Axiology in philosophy

Axiology is the philosophical study of value. As a philosophical area, it was created only in the 19th century. Your representatives – eg. As Oskar Kraus – find their question already in the goods ethics of the Greek philosophers , although one of the most influential representatives of the philosophy of value, Max Scheler , his theory has developed in opposition to the goods ethics. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics, philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of worth, or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used by Paul Lapie, in 1902, and Eduard von Hartmann, in 1908.

Axiology studies mainly two kinds of values: ethics and aesthetics. Ethics investigates the concepts of “right” and “good” in individual and social conduct. Aesthetics studies the concepts of “beauty” and “harmony.” Formal axiology, the attempt to lay out principles regarding value with mathematical rigor, is exemplified by Robert S. Hartman’s science of value.

Terms
If two values are in conflict and can not be realized without jeopardizing one another, then the axiology speaks of a value antinomy. Today’s everyday and nonphilosophical technical language (legal, sociological…) use of the value concept, which corresponds to no philosophically elaborated modern theory of value, has led to numerous compositions: The conflict arising from conflicting value concepts can in Wertverfall (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann), loss of value (Rupert Lay) or value synthesis (Helmut Klages) result (see also value change). value blindness refers to the lack of feeling for certain values.

History
Between the 5th and 6th centuries BC, it was important in Greece to be knowledgeable if you were to be successful. Philosophers began to recognize that differences existed between the laws and morality of society. Socrates believed that knowledge had a vital connection to virtue, making morality and democracy closely intertwined. Socrates’ student, Plato furthered the belief by establishing virtues which should be followed by all. With the fall of the government, values became individual, causing skeptic schools of thought to flourish, ultimately shaping a pagan philosophy that is thought to have influenced and shaped Christianity. During the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas made the distinction between natural and supernatural (theological) virtues. This concept led philosophers to distinguish between judgments based on fact and judgments based on values, creating division between science and philosophy.

Historically, the philosophy of value dates back to the adoption of the concept of value of the national economy; in Immanuel Kant, for example, the talk of the “absolute value” of good will represents such a metaphorical adoption of the concept of economic value. The value concept already plays an important role in the ethics of Jakob Friedrich Fries, but Lotze was the point of reference of later value philosophies, Since the 1890s, the concept of value by the direct Lotze reception of George Santayana and others in the United States is common and played a major role in the late-moral writing of John Dewey, so that for the expressionvalue in English-speaking countries gave the same everyday-language uses as in German-speaking areas.

Lotze took an objective philosophy of value and attributed values to a mode of their own: the “validity”. Subjective theories of value, on the other hand, proceed from the value judgment as the basis of the value: the judgmental man establishes a relation between his scale and an object, which represents the value of the thing.

If the measure of value is based on a feeling of pleasure through the satisfaction of needs, then a psychological value theory arises. If values are granted only relative importance and validity, this leads to value relativism as a special form of relativism.

The most prominent value theories of the 19th and 20th centuries were:

the Neo-Kantianism of the Badische Schule by Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband, who attribute to the values a transcendent status and assign to them the mode of validation, which is to be distinguished from the mode of (empirical) being. The values form their own realm and have absolute validity, exist but not in the mode of being.
the life philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who defines the world view as the result of esteem as “physiological demands for the preservation of a certain kind of life” and values. This appreciation is expressed in the will to power. Therefore he demands a revaluation of all values.
the Austrian philosophy of value of Franz Brentano and his disciples Christian von Ehrenfels, Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong
the neovitalism of Eduard von Hartmann
the British intuitionism of George Edward Moore, Hastings Rashdall (1858-1924) and William David Ross
the pragmatism of William James, John Dewey and Clarence Irving Lewis
the Wertphilosophie of value phenomenology of Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, which follows Husserl’s early phenomenology. Scheler invokes the sense of value: this manifests itself in the intuitive loving (as an expression of the valuable) or hate (as an expression of the illegitimate) of a thing, before their meaning was rationalized. The values themselves form an empire of material qualities (Scheler), which is independent of being.
as well as the neurealism of Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957).

