§1. Human Pathos
Pathos. In English this is not a term that would normally call to mind the project of the human sciences, scholarly inquiry, or phenomenology. Yet it names something that lies very much at the intersection of technology, nature, and life. (1) For pathos, as Hegel might say, is that point where nature passes over into life, and I as shall try to show here, the significance of this passage remains a deeply contested point precisely in those inquiries - the human sciences and philosophy - that try to come to terms with the destiny of technology. To speak of human pathos is to speak of that which touches us, of our capacity for passivity, of what we undergo. And should not the project of science, born of the human instinct for autonomy and expressing the power of freedom, be deeply concerned with what may limit its Promethean striving? Those sciences for whom "human" is simply a natural-kind term may see no special importance in the dimension of pathos: to be affected by what is other, to be "determined," is, for such sciences, simply the fate of every entity in causal interaction, obeying laws to which it can only be indifferent, toward which it can take no stand. (2) But those sciences for whom the term "human" retains something of its normative character, the human sciences, cannot ignore the complications for their own scientific practice that flow from the fact that the human being is neither simply an inert variable in causal explanations nor the supremely rational creator of all he surveys, but rather a being who undergoes its world - a creature who is affected by things, moved by them, afflicted; who suffers, endures, and remains exposed. Because of this, the problem of method is incomparably more troublesome in the human sciences than it is elsewhere, a fact to which phenomenology has always tried to do justice. It has, however, not yet met with great success.
Before looking at the problems phenomenology encounters when it tries to provide a "logic" of the human sciences that does justice to human pathos, let me call upon it to help us see why this theme - the kind of passivity inscribed in the passions, in what we undergo - is not simply a topic for the human sciences, but their root soil. For phenomenology insists on the difference between this sort of passivity and that in which something is "acted upon" causally to produce an effect. Whereas the latter, as Kant pointed out, makes sense only in a space of reciprocal casual interaction (Wechselwirkung), and so in such a way that what is passive is in turn, and simultaneously, active, the passivity of the passions is not reciprocal. To undergo, to be moved, touched, affected; to suffer: these are not forms of interaction with the other but of exposure to the other, modes of being that take place not in a space of causes but in a space of reasons, (3) a normative space in which I am not constrained merely to react but am open to learning. Just this distinction is voiced in the ancient Greek saying, pathe mathos - learning through suffering - and in a certain sense it is because undergoing can be learning that human beings can become selves. If undergoing is a way of being addressed, of being called upon to take a stand, then to be an I is to be capable of exposure to the world in this way, such that what is undergone is not lost in a nexus of cause and effect but is registered and inscribed, however dimly, in a character. Phenomenologically, it is impossible to say whether the freedom to take a stand on what one undergoes (to learn) makes exposure in this human sense possible, or whether this being exposed is the condition of freedom itself. They belong inseparably together. As Heidegger puts it, Dasein is constituted "equiprimordially" by Befindlichkeit and Verstehen. (4)
Heidegger's account of Befindlichkeit - of the kind of pathos he calls "thrownness" - contains what is phenomenologically crucial in this theme: to be a creature of passion is not merely to allow a "mood" to provide some "subjective coloring" to things already simply there in the world; it is rather that whereby the world and all that appears in it can matter to us at all. (5) To suffer or undergo is not a momentary event but the very modality in which things as a whole and in particular make a claim upon us, concern us in some way, take on significance. While a purely rational being, lacking pathos, might be able to register things (as a computer or a photographic plate might), it could not respond to them since it would lack motivation to do so. Things could not move such a being since nothing could matter to it; such a being could not inhabit a meaningful world. Rationality, surely a necessary condition, is nevertheless not a sufficient condition for meaning. An account of the "affects" - love and hate, rage, joy, boredom, fear, longing and so on - is thus not an appendix to the real work of explaining the "mind" in "cognitive science"; it is the window onto a human mind's most fundamental condition. As yet, however, it has been hard to look through that window.
If the modalities of the pathetic - of undergoing, exposure, passivity - are the ways in which things variously matter to us, we may speak generally of human pathos as the ontological dimension that includes them all, a dimension inseparable from the constitution of meaning as that which distinguishes the specifically "human" as being-in-and-of-the-world. Because dwelling within a space of meaning, rather than merely inhabiting an environment, is the exclusive prerogative of a pathetic being, we may not neglect that dimension in favor of pure "reason" when we try to understand ourselves as standing, in Aristotle's phrase, between beast and god. But why is it so difficult to think this dimension in its own terms? Why do the customary, mostly cognitivist, approaches conceal as much as they reveal? Why do we continually fall back such models of human meaning no matter how often phenomenology reminds us of their limits? Here Nietzsche can help us toward an answer, since he reminds us that human pathos is itself exposed to a malady; Befindlichkeit can itself undergo a pathological condition, a disease; can suffer a collapse of meaning: nihilism.
