Abstract
There are three steps in my description of the ground-problem of value: First, Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of reason is based on the systematic loss and phenomenological recovery of the intuitive evidence of the lifeworld. But if letter symbols are essential to formalizing abstraction, as Klein’s de-sedimentation of Vieta’s institution of modern algebra shows, then the ultimate substrates upon which formalization rests cannot be “individuals” in Husserl’s sense. The consequence of the essentiality of the letter symbols to formalization is that no direct reference to intuitive evidence of individuals is possible from formal structures. Second, the crisis of reason in Marx’s Capital on commodities contains a parallel analysis of the contradictory relation between formalism and evidence. The value-structure of capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and imposes a homogeneous standard on social representation of value such that quantitative values are not grounded in the experience of use which entails that the system of general value becomes a mere aggregate. Third, the problem of value, or formal axiology, is the core of a teleological convergence between phenomenology and Marxism. A short phenomenological description of the experience of value shows that practical activities generate valuations that are experienced with an intensity through which they aim toward social representation. The conclusion is that the social representation of value in capitalist society intervenes into the constitution of the community by the intensity of individuals’ value-experience to reduce its system of value to an unthematized simple aggregate of value-quantities.
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Notes
The pertinence of Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value to the phenomenology of values has been noted by James Hart (1997a, pp. 1–2).
Klein’s original term was symbolische Abstraktion, whose English equivalent is simply “symbolic abstraction,” and this is the term used in the essay Phenomenology and the History of Science (Klein 1985). Nonetheless, Eva Brann’s translation of Klein’s text used “symbol-generating abstraction” because the prior term was ambiguous in that, while the conceptual abstraction that produces the new symbolic object is clearly an activity of thought, and thus an abstraction, the symbolic object of that conceptual intention is not itself an abstraction. Since Klein approved this clarification, I will use the amended term from this point on (Brann 2011, p. xxvii, footnote 3; Hopkins 2011, p. 109).
I already pointed out in Technique and Enlightenment: Limits of Instrumental Reason that the relationship of formal logic to individuals is a simple presupposition, without appreciating the critique of Husserl that this implied (Angus 1984, pp. 35–8). Burt Hopkins’ preliminary studies for his meticulous text on the relation between Klein’s work and Husserl’s phenomenology, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics, revived my interest in Klein, which occasioned my understanding that the references to Klein in Technique and Enlightenment similarly did not appreciate the significance of his work for a revision of the task of phenomenology (Angus 1984, pp. 7–9). However, the account of the “presupposition of individuals” in that text already demanded that Husserl’s account of the crisis of the sciences be supplemented with an understanding of “technique” as a specific adumbration of individuals to “abstract evidences which […] are isolated ends pursued within the context of typifying situational knowledge in everyday life” (Angus 1984, p. 53). This grounded an appropriation of the work of Max Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt in a critique of instrumental reason. An essay on Husserl and Klein stimulated by Hopkins’ work on Klein pulled together these threads in order to argue for the significance of a “transcendental history of reification” in which “unlike formal abstraction, emergent universalizations are not nodes within a system but points of origination” (Angus 2005, p. 208).
The origin of the discipline of axiology is still debated. Most histories refer to Eduard von Hartmann, Grundriss der Axiologie (1908), but Wilbur Urban in his Valuation: Its Nature and Laws (1909) both claims to have constructed the term himself in two articles for The Philosophical Review in 1902 and also refers to Christian Ehrenfels’ System der Werttheorie (1897). J. N. Findlay attributes the English term to Urban as a translation of Werttheorie whose origins reached back to the Austrian economist von Neumann and philosophers Ehrenfels and Meinong (Findlay 1970, p. 1).
Jan Patočka has developed Husserl’s concept of sacrifice in a direction that is problematic in the present context. He argues that its mythico-religious origin shows that sacrifice is a binding of oneself to something higher and therefore that the apparent loss is simultaneously, and more importantly, a gain, such that the term “sacrifice” is in the end a misnomer. While it is true that the higher value is not created by the person, it is nevertheless affirmed by the person in a significant manner that I have called “intensity.” Intensity involves the assertion that the value will have a place in the person’s lifeworld. It is thus quite possible that the binding to a higher value comes at the cost of the life of the person—and therefore also the other personal values of that person. If so, it would seem that Patočka’s revocation of the term “sacrifice” is not warranted: the binding to a higher may also be a sacrifice of not only the lower but of other higher values. I say this cautiously in light of Patočka’s own sacrifice, not to disagree with him about the joy of binding to a higher value, but to say that, even so, sacrifice is not revoked because what is lost would only be “lower.” This “lower” is the very condition for the assertion of “highness,” not only this higher but all other highers to which the person is open and whose intensity propagates (Patočka 1989, p. 336).
It has been recognized by Phillip Blosser that the problem of human agency is a difficult one for Scheler’s purely objective theory of value (Blosser 1997, pp. 163–4).
This essay is a revised version of a keynote lecture given to the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, June 2013.
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This paper is drawn from a research project supported with research time by the Shadbolt Fellowship (Simon Fraser University, 2012) and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant #435-2012-0209.
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Angus, I. Critique of Reason and the Theory of Value: Groundwork of a Phenomenological Marxism. Husserl Stud 33, 63–80 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-016-9200-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-016-9200-1