Windelband explained the philosophy of value to the critical science of the common values. In that, it differs from the exact sciences, which explore and systematize natural laws and special phenomena. The philosophy of value forms the true center of philosophy.

The mathematically exact value science was at the center of the work of Robert S. Hartman. Through the axiom of the science of values, which he developed, it was possible to build up an exact science of values independently of different ethical moral values.

The value theory as a comprehensive philosophical approach, as it has been trained in Lotze, Hartmann and the southwest German neo-Kantianism, u. a. sharply criticized by Martin Heidegger. It is no longer represented today as a philosophical theory, although it still has supporters in jurisprudence (for example in the influential school of Rudolf Smend) and even the analysis of the value judgment is quite a special topic of analytical philosophy. Some representatives of the philosophy of value was the value philosophy of the 19th and early 20th century, however, as the foundation of the other philosophical disciplines, as they laid claim as the basis for other areas such as logic,Ethics, epistemology, philosophy of law, philosophy of culture, philosophy of religion, social philosophy, political philosophy, economics and aesthetics to serve.

Context
The explicit reflection on values, however, precedes the notion of axiology and can be traced back to David Hume, who is primarily concerned with moral and aesthetic values and develops an anti-metaphysical and nominalist theory of values. However, Hume’s theory defines values as principles of moral and aesthetic judgments, a vision that will be criticized by Friedrich Nietzsche and his genealogical conception of values, according to which not only aesthetic and moral judgments depend on values, but that even scientific truths and everyday observations respond to certain values and ways of valuing (Voluntary Irrationalism, close to Arthur Schopenhauer, and contrary to the Enlightenment promoted byImmanuel Kant).

Before them, in order of importance would be Kant’s philosophy, which would place the possibility of an Ethics in the foundation of the Subject and of the Substantial Reason (and not in the mere instrumental rationality of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism). For Kant there can only be ethics if there is Freedom, a condition of the necessary Autonomy, against the imposed Heteronomy.

So for Kant, – against the conservative Hume -, the World of Necessity is the World of Physics, that is, the World of Mechanics of Newton(Kant was a physicist rather than a professor of philosophy). Kant, a critical reader of Hume, rescues Newton’s Physics, but elaborates a Subject Theory as the ultimate Foundation of his philosophical system (“Gründ”, in German), an idea developed later by G. Fichte and later by GFW Hegel. For the purposes of an Ethics, it is not his beloved Newton Physics that Kant needs here, but the Regulatory Ideas of a Reason (Substantial), which uses Understanding (categories of instrumental reason to build scientific knowledge) and Sensitivity (the empirical, the sensitive experience). Thus Kant reconciles the scientific and philosophical Reason with the possibility of practical Emancipation (political and ethical). The great values in Kant will no longer be fossilized in the old, religious-inspired Metaphysics,

On the other hand and from a different discursive matrix, Marx from Criticism to Political Economy develops a critique of value, which goes beyond criticism of the usual mystification between use value and exchange value. Marx thus develops a critique of the economic concept of value to largely base his criticisms and socio-economic analysis. Certainly the price is not the value, but the reading of this social critique is neither religious nor moralistic, nor metaphysical, but with scientific-social pretensions. Of course, Marxist criticism, although part of philosophical elements, goes beyond them, because it is located from the socio-historical elements that allow it. Marx and then Marxism (in its different discursive developments), proposes (n) a theory and a praxis, that part of his theory of history (usually known as Historical Materialism, in its different variants), as well as from its sociological conception that part of a modern theory of “class struggle”, to explain the different hegemonies and forms of domination, in the different concrete historical formations and in the most general modes of production. (For example: Slave Production Mode, Feudal Production Mode, Asian Production Mode, Despotic-Tax Production Mode, Capitalist Production Mode, Bureaucratic Mode, Socialist Production Mode, etc. The fundamental discursive contribution Marx was his criticism of the modern phenomenon of alienation of the great majority of the world population under the capitalist world-system. Thus, the “merchandise fetishism” arises,

