality logically as a branch of axiology, assuming it were firmly established as a science, which is its objective. This leads to an obligatory confrontation with nihilism (nothing has value), scepticism (what certainty can we have?) and pessimism (it’s an impossible knowledge), which constitute “the common directions of criticism of the concept of value”⁶. Two characteristics of values are then hypothesized: the existence of a hierarchy and their (amiability) attractiveness. It may seem like reasoning by the absurd, but at the end of the day, the hypothesis is confirmed. In fact, since value could be found neither in the object nor in the subject, a third way remained: the relationship between the two, this relationship being love, linking the amiability (attractiveness) of value and the capacity for love (to love).

There is a philosopher, albeit a little old, René Le Senne (1882-1954), whose doctrine of obstacle and duty, as well as the cardinal value of Love, it seems appropriate to recall here. According to Le Senne, contradictions and obstacles are opportunities for the expression of duty. In action, it is this duty that moves us from “what-is” to “what-must-be”, “must-be” being the first principle of being. But what can transcend the opposition between “what-is” (the ontological) and “what-must-be” (the deontological)? It’s what he calls “the acting spirit that is value”⁷ or “the absolute[ which] is, in its essence, infinite value” and the source of all duty. Its four cardinal values: Truth, Goodness, Beauty and Love are each an “epiphany of transcendence”. Make no mistake: Value is God; by participating in Spirit (if we open ourselves to Spirit), the Absolute is revealed as a sovereign Person, the source of all persons (and not as an ideal abstraction). From then on, the supreme Value, God, is infinite Love (Christianity).

Three quarters of a century apart, we note that this notion of Love is common to both philosophers (Le Senne, Arnaud), even though one would be a convinced Christian and the other not. Is the former’s love transcendent, the latter’s immanent?

With this “third way”, the hydra of values rears its head again, and the phoenix of values rises from its ashes. The question can no longer be put off:

Where does value come from?

As we’ve said, there’s nothing to be said for sciences that posit values without being able to say where they come from, or whether they’re well-founded. But we do need to make a fresh attempt to define their nature.

Let’s start with the etymology of the word, obviously largely common to European languages((From Scandinavia to Portugal, from France to Romania, we imagine the same root to the words of the main European (Romance) languages: value, Wert, valore, valor, værdi, väärtus, arvo, vērtība, vertybė, waarde, verdi, wartość, valoare, vrednost, värde.Value” has a Latin origin of its own (with no direct Greek equivalent): valor, valoris (“strength”, “power”, from the verb valere (“to be strong” or “to be worth”), with the original double meaning of quality that makes a person worthy of esteem, and price a commodity. The word appears in French in the classical Middle Ages, in the Chanson de Roland (1080), where it designates the merit and importance of a thing or a person ⁸. The meaning quickly becomes clearer in three directions: valour (v. 1175), pecuniary value (v. 1260), moral or societal importance of an object or idea.

Today, the word is used in almost every field, from the commercial world (economy, finance…) to the arts (value of a musical note, a color), from the legal world (legal value of a judgment, a law…) to the worlds of linguistics and stylistics. Philosophically, “value” is defined as “the intrinsic quality of a thing which, possessing the ideal characters of its type, is objectively worthy of esteem”; the problem lies precisely in these affirmations: “intrinsic” and “objectively”. Lavelle’s definition seems to avoid these two pitfalls, but nothing is said about the object itself:

Every value, whatever it may be, is indivisibly the object of desire and the object of judgment; desire is the driving force, but judgment is the arbiter. And theories of value are opposed to each other by the pre-eminence they give either to desire or to judgment in the constitution of value. But value lies in their union, and if either of these factors is lacking, value collapses.⁹

What we want to remember is that the word “value” has a universally shared meaning, whether it’s the Latin origin common to many Western languages, or a use that has invaded all areas of human life. But a meaning is a given, a received, and by its very nature unmanageable. This is the age-old teaching of the distinction between reason and intelligence or intellect. Reason calculates, even ideas, and constructs reasonings, but it is intelligence that understands calculations and reasonings. And we cannot force ourselves to understand what we do not understand (cf. Simonne Weil)¹⁰. Even if it’s not the intelligence that knows, but man (Aristotle, On the Soul), it’s his intellect that receives meaning, that encounters the intelligible; we’re a long way from the conceptible constructed by reason. We are thus led to consider two types of knowledge: knowledge by abstraction from sensation and knowledge by participation, with the intellect open to the super-natural or meta-physical, for “the intellect comes through the door or from outside”, says Aristotle¹¹. And as Leibniz said, “nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu” (nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses), “nisi ipse intellectus” (apart from the intellect itself)¹².