That nihilism belongs to the dimension of pathos is evident in Nietzsche's description of it as "the feeling of valuelessness." (6) By terming it a feeling of valuelessness, Nietzsche indicates, further, that nihilism is a deformity of this dimension: in it things lose their meaning, they no longer claim us, nothing matters any longer. Is there anything to be learned from the suffering of nihilism? Consider Nietzsche's diagnosis: Nietzsche understands nihilism, the pathology of meaning, to be an affliction of values; we undergo nihilism because "the highest values de-value themselves." Normally, meaning arises because things appear to have value in light of goals and purposes that I posit from my point of view. These goals and purposes themselves take on the character of values that ultimately come to measure the worth of my existence itself. When they fail, as in nihilism, meaning collapses. From this, says Nietzsche, we should learn a "revaluation of all values." The sick man of today, with the life-denying values ("ascetic ideals") that have hitherto perversely measured his existence, must undergo this revaluation by going under, must learn, through suffering, the meaning of the earth, which speaks in the life-affirming values of will-to-power. (7)
Nietzsche's prescription for dealing with the nihilism afflicting the body of Western culture draws upon the passions rather than reason. With his "pathos of distance" the strong human being is to posit a new "order of rank" among values by enacting it, by "giving style to one's existence" according to a "great mood," an aesthetic "taste" that shapes one's drives, feelings, and instincts into an individual whole. (8) This gaya scienza is poetry; there is no "science" of value in which reason polices the validity-claims made by competing values, since, as Nietzsche puts it, "faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism." (9) And yet Nietzsche's heirs - or at least those, like Husserl, who occupied chairs of philosophy in Germany at the turn of the last century - had a very different prescription. For them it is precisely by restoring to reason her rights over the dimension of human pathos that a theory of meaning, a scientific antidote to nihilism, is to be achieved. (10) All agree that, as Husserl would write, baldly, in 1935, "the European nations are sick." (11) Already in 1911 Husserl had noted that "the spiritual need of our time has, in fact, become unbearable." (12) Like Nietzsche, Husserl sees this sickness as a crisis of values, and, like Nietzsche, Husserl sees values as deeply connected with the human pathos - what he calls the Gemütssphäre in which we are affected by things touched, moved, in which things matter to us. But Husserl's diagnosis does not follow Nietzsche's.
According to Husserl, the impasse in Western culture has resulted not from reason exercising its hegemony over passion and value but from a failure to exercise the kind of reason - "axiological reason" - appropriate to passion and value. Husserl's prescription calls for something like a critique of axiological reason, a reflection on its nature and possibility. (13) Husserl therefore turns to a phenomenology of affective life not for its own sake but because he hopes to construct a rational theory of value (Wertlehre). For this reason, the contribution of the Gemütssphäre to the constitution of being human, of a meaningful world, is from the start filtered through a cognitivist lens that distorts its significance. In what follows, I hope to show that the lectures on ethics and theory of value that Husserl delivered periodically between 1908 and 1914 are marked by an irresolvable tension between phenomenological analysis and analogical reasoning, a tension that undermines the very notion of a Wertlehre. I argue that we must reject the analogy in favor of the phenomenology, if we hope to profit from what a phenomenology of human pathos has to teach us. (14)
§2. The Analogical Approach to Affective Life
Husserl approaches the Gemütssphäre by way of an analogy between "logical" or "theoretical" reason (which embraces the laws of cognitive experience, governed by the norm of truth) and what he calls "axiological" reason (which, by analogy, would embrace the laws of appetitive and affective experience, governed by the norm of the good). Why does Husserl proceed analogically here? His motivation is itself introduced by an analogy: just as logical reason emerged in the ancient world as a means for confronting theoretical scepticism, so "in the modern period" nihilism so threatens practical life that there is an "ever more urgent striving" after a "system of absolute and pure principles of practical reason" (Hua XXVIII:11). By analogy, then, just as logical reason secured the claims of cognitive experience against scepticism in the ancient world, so axiological reason should secure the claims of affective/evaluative experience against nihilism in the modern world. (15) Much of Husserl's text is given over to developing this analogy - for instance, to rehearsing the arguments against theoretical psychologism so as to motivate similar arguments against value-theoretical empiricism and naturalism. However, gathered under the generic term Werten ("valuing"), the text also contains elements of a phenomenology of the Gemütssphäre, reflections on experiences ("acts") of feeling, desiring, wishing, hoping, taking joy in, fearing, and so on. Despite Husserl's hope, these two aspects of his text are not in harmony; indeed, his thinking is marked by an aporia between the analogical projection of axiological reason and a phenomenological reflection on affective experience that in fact undermines the analogy at crucial points. This aporia is, I shall argue, inseparable from the concept of value itself, and to untie it we must abandon the chimæra of a rational theory of value.
