Abstract
For Husserl, values are noematic correlates of acts of evaluation, i.e., acts which often are encompassed under “emotions” and “feelings.” These acts and their value-correlates are founded in the sense that they rest on ontifying acts, acts in which a categorial determination of the things in the world is constituted. Appreciation of something requires that there be something to appreciate. Whether Husserl held finally that we first engaged things denuded of all value properties and then slapped value properties upon them seems quite unlikely. Rather he came to emphasize a kind of primacy of a sense of will which caused him to maintain that nothing crosses our experience which is completely value free or indifferent to this elemental sense of will. At this level we have a coincidence of the elemental nisus of passive synthesis and the pre-categorial. Thus, within the existential context of this elemental sense of will, what I have elsewhere called the “general will,” he gave up the theory of “adiaphora,” i.e., value-neutral experiences. This sense of will, which is the teleological nisus of passive synthesis, must be contrasted with evaluation as well as will in the proper sense of the Fiat, i.e., doing (or ceasing to do) something, as an action, promise, decision, resolve, etc.
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References
For a sketch, cf. my “Axiology as the Form of Purity of Heart,” in Philosophy Today (1990) and The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), ch. II, §6 and ch. IV, passim. I would like to thank Professor Samuel IJsseling, Director of the Husserl Archives in Louvain, for permission to quote from Husserl’s Nachlass.
See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Werlehre (1908-1914), Husserliana XXVIII, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). Hereafter Hua XXVIII. Cf. also Alois Roth, Edmund Husserls Ethische Untersuchungen ( The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960 ).
See Hua XXVIII, 90-91. At the outset we may note that Husserl openly acknowledges his debt to Franz Brentano’s “geniale Schrift,” Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955. The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth Schnewind ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 ).
See Franz Brentano, Von Ursprung,27 and 37; trans., 28, 40-41.
For what precedes, see F I 24; and Roth, 93-94; and Hua XXVIII, 93-94.
See F I 24, 296; in Roth, 97.
See ch. iii of my The Person and the Common Good; also, “I, We, and God,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung,ed. Samuel IJsseling (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990).
For an elaboration of a Husserlian theory of community and “we” see my The Person and the Common Life,especially ch. iii.
At the conference, Tom Nenon and others made the proposal that there might well be “dysvaluewholes,” i.e., wholes which are worse than the sum of their parts. Although this might well be difficult to imagine, I believe that Lewis Mumford’s and Rudolf Bahro’s proposal that the modem exterminist “megamachine,” which uniquely brings together elements such as urbanization, megalapolis, militarization, capitalism, and technology might well serve as an example.
Moore believes that Brentano’s Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong has greater affinities with his own views than any other writer. But he maintains that Brentano by implication denies the principle of organic unities, i.e., the equivalent of what Husserl calls unique value-wholes. See G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903/1968), x-xi.
Moore, 27 ff.
so nach der einzigen Autorität, “die hier entscheiden kann, nach der Autorität des Bewusstseins selbst and des ihm innewohnenden Sinnes” (F 112, 42b).
Brentano, Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, 23; see Husserl, e.g., Hua XXVIII, 140; F I 24, 115.
See my The Person and the Common Life,Ch. II and IV.
See F 124, 126-127 and 140-150 for this rich topic. He calls this self-esteem/self-satisfaction, the “condition for the possibility of any further satisfaction… The struggle for an ethical life is the struggle for myself, that I can have respect for myself” F 124, 150.
See Ch. I, The Person and the Common Life.
See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: New American Library, 1958), Book Two, “Rebellion,“ 218-226. See also Edgar Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion (Westport, Conn.: N.D.; originally Prentice Hall, 1940), Ch. VIII. There is much more to be said about the problem of tragedy and surd evils; for a start, cf. my “The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings,” in Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. Mano Daniel and Lester Embree ( Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994 ), 289 - 296.
Moore, 181. 20Moore, 184. 21Moore, 184-185.
wish to express my thanks to Ullrich Melle for showing me the connection between these texts and making possible this discussion.
deal with Husserl’s ideal telos of humanity in Ch. IV of my The Person and the Common Life. The sense in which the ideal as entelechy is uniquely necessary was not pursued there; I am indebted to Rudolf Unger, The Imagination of Reason (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1952) for helping me to see this point.
Blondel’s answer is mortification: Mortification, radical self-abnegation, is the supreme metaphysical experiment, i.e., the choice of a kind of style of living through which one’s metaphysical destiny becomes evident. See Maurice Blondel, Action (1893), trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 353 and 404. Cf. my “Blondel and Husserl: Continuing the Conversation,” forthcoming in Tjdschrift voor Filosofie (1996).
This relatively early (1911) text of (Hua XXVIII, 181-182) is very important for Husserl’s theology and receives a paraphrase in the important late E III 4 MSS (a slice of which we present in the next section) without, however, any major change, except that in the later text he sees the divine ideal as a godly person of a higher order. For more on metaphysics and entelechy, see my “Precis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology,” in Essays in Phenomenological Theology, ed. By Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart (New Albany: SONY, 1986 and “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A Sketch of the Foundations of Husserlian Metaphysics,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. LXVI (1992), No. 2, 189 - 212.
Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 525. It is not clear to me to what extent the late Scheler’s philosophical theology admits of a personal God. The reasons for the unclarity have symmetry with issues in Husserl which raise the same question.
For reflections on monadology, see, e.g., Hua IX, 216, Hua XIV, 290-02; Hua XV, 378-402, 593626;
Cf. my “A Précis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology,” 134-142.
Cf. my “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A Sketch of the Foundations of Husserlian Metaphysics,” 189-212.
See Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America), especially Ch. 5-7; and Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1982); and Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), Ch. 5.
The only place I know where Husserl calls into question the meaningfulness of the pursuit of infinite ideals is in Hua XXVII, 175, n.l.
Charles Hartshorne, “Believing in God’s Existence,” in Meaning Truth and God, ed. Leroy S. Rouner, ed. ( Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1982 ), 19.
I do not think so because the analogous “substance” is “transcendental subjectivity” as the absolute concretum. This is the absolute for transcendental phenomenology. But perhaps religious meditations might give rise to another possibility. Cf. the letter he wrote in 1932 to his dear friend Gustav Albrecht, to whom he confessed that he would very much like to have written a philosophical theological systematics and where the being of God seems to be called a “second” absolute juxtaposed to the first, i.e., transcendental subjectivity. Such a work would deal with “the highest ranging of all questions which not every one can grasp and understand in terms of their proper rigorous and genuine sense”. But these are the metaphysical questions. And they have to do with birth and death, the ultimate being (Sein) of ‘I’ and ‘we’ as objectified humanity; with teleology which ultimately leads back to transcendental subjectivity and its transendental historicity. And it has to do of course with what is primary (oberstes),the being (Sein) of God as the principle of this teleology and the sense of this being in juxtaposition to the being of the first absolute, the being of my transcendental I, and in juxtaposition to the transcendental all-subjectivity disclosing itself in me; this all-subjectivity as the true place of the divine ‘effecting’ (Wirkens) to which the “constitution” of the world belongs as “ours” — but from the standpoint of God is the constant world-creation in us, in our transcendental ultimate true being.’ Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel,vol. IX, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 83-84. Here we see Husserl referring to transcendental subjectivity as juxtaposed to a second absolute, that of God’s own being, having its own standpoint, to which Husserl has access from the first absolute standpoint. How this is possible is unclear.
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Hart, J.G. (1997). The Summum Bonum and Value-Wholes: Aspects of a Husserlian Axiology and Theology. In: Hart, J.G., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of Values and Valuing. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2608-5_12
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