What interests us in these considerations is that the universal, but unmanageable, meaning of “value” is thus a receipt in the same way as intelligibles such as God, beautiful, true, evil, false… We can thus understand that, once reduced to the conceptible, handed over to discursive reason, to the constructions of the hypothetico-deductive, formulating it becomes “the (seemingly) impossible program” mentioned above. Here we find again the limits of (rational) “proofs” of God’s existence. Starting from an intelligible evidence (“God is” is an evidence, “what He is” is another question altogether), any rationalization is doomed to failure.

“Where does the idea of value come from?” we asked. It comes “from outside”, it is metaphysical. And for us, this origin is its foundation (transcendental) and its nature (intelligible). But can we define it?

What is value?

A Reference.

Value is a receipt. As such, it is a (relatively) absolute reference, i.e., as mentioned above, a reference of a transcendental nature. This value can be described as positive or negative, “positive” and “negative” also being received meanings. Here, just as the Sophist believed he could say what was true indiscriminately of what was false, without realizing that for his assertion to have meaning, “true” and “false” had to have meaning, so we might say that any value denied by the nihilist reinforces the intelligibility of his “positivity”.

Now, what to do, what to say, if this nihilist affirms that a value usually considered positive is negative – for example, declaring that beauty, a supposedly positive value, is a negative value? Has he done anything other than show that lying is a possibility of discursive thought, in fine of language? His assertion does nothing to change the positive metaphysical nature of beauty. On the other hand, his assertion does have the advantage of promoting awareness of the difference in nature between the world of concepts, words and sayings, and the world of the intelligible. In other words, we can always say anything, such as “round-square”, but we’ll never be able to think it.

However, we can say and think the opposite of what someone else thinks, or even go against everyone else’s grain. This brings to mind Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, with its “reversal of values”, historically operated by the weak against the strong. Because he glosses over the reason-intelligence distinction, value becomes, for him, a human creation, a “gift” that man makes to the world. Promethean, the individual must become the creator of his or her own values, which implies freeing oneself from transcendent ideals to create new, immanent values. We’re right in the middle of his “Dieu est mort… et c’est nous qui l’ont tué” (Le gai savoir, III, 125), which is either his own words or just a figure of speech.

If we now wish to subscribe to what axiology has set out to do, i.e. to establish a hierarchy of values, this is easy to do, still within the framework of the distinction between reason and intelligence; It follows the cascade from God to man (“in his image”), passing through what ancient and then Christian philosophy called the transcendentals, i.e. the attributes that transcend all categories to express the properties of being, and thus convert one to the other¹³. These transcendentals are the classic Beautiful, Good and True, as well as Being (ontological reality) and One (first principle in the cognitive order, in particular). This is the foundation of the values of aesthetics and ethics. Since these values are at the heart of these sciences, and their principles are by definition not part of them, it was only natural that they should not be demonstrated in them.

A relationship.

There’s another characteristic of value that we’ve come across in Cyril Arnaud and René Le Senne: it’s “relationship”. Although the horizons of the two philosophers diverge, they both call this relationship “Love”. At its most prosaic, because since value is neither in the object nor the subject, it is what unites them; at its most subtle, because Love is the relationship par excellence, from which all others derive.

To take this a step further, we need to point out that Love is not born of the encounter, but comes from elsewhere and passes through man. Nor does it stop at the object, but, through its anagogic power, carries itself from this being to Being, the Being that is the sovereign Good (Plato), Love itself (in Christianity). This is because bonum diffusivum sui (the Good is diffusive of itself); Being and Love are coextensive (and convertible, as we’ve seen). Being is relational by nature. This is clearly seen in the case of a particular being, man: there is the relation to that (the One) who gave him life, the relation to his parents, otherwise he would be a “wolf-child”, and there is the relation to all others, according to his nature as homo societatis.

Human nourishment.

We have seen so far that the human being, because of his inherent subjectivity¹⁴, cannot be taken into account in the search for universal and non-relative values. However, man has not yet been considered metaphysically in terms of his anthropological tripartition: the structure of the human being as body, soul (or psyche) and spirit. These three instances are considered in their essentiality. Thus, the body is not merely an anatomy, but “must be seen as the means of our active presence in the earthly world”¹⁵; as for the mind, it is envisaged here primarily as the organ of knowledge.

So what are the needs, desires, driving forces or aims of each of these bodies?