Why does Husserl believe that affective life is governed by a peculiar form of rationality? For one thing, it seems to be entailed by the way we express ourselves in "common life" (Hua XXVIII:169): We say, "That is a beautiful sunset," or "He is a fine fellow," or "This Mont Blanc is an excellent pen." On the one hand, Husserl suggests that such expressions point back to acts of feeling in which the values expressed are experienced: "The fact of valuing, of being pleased or displeased, of wishing, and so on, signifies at first nothing more than that we are struck [angemutet] in this or that way by objects, that we feel ourselves so moved by them, and the like." On the other hand, the fact that such experiences get expressed as predicates, that "we ascribe a predicate to the evaluated matters that pertains to them irrespective of the contingent act of valuing," signals, for Husserl, "something new"(Hua XXVIII:86). Thus the ordinary language in which we express our feelings about things already poses the "problem," for Husserl, of how we can legitimately move from the mere "fact" of a feeling in which something is valued to a "predicate which raises the claim to objectivity," from "This is valued" to "This is worthy of value, good" (Hua XXVIII:254). This is the problem that axiological reason - "valuing reason with its lawfulnesses" (Hua XXVIII:86) - is supposed to address.
Let us note two things about Husserl's point of departure. First, his phenomenology of value affirms the fact that feelings present themselves not as mute but as meaningful: undergoing is not simply a causal-psychological occurrence but a kind of intentionality, which Husserl calls "deeming" (Vermeinung). As intentional, it necessarily involves a norm of intelligibility. But, second, he immediately construes this normativity as a kind of rationality - that is, as a "claim to objectivity" and hence, in the last analysis, as a kind of cognition. (16) By construing our linguistic penchant for assigning predicates to objects as a clue to the normativity of the Gemütssphäre, the latter becomes amenable to the analogy with theoretical reason. At the same time, however, the peculiar character of the normativity embedded in the intentionality of the affects gets covered over. To support this claim I shall first examine how Husserl's phenomenology discloses, in the affective sphere, a normative dimension that is descriptively distinct from cognitive normativity (truth). I will then argue that Husserl's own examples of the supposed analogy between theoretical and axiological reason fail to convince. We will then be in a position to diagnose why value theory is, phenomenologically, wooden iron (holzes Eisen).
§3. Affective Intentionality
Husserl's phenomenology of the affective dimension has two goals: to establish the intentionality of the affects, and to distinguish them from cognitive experiences - or what he calls "objectifying acts." The first discloses pathos as an element in the constitution of meaning, while the second, because it is shackled to the concept of act, becomes a tangled confusion that in principle can never be unraveled.
