Abstract
Philosophy was born from the need to provide answers to several theoretically relevant questions, namely, (1) concerning the search for truth and the value grading of the forms of existence, (2) concerning the relationship between man and the universe as a whole and between man and the values he has created, and (3) concerning man’s specific way of being, which Montaigne named “the Human Condition.” Values allow man to transcend his natural condition by his human condition: philosophical thinking applied to the fascinating world of values works as “one of the threads of man’s existential self-interpretation in existence” and, at the same time, as “a thread of the Human Condition itself, without which the human being would not be human” ‘ Starting from these considerations, I shall try to resuscitate the attempt made by Lucian Blaga and D. D. Ro§ca in Romanian philosophy between the two world wars2 to give value the prerogative of a central concept in philosophy, to reinterpret the ontological problems in an axiological perspective, and, implicitly, to trace the coordinates of an axio-centric ontology of the human condition. Such a project is in close agreement with the program of “philosophical reconstruction” initiated by the World Phenomenology Institute — which, by its theme “Phenomenology of Man and the Human Condition,” proves to be a common ground for the “cross-cultural” philosophical dialogue.
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Notes
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Philosophy in Man’s Self-interpretation-in-existence,” Phenomenology Information Bulletin 5 (October 1981), p. 4.
Lucian Blaga, “Trilogy of Values” (1939—42); D. D. Rosca “Tragic Existence” (1934).
Camil Petrescu, “Edmund Husserl,” in Istoria filosofiei moderne, vol. 3 (Bucharest: Societatea Románá de Filosofie, 1938), pp. 375–427.
Edmund Husserl, Husserliana, vol. 8, Erste Philosophie, pt. 2 (1959), p. 157.
Alois Roth, “Husserls ethische Untersuchungen,” Phaenomenologica 7 (1960), pp. xii–xiii.
Dallas Laskey, “Husserl as a Humanistic Moralist,” Phenomenology Information Bulletin 7 (October 1983), p. 40.
I refer to the manuscripts M III, 3,5 and K III, 2—K, III, 26; I could also mention the set of manuscripts E from the Husserl Archives of Louvain which discuss the theme of the “possible life based on practical reason” and of the “free development of personality” — two axiological problems of utmost importance nowadays.
Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik (Halle, 1929), p. 5.
A-T. Tymieniecka, “Metaphysics of the Human Condition and the Creative Origin of Sense”; see also ‘The Praise of Life: Metaphysics of Life and of the Human Condition: A Treatise ‘in a nutshell,’” Phenomenology Information Bulletin 6 (October 1982), pp.81—96.
A-T. Tymieniecka, “The Theme: The Human Being in Action,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1978), pp. xii–xiii. As Tymieniecka has indicated, the results of the transcendental and formal-ontological stages of phenomenology are not to be rejected, but rather reinterpreted in the third stage and placed within the wider framework of contextual phenomenology.
A-T. Tymieniecka, “The Praise of Life: Metaphysics of Life and of the Human Conditon,” pp. 22, 89.
J. M. Broekman, “Sozialphilosophie in Phänomenologie und Marxismus,” in Phäno-menologie und Marxismus, vol. 3 (Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 13. Editor’s note: In this interpretation of Tymieniecka’s thought, the author speaks for himself.
Angela Ales Bello, “The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition,” Phenomenology Information Bulletin 7 (October 1983), p. 18.
This viewpoint is presented in my Axiology and Human Condition (Bucharest: Politicä, 1972); see also my “Value-revaluation and the Axiological Perspective in Philosophy,” Journal of Value Inquiry, no. 2 (1969), pp. 100—12; “Nietzsche versus Marx in Modern Culture,” in Crisis and Consciousness, ed. R. M. Fans (Amsterdam: B. R. GrÜner Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 33—54; “Rationality and the Basis of the Value Judgment,” Journal of Value Inquiry, no. 2 (1978), pp. 126—33; “The Problem of Happiness. An Axiological Approach,” Revolutiónary World, pp. 37—39 (1980), pp. 225—38; and Value-Fundamental Concept of the Philosophy of Culture, in Proceedings of the 17th World Congress of Philosophy (Montreal, 1983).
Cf. A-T. Tymieniecka, ‘The Creative Self and the Other in Man’s Self-Interpretation,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 6 (1977); see also ‘The Praise of Life: Metaphysics of Life and of the Human Condition,” Phenomenology Information Bulletin 6 (October 1982), pp. 93-94.
Cf. Karl Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, in Scrien din tinerete (Bucharest: Politicà, 1968), p. 579.
In a theoretical discussion of freedom, five types of solutions have been proposed in the history of philsophical thinking, corresponding to the phases of the progressive process of getting freedom: (a) freedom as a passive yielding to the spontaneous impulses of the self; (b) the neutralization of this passive yielding through conquering the independence of motives; (c) the rise above this attitude which “shuts off” the horizon of values, through man’s capacity of carrying on the voluntary action apt to model existence; (d) the replacement of the vainglory of absolute freedom in itself with the internal freedom of choice of the individual engaged in concrete situations; (e) finally, the transition from subjective (internal) freedom to its objective realization in actu, concomitantly oriented by the understanding of necessity and the active adhesion to the promotion of values.
Husserl characterized value as the objective correlate of an intentional act of feeling (GemÜtsakt). From this phenomenological point of view, values, as intentional objects, are stable structures of experience and can be investigated in their costitutional development, in the “horizon of community”, where “the self-determination of the T is a part of the self-determination of civilization itself.” According to Husserl, each individual “operates the choices within man’s scale of values, but the criteria are beyond himself"; “feeling is subjective while value is objective” (Aloïs Roth, Husserls ethische Untersuchungen [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1960], F I, 28; F124; pp. 92,150,15).
A-T. Tymieniecka, “The Theme: The Human Being in Action,” Analecta Husser-liana, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1978), p. x.
K. Marx and F. Engels, Opère, vol. 1 (Bucarest: E.S.P.L.P., 1967), p. 421.
Veda Cobb-Stevens, “Contextual Phenomenology and the Problem of Creativity,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1978), p. 173.
A-T. Tymieniecka “The Prototype of Action: Ethical or Creative?,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 183, 209.
Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 192.
A-T. Tymieniecka, Why is There Something rather than Nothing? (Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., 1966), p. 19.
A-T. Tymieniecka, “The Theme — The Phenomenology of Man and the Human Condition,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 14 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983), pp. xvi–xvii.
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GrÜnberg, L. (1986). From Phenomenology to an Axio-Centric Ontology of the Human Condition. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Phenomenology of man and of the Human Condition. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4596-8_14
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