There’s no doubt about the answer: in all things, the spirit seeks the truth; truth is the unifying pole of all its desires and activities. Likewise, in everything, the body seeks the good, whether it’s the physical good: good bread, good rest, well-being; or the moral good: the right action, the right gesture, for all moral duties and obligations involve the body. As for the soul, all that’s left of the traditional axiological triad is beauty to determine it. And indeed, we believe that in everything, the soul seeks beauty above all else; that in everything, it aspires to taste beauty. And this is obviously not unrelated to the profound analogy between woman and soul, and between woman and beauty.

True, beauty and good are therefore respectively the polar stars of the mind, soul and body, defining and summarizing their fundamental needs. This is why, very precisely, beauty is the food of the soul, just as the true is the food of the mind and the good that of the body. And, in the same way, we must say that Truth is the end of the path of knowledge, Beauty of the path of love, Goodness of the path of action.¹⁶

This means that the so-called transcendentals are not given from “above”, but spring, as a matter of course, from man’s tripartite nature. Only then are they recognized as transcendental, i.e. as transcending man and, as such, as being at the source, i.e. in nothing created by man, but at his principle.

Conclusion

This journey has taken us from a situation where value, though prevalent in all science, appeared unfounded, with the nihilist rendering everything equivalent, the skeptic denying all certainty and the pessimist all knowledge, to a metaphysical solution that we deem satisfactory.

Of course, it’s not totally new. Certain philosophers have affirmed value as the reception of a transcendent source; the objective intuition of Max Scheler is well understood with the essential distinction between reason and intelligence; and the ontological participation of Louis Lavelle seems well in tune with the participatory mode of knowledge of the intelligibles.

Those who thought of immanent reception may simply have missed the point that God is necessarily both transcendent and immanent. As Le Senne reminded us, “l’esprit agissant qui est valeur” (immanence) is indeed an “epiphany of transcendence”.

There remain those who have imagined a subjective – and arbitrary – creation of value, or an objective creation within the framework of universal norms or rules (!), or those who, like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Raymond Polin (1910-2001), have spoken of creative freedom as the source of value creation. Undoubtedly, they missed the essential distinction between reason and intelligence: where “every man coming into the world is enlightened” (Jn I, 9), they remained prisoners of a limited Kantian reason and the obscurantism of the Enlightenment.

Finally, we will have uncovered what seems to us the only possible way of determining values: their foundation, their emergence or discovery, at the heart of man’s tripartite nature. Thus revealed, intrinsic to the nature of things, these values are neither a transcendent nor an immanent given. Once identified, then, these values, which transcend man and are absolutely inaccessible to him, can be likened to the transcendental and, ultimately, to God, the only Absolute True, the only Absolute Good, the only Absolute Beauty.

Footnotes

1. Cf. De justitia apud Aristotelem, Paris, F. Alcan, 1902.[↩]
2. Cf. Peter Singer (1946), Martha Nussbaum (1947)…[↩]
3. François Vanier, “Une conception naturaliste et normative de l’axiologie scientifique contemporaine : analyse et dépassement de la théorie de Laudan”, Papyrus, Université de Montréal, 2011.[↩]
4. The scholar must be aware of the values that guide him and not impose them unduly on his audience; cf. Le Savant et le politique, 1919. For teachers, this means proscribing their own value judgments, so that students are left free to pursue their own research.[↩]
5. Cf. Axiologie 4.0, on axiologie.org.[↩]
6. Thibaud Zuppinger, “Recension – L’axiologie est-elle morte? Review of Axiologie 4.0, proposition pour une nouvelle axiologie by Cyril Arnaud, Implications philosophiques, Nov. 12, 2014; which we partially follow here.[↩]
7. René Le Senne, La destinée personnelle, Flammarion, 1951, ch. XVII. Le salut.[↩]
8. For a person: Roland, ed. J. Bédier, 534, for a thing: aveir valor “to be fit for a certain use” (Roland, 1362); source CNRTL.[↩]
9. L. Lavelle, Traité des valeurs, I, 196, Foulq.-St-Jean,1969.[↩]
10. Quoted, without reference, by Jean Borella, La crise du symbolisme religieux, p. 291.[↩]
11. Generation of Animals, II 3, 736 a, 27-b 12.[↩]
12. New Essays on Human Understanding, Book II, chap. 1, §2.[↩]
13. This is, for example, the famous scholastic Ens et Unum convertuntur (Being and One convert).[↩]
14. It should be remembered that if objectivity did not exist, the notion of subjectivity would have no meaning, but that’s another subject.[↩]
15. Jean Borella, “La beauté est la nourriture de l’âme”, in A. Santacreu (dir) Du religieux dans l’art, Contrelittérature, L’Harmattan, 2012. Also, Jean Borella, Symbolisme et Métaphysique, L’Harmattan, pp. 74 -75.[↩]
16. Jean Borella, op. cit., pp. 57-58.[↩]