Husserl begins by taking seriously the phenomenological fact that in the experiences I undergo at the hands of the world my feelings, such as being pleased or displeased (Gefallen and Misfallen), have intentional content; they are, in a distinctive way, about something (Hua XXVIII:57). When I take a certain delight in leafing through my copy of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, I am not merely directed toward the book. Rather the delight delights in the book's feel, the fineness of its binding, the clarity of its typography. These things move my delight and are inseparable from it; that is, a "fineness" of the binding or a "clarity" of the typography that would be accessible to mere sight would not be the sort of thing that we express by these terms when describing the affective experience. (17) They belong to its kind of intentionality. If I am moved by the sublime landscape, then against psychologism phenomenology insists that its sublimity is no more something merely subjective, an inner "representation," than is the landscape itself. The affects, no less than simple perception, open out onto the world. Yet this distinction between psychological and intentional content requires that intentional experiences are, while psychological experiences are not, normatively oriented; that is, their content is a claim that might or might not be satisfied by the world. For instance, in the case of cognitive acts (which for Husserl includes perception) the norm is truth: to say that I perceive a red ball before me (that is, that "red ball" is the intentional content of my perceiving) is to say that there is in fact a red ball before me if my perception is true. Something similar must hold for the Gemütssphäre if one is to attribute to it genuine intentional content. Thus Husserl insists both that affective life is distinct from judgment - that it is "as such not belief, not cognition; it does not perceive or predicate, it carries out no deductions or inductions" (Hua XXVIII:64) - and that it is nevertheless normatively oriented, e.g., toward a "valuing that values as it should value" (Hua XXVIII:57). Were this not the case it would have no intentional content but would be "blind experience like, for example, experiences of red or blue sensations" (Hua XXVIII:63). To explain this, Husserl argues that though our passions do not judge in the logical sense, they do "judge" in an analogical sense (Hua XXVIII:64) and thus seem to predicate something about what they are about: this landscape is sublime, this person is lovable, this desired state of affairs is desirable and should become reality. What norm governs such attributions; according to what measure are they justified?
Husserl notes that it is not, strictly speaking, the norm of truth. Truth is a matter of the logic of judgment, while the affects are not judgments. As Husserl puts it, if we "think away" all value predicates "nature remains nature. Theoretical science" - governed by the norm of truth - "remains what it is: in itself it never leads to values." Nevertheless, he is convinced that "the value predicates do truly [in Wahrheit] pertain to [the object]; to disavow them would be perverse. They belong," Husserl continues, "in another dimension" - a dimension other than the one accessible through theoretical reason and assessable in terms of truth (Hua XXVIII:262).
Just this sort of suggestion, however, has led some philosophers to conclude that the phenomenology of valuing life is systematically misleading. Agreeing with Husserl that science neither encounters value properties nor need appeal to any in its explanations, J. L. Mackie, for instance, held this to show that all phenomenological attributions of such properties are in fact in error. How can Husserl's appeal to "another dimension" avoid this "argument from queerness"? (18)
One response, surely, would seize upon the naturalistic assumptions governing Mackie's argument (and many others of this sort) - the idea that the set of legitimate explanations is exhausted by the sort of explanation found in natural science. Husserl, for example, argued that this idea undercuts itself since it leaves no room for any sort of normativity, including the logico-cognitive normativity upon which naturalistic explanations themselves depend. This opens the door to a strategy once championed by John McDowell, who, likening value predicates to secondary qualities, offered a defense of non-reductive explanations couched in terms of such qualities. (19) Once we no longer imagine that all "real" properties must be like primary qualities ("just there"), we can accept the fact that physical explanation need not encounter or appeal to secondary qualities, while still holding that this is no good reason to deny such qualities to objects. Though one cannot account for what such a property is - being-red, say - without reference to how the object shows itself in a certain kind of experience (otherwise it would not be an account of being-red), this does not at all tell against the object's actually being red. "Being red" just is "being such as to look red in appropriate circumstances" and is independent of its "actually looking red to anyone on any particular occasion." (20) If this is so for secondary qualities, then perhaps something similar is true of values: to account for what it is for something to be a beautiful piece of music is to say that it is "felt to be beautiful under appropriate conditions" - conditions which, as in the case of looking red, will include features of the environment as well as of the perceiver. This seems to be close to what Husserl means by saying that value predicates belong to the object, but "in another dimension" (Hua XXVIII: 259-60, 261-2).
Yet we may still feel that there is a salient difference between secondary qualities and values here. For one thing, spelling out what "appropriate" conditions amount to in the latter case leads us back to the initial problem: whereas in the case of perception of secondary qualities (an objectifying act), the "theoretical" norm of truth is in play, in the case of affective or evaluative life it is precisely the nature of the norm that is in question. Thus in trying to specify what "appropriate conditions" mean in evaluative life there is nothing obviously analogous to Husserl's account of appropriate perceptual conditions in terms of normality and optimality, centered in the "orthoaesthetic" lived body. (21) If there is nevertheless an analogy, as as Husserl believes, we have no choice but to look closely at the phenomenology of affective life itself to see the norm at work.
