Values (5) Philosophical Definition - Existentialism

As an academic ideology in America, post-modernism has its roots in the European secular philosophical tradition of existentialism.  Being and Time (1927), by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and Being and Nothingness (1943), by the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, are considered the major founding treatises of existentialism. The concept of values is central to their existentialism; but, curiously, neither philosopher defines the concept in a straightforward way in these major works. Nonetheless, what they mean by values is quite clear and important. We start with the simplest definition.

According to these philosophers (but in my own words): Values are feelings that accompany all experience.

By experience, the existentialists mean all experiences of which we are aware (that is, of which are conscious). These experiences include all thoughts - each and every one of them, no matter how unemotional or unfeeling our thoughts seemingly might be.

We easily understand what the philosophers are saying when we watch a movie, for example, which makes us laugh; or when we are at the bedside of a sick child, which makes us sad. Feelings also accompany experiences that we are not conscious of feeling, only thinking. When I calculate a sum of numbers, I might not be conscious of having feelings, but - according to these philosophers - my entire experience of calculating is suffused with emotion. Similarly, I might be engaged in cold, rational scientific research, for instance, evaluating the computer readout of digits from a instrument in an experiment; but here, too, feelings would be completely involved with my rational thinking.

By values, the existentialists also mean something more subtle than I have expressed in the previous discussion. They mean that all our experiences of the natural and social worlds come to us valued as to their worth, that is, how attractive they are or how much something should be avoided. Consider all the objects, events, and processes that are in our experience: for example, the noise of a jet airplane overhead, the face of a man, a baseball flying toward our baseball glove, a large book, a plate of food, a sports car travelling fast, a sentence spoken by a student, the touch of clothing against your arm, the upward lift and downward pull of an elevator, the babble of crowds in Times Square, a flash of eyes in a bar, doing the laundry, and so on.  If we would experience all these things neutrally, we would experience each of them as having the same lack of importance and lack of usefulness to us; but we experience none of these elements of our experience with such neutrality. Each item is experienced by us as a complex of feelings. These complexes of feeling distinguish one experience from another as much as do the "objective" properties of the objects (or events) we experience.

We might love fast cars, for instance, and experience our driving a fast sports car with pleasure, thrill, and fear, all at once. On the other hand, we might experience our first encounter of a food - say, uncooked squid -, which we had never seen or eaten, with trepidation.

What the existentialists say, about value, is that each of us lives within a world of values. There are values of many kinds, all of which are feelings (in some sense), rather than perceptions or cognitive thoughts: emotion (e.g., happiness, fright), expectation, alienation, conscience (e.g., duty, guilt), and confusion are values.

We never experience the world of objects, events, persons, and social relationships in which we live as those items might be described and measured by scientists. We can never experience a fast sports car, as might be described by a physicist or an engineer. The engineer might describe the sports car as a metallic object of certain physical dimensions, of unloaded and loaded weights, with an engine that consumes 18 gallons of gasoline while travelling 360 miles at an average of 55 miles per hour. Such an object can exist as a construct only within scientific theory and engineering practice; but it cannot so exist within our experience, void of feeling.

We should conclude by mentioning that the values which we experience are precognitive and determinative. By precognitive, I mean values exist as part of our experience before we are able to think about them or be conscious of them. By determinative, I mean that values set up the structure of our conscious experience (for instance, by separating some experience from us as "objective," and some experience as "subjective").

I have not discussed why this concept of values in existentialism is important in that philosophy or what important consequences it has had for general intellectual thought. I have not, for instance, indicated where the existentialists thought values come from. I have not indicated whether values pre-exist language or are thoroughly bound up with language. I have not indicated whether we can ever "transcend" our values. I have not indicated whether values "exist" outside our experience in some universal (or absolute) way. These are all important and complicated issues much beyond my capability to explain in a brief article of definition.

We can conclude, however, by pointing to the direction in which the existentialists would answer these questions about values. They would point to the concepts of "culture" (even though they might not use that word and would, of course, since they are philosophers, differ over its use) and "situation". Culture is the accumulated values held by a people who share a culture. People obtain their values from their culture, but also infuse their values into their culture from their own experience (this is circular). A situation is an act or action in a natural environment and within social relationships in which a person is involved at any time. All of the time, while we are alive, we are situated in acts that result from our intentions. Existentialists say that values are relative to our situations and further relative to our culture.

We shall more to say about culture in another article.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

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This discussion is drawn from (in order of publication) Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus  (Mikrokosmus, 1869; Hamilton trans., 1885), Vol. I, Bk, II, ch. V, and Bk. III, "Conclusion"; Edmund Husserl, Ideas (Ideen ..., 1913; Gibson trans., 1931), ch. 28, 37, 95, 116, 148; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927; Macquarrie and Robinson trans., 1962), esp. H63-66, H69, H79-80, H150, H287; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (L'être et le néant, 1943; Barnes trans., 1956), pt. three, ch. 3, pt. four, ch. 1.

Comments

[Iam]

I apologize for not putting the page references in my citation of Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson). References are to the pagination of the later German editions, per M&R's index. H. begins, "The Worldhood of the World," H63-66, distinguishing things of the world and things invested with value (worth - wert); this is Lotze's distinction (Microcosmus), that is to say, feelings. Then he goes to argue that we have no access to things of nature. The world in which Dasein dwells (Dasein is being-in-the-world) are things invested with value. Then H launches into his depiction of environmentality, which is things closest to hand. "Close to hand" and "ready to hand" are values (feelings). See also H69. Heidegger's discussion of how the world is encountered (how things are let be ready to hand) relies upon the concept of signs. A sign is a value or worth (Lotze: feeling). See H79-80. H's discussion of appropriation (encountering things within an already established interpretation) relies upon the concept of fore-sight. Foresight is a value. H150. The concept of value appears in the key discussion of guilt; "they" are a value. H287.

Heidegger was one source of cultural relativism, though one might not give his philosophy that tag. For some readers, perhaps, it helps to make H's philosophy not seem subjective (which he would deny) to think of Dasein's world as a group world of values shared by others. In the first half of the 20th century, many secular European and American thinkers moved to a philosophical stance (ideology?) of cultural relativism. In the U.S., Boas and his students in anthropology were a popular source of scientific cultural relativism; but I do not think they were the main inspiration for the cultural relativism in post-modernism, post-structuralist thought after 1960. The source of that was existentialism, specifically Heidegger and Sartre, which influenced literature and criticism.