Previously and since there was a human economic surplus, there are commercial relationships. But it is with capitalism as a hegemonic mode of production, and especially with industrial capitalism, and of course with current financial capitalism, that human relations are generally conditioned by merchandise-form. This means that the vast majority of current social values have a mercantilist origin. Thus, the human being, whose work is the social origin of all wealth, is split from this genealogy, from this social genesis, and ends up being worth less, than its production, which is the merchandise. These collective cultural operations are sometimes done very subtly and taking advantage of collective unconscious elements (review Freud and the contributions of Psychoanalysis here), because the human being is dedicated to the reproduction of his immediate life, through his alienated work, therefore, he cannot know the structural origin of his collective alienation. Thus, the solution would not only be ethical and discursive, but theoretical and political practice, so that you can transform your current alienated social condition.)

Contemporary Axiology
Contemporary axiology, not only deals with addressing positive values, but also negative (or anti-values), analyzing the principles that allow us to consider something to be valuable or not, and considering the foundations of such a judgment. The investigation of a theory of values has found a special application in ethics and aesthetics, areas where the concept of value has a specific relevance. Some philosophers such as the Germans Heinrich Rickert or Max Scheler have made different proposals to develop an appropriate hierarchy of values. In this sense, one can speak of an “axiological ethic”, which was developed, mainly, by Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann himself. From an ethical point of view, axiology is one of the two main foundations of ethics along with ethics.

Values
According to the traditional conception, the values can be objective or subjective. Examples of objective values include good, truth or beauty, being goals themselves. Subjective values are considered, however, when they represent a means to an end (in most cases characterized by a personal desire).

In addition, the values can be fixed (permanent) or dynamic (changing). Values can also be differentiated based on their importance and can be conceptualized in terms of a hierarchy, in which case some will have a higher position than others.

The fundamental problem that develops from the very origins of axiology, towards the end of the 19th century, is that of the objectivity or subjectivity of all values. Max Scheler will be placed in the first of the two positions. Subjectivism will oppose, from the beginning, this approach. And he will understand – in the old way of Protágoras – that the strictly human is the measure of all things, of what is worth and of what is not worth, and of the same scale of values, without sustenance in external reality. Alfred Jules Yesterday, in language, truth and logic, his early work will leave value judgments out of the question, because they do not comply with the empirical verification principle. In this way, the ethical and the aesthetic are nothing more than “expressions” of the spiritual life of the subject. Not a verifiable uptake of the external world.

From Nietzsche’s point of view, however, there is no essential difference between what the traditional conception calls “value judgments” and scientific judgments, since both are based on valuations that have been historically configured and that constitute themselves. same specific ways of interpreting and living. Likewise, there is also no essential difference between judging and acting, since both things consist in the deployment of certain forces that by definition are forces that value and whose movement also depends on previous assessments.

Within philosophical thinking there is a central point that is how we want to become in the future, in a better state. In order to move from a current state to a better state it is necessary to first understand that to make improvements we have to base them on certain key points. In thought we have always called them the philosophical or existential axiology, that is, values, which are those based on the action that can lead us to a better state tomorrow; This is because the values give meaning and coherence to our actions.

The nature of value raises the debate among scientists of different disciplines. It is a complex problem that requires a philosophical specification. Axiology is the science that studies values and they have a philosophical connotation. In the article, the history of axiology is presented briefly and various interpretations of the concept of value are presented, analyzing these from the perspective of Marxist philosophy. The dialectical-materialist response with respect to value is highlighted, stating that this is a social phenomenon, that has significance in the context of the subject-object relationship and that expresses the needs and interests of human beings or of all nature.