But here the real difficulties begin. For in a certain sense it is impossible to see the distinctive norm that governs the "other dimension" in which affective life plays itself out, because the light of theoretical reason shines too brightly, obscuring the very different intentionality that belongs to our undergoings. On the one hand, Husserl understands that affects are not cognitions: "If we ascribe to a joy [Freude] a relation to an object, if we designate it an intentional experience relating to the enjoyable [das Erfreuende], then this sort of 'relation-to' is totally different from the one we ascribe to a perception, for example, or a memory or a judgment" (Hua XXVIII:336). On the other hand, the norm governing this sort of intentionality - the norm belonging to "valuing reason" - is available only as bound up with cognitive acts: "it must interweave [verflechten] with acts of the logical, doxic sphere . . . Only by carrying out such acts can acts in general, and what they deem [vermeinen], come to objective givenness" such that "we can see that valuing acts are 'deemings' . . . and further, that they stand under ideal predicates of Recht and Unrecht, etc" (Hua XXVIII:69). Without this Verflechtung we cannot see affective intentionality for what it is. And yet, Husserl concludes that if "the forms and norms concealed in the spheres of affect and will are to come forth into the bright light, the torch of logical reason must be abandoned" (Hua XXVIII:69). How then are we to see the norms of the "other dimension" at all?
§4. Analogy and its Discontents
At this point Husserl supplements phenomenological analysis with an analogical approach that is supposed to enable us to see the phenomena of affective normativity in light of logical reason without actually using it as a "torch." (22) That is, though he admits that undergoing "does not see, does not conceive, does not explicate, does not predicate" (Hua XXVIII:69), he nevertheless describes it, analogically as a sphere of "valuing reason." What authorizes this analogy is simply that Husserl equates the normative with the rational: "reason" stands for "the essentially closed class of acts and their appurtenant correlates which stand under the ideas of legitimacy and illegitimacy, correlatively of truth and falsity, of obtaining [Bestehen] and not obtaining, etc. There are just so many fundamental types of reason as there are acts that we can distinguish of which this holds" (Hua XXVIII:68). Well then, is the Gemütssphäre made up of such "acts"? A rigorous phenomenology of this sphere would be required in order to answer this question. But one looks in vain in these texts for such a phenomenology. Instead, the procedure Husserl adopts in the 1911 Einleitung is fairly typical:
Assuming the sphere of "theoretical-objectifying reason" as "analogical clue" to the affective sphere, Husserl stipulates that though the affects are not judgments or cognitions they "in turn do support rational questioning" (Hua XXVIII:204). For instance, "desire has the character of a deeming; (23) one can ask about the legitimacy or illegitimacy [Recht oder Unrecht] of the desire . . . and in the objectivations that are built upon acts of this group something stands there in an objective manner as something that ought to be, as a good, and we say that it is actually good if the question of its [sc. the desire's] legitimacy receives a positive and well-grounded answer" (Hua XXVIII:205). It is obvious that the main claims in this passage - that desire can be questioned about its "legitimacy" and that the "good" is that correlate of desire which survives such questioning - are not derived from a phenomenology of the "other dimension" of the passions itself but from the analogy with theoretical reason. Indeed, Husserl admits that these "preliminary distinctions" call for "penetrating clarifications" in order to see "in what sense and with what actual justification essential demarcations are really to be made here, or in which sense we may really speak here of reason and objective validity" - clarifications that "lead into phenomenology and the theory of reason." However, since that is a "veritable primeval forest of difficulties," Husserl chooses to "avoid this primeval forest and all the monsters lurking within it" by taking it for granted that reason is operative here, that the normative is eo ipso the vernünftiges (Hua XXVIII:205). Thus if one were to doubt that the claims we experience in the "other dimension" of the human pathos are so easily analogized to theoretical reason, one would have to show that the results obtained by applying this analogy actually distort the character of the Gemütssphäre. And in fact, if we turn to Husserl's proposal for what he calls "formal axiology" - the analogue of "formal ontology" - the evidence for the failure of the analogy is not hard to find.
Central to the normativity of the cognitive sphere is the relation of ground to consequent. Hence, if there is to be a formal axiology something like this relation must obtain in the affective sphere as well: "wherever it is possible to speak of valuing and value, there also is a distinction between value grounds and value consequents, between presupposed values and the values posited on or derived from them" (Hua XXVIII:71). However, the passage from one to the other is not governed by truth-functionality, as in the case of formal logic; rather, it is a function of "contexts of motivation": "the ground-valuing motivates the valuing of the derived values," and it is this motivation that is assessed as to its reasonableness. If formal axiology is supposed to be a theory of "laws of consequence" that are "laws of rational motivation" (Hua XXVIII:71), the success of the analogy will depend on whether contexts of motivation behave sufficiently similarly to truth-functional contexts to justify applying to them the term "reason." And though Husserl does not apply the analogy mechanically, (24) the violence done to the phenomenology of motivation quickly becomes apparent.
Let us begin with Husserl's distinction between "existential" and "non-existential" pleasure. Non-existential pleasure is the sort taken, for example, in the beautiful, which, according to Husserl, is valued in its mere appearance and not in its existence. Existential pleasure, then, is the sort that depends on the existence of the thing enjoyed. Now Husserl believes that the following is a law of "rational motivation," that is, an apriori law of formal axiology: "Whoever takes a non-existential pleasure (valuing-something-as-beautiful) in A, must, rationally speaking [vernünftigerweise], be glad [freuen] in case it is certain that this 'beautiful' [thing] is and must be sad [trauen] in case it is certain that it is not" (Hua XVIII:73). But this hardly seems to hold at all, let alone be an apriori law. Considering only its appearance, I take pleasure in a beautiful sunset with burning reds, oranges, and yellows spectacularly laid out across the sky. Now I consider that this thing really exists - perhaps by recalling that it is actually produced by intense air pollution. Must I be glad of this existence, just because it is beautiful? Is it "irrational" of me to be depressed that such a thing exists? Husserl would call that an "affective contradiction" (Gefühlswidersinn). Or perhaps I am looking at a painting of "nymphs dancing in a ring" in which I take aesthetic pleasure. I may be glad that the painting exists, but this is presumably not what Husserl means by "rational motivation" here. Rather, it is the existence of what is depicted that I am supposedly motivated to value. But I do not believe it would be irrational not to take pleasure in the existence of a world where nymphs were dancing in a ring, just because I took pleasure in the depiction of such a world. Husserl's principle seems not to be an apriori law but to reflect a limited view of the relation between the beautiful and the good, the image and reality, a view in which I will thank God - and not the automobile - for the existence of beautiful sunsets, or in which only those paintings are beautiful that depict things, the existence of which would be good.
A further supposed example of a law of "rational motivation" is this: "If one is happy [freut sich] about some actual W, and if one knows that because A is, W also is, then, rationally speaking, the happiness is transferred to A" (Hua XXVIII:75). (25) But this too seems contingent. It would make it irrational to be unhappy about any regrettable circumstances upon which some good and pleasing thing depended. (Perhaps the contrapositive might be a "law": If I am happy that something exists - say, a big luxury car - and then find out that it only exists because something else that I am unhappy about exists - say, exploitation of natural resources - then I should be "rationally motivated" to change my valuing of the car). (26) Or again, consider the law, "if a property is valuable, so is every object that possesses such a property to that extent valuable" (Hua XXVIII:77). Either this is the uninteresting tautology that a valuable property is a valuable property, or else it is false, since a very despicable person might possess a valuable property (cleverness, for example), though the mere possession of that property would not, for all that, make him more valuable. I would not be irrational to esteem him no whit more for having it.
Finally, following the analogy with formal logic Husserl believes that the law of transitivity holds in formal axiology (Hua XXVIII:91): if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C. But as a law of "rational motivation" this does not in fact hold: I might be right to prefer A over B, and right to prefer B over C, but not right to prefer A over C. Because the argument for this counter-intuitive fact is complicated, however, I will not try to reproduce it here but will refer you to a paper by Larry Temkin. (27)
Now these few counter examples would not be enough to undermine Husserl's idea of a formal axiology if we had other good reasons to think that an axiology were entailed by the phenomenology of the Gemütssphäre. But that is precisely what Husserl does not give us, relying instead on analogical reasoning to do the work. Systematically committed to the idea of "value-theory," Husserl develops the necessary "formal" axiology in spite of the actual phenomenology of motivation. I say "in spite of" because, being the honest thinker he is, Husserl does engage in phenomenological analyses that tend at every turn to cut the ground out from under the analogy. Beyond our critical arguments "from consequences," then, let us turn to some rather more phenomenological criticisms.
§5. A Crisis in the Concept of Act
What finally undermines the analogy between formal logic and formal axiology is that the phenomenological difference between cognitive experiences and affective experiences affects the movement from the implicitly normative to the explicitly normative in each. Normativity in the cognitive sphere can be traced to a distinct telos belonging to acts in this sphere: they are "objectifying" or "object constituting." Such acts can be said to succeed or fail in light of the constitution of a consistent, identical "object," whether on the pre-predicative level of perception or the predicative level of everyday life and science. The normativity of theoretical reason is nothing but a reflection of this phenomenological structure of object-constitution. In affective experience, however, things are quite otherwise. (28) As Husserl notes, it is characteristic of such experiences that they do not constitute objects, and therefore the "reason" that is supposedly implicit in them is a "non-objectifying reason" (Hua XXVIII:208f). This means that its normativity cannot be understood to derive from the telos of consistent, identical object-constitution. But since the analogy with truth-functional logic offers no other way to grasp affective normativity, the tension between analogy and phenomenology becomes acute.
First, the analogy leads Husserl to distort the phenomenological relation between predicative and pre-predicative experience in the Gemütssphäre. For while there is, in the cognitive sphere, a continuity between the two, there is no such continuity in the sphere of what we undergo. Since, however, the possibility of "axiological reason" being normative for pre-predicative affectivity requires such continuity, a continuity must be manufactured. To see this, recall that object-constituting experience is characterized by acts that include a Glaubensthese - that is, a moment in which a "commitment" to the object's "truly being" so-and-so determined is registered. At the pre-predicative level Husserl notes that "such theses emerge in the spheres of perception, of memory, of sensibility and the lower intellective forms of consciousness that lie prior to specific thinking and conceiving" (Hua XXVIII:212). Because all and only "belief theses" are "object-constituting" [ref 278?] there is a normative continuity between these proto-intellective acts and "the domain of specifically thinking, cognizing reason" (Hua XXVIII:212); that is, the kind of "objective validity" that will be claimed in explicit acts of cognitive reasoning, in explicit predicative doxic positing of "true being" as truly constituted identical object, is already at stake at the lower level. The two levels belong together in a most intimate way since the higher "takes up so to speak all of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of the lower consciousness and in the case of its justification it also co-justifies the lower consciousness" (Hua XXVIII:212). Indeed, Husserl defines the "general class of objectifying acts" as those that have a "capacity to enter into contexts of identity and so into contexts of judgment" (Hua XXVIII:332). Now despite the fact that acts in the Gemütssphäre, as non-objectifying, do not exhibit this definitional connection with the "contexts of judgment," Husserl nevertheless insists that there is a continuity between pre-predicative and predicative experience here too: "So it is also in the sphere of affective acts with its novel affective theses [Gemütsthesen]: we transpose 'what' we value or will into predicative form, as when we say: May A be B, A should become B, etc. Everything that we have just expounded in the sphere of belief holds as well for the sphere of affective acts" (Hua XXVIII:212).
It is clear that the legitimacy of this last claim depends entirely on the legitimacy of talk of affective theses (Gemütsthesen) in analogy to belief theses (Glaubensthesen). There must be theses at the pre-predicative affective level if there is to be a continuity between it and the thetic form of evaluative predication. Only then would there be something like a pre-predicative quasi-object that would implicitly call for (and admit of) the sort of critical justification that an explicit theory of value, grounded in axiological "reason," might provide. Yet this does not seem to be the case. When I take pre-predicative joy in the beauty of a flower - am absorbed in it - the world is indeed disclosed to me in a certain way, matters to me in a certain way, but I do not find any kind of positing, anything that could be called a "thesis" that might implicitly call for "critical" assessment as to its "validity." In contrast to cognitive acts, here there is a discontinuity between pre-predicative experience and the predicative acts that express "evaluations" - apparently objective and subject to criticism - about things. It is true that in loving someone I can wonder whether I should love her, but the answer to that question may not come from a "value-theory," however much the form of the question suggests such a thing. (29)
Thus everything comes down to whether the dimension of human pathos, of what we undergo in our exposure to the world, can be construed as something like an objectifying act and so as amenable to the norms of correctness and incorrectness that derive from the identity of objects. Far from convincing us that it is, Husserl's attempt to construe affects in this way leads to a crisis in the concept of act itself. It is in the context of this crisis that we come to grasp the essence of the concept of value and see why, rather than being an answer to nihilism, it is a symptom of it. What, after all, is a "value"?
In his writings on "The Distinction and Relation Between Theoretical and Axiological Reason" of 1908, Husserl struggles for many pages with the relation between "understanding" - the "objectifying" faculty of judgment and representation - and "affectivity," which neither objectifies, judges, nor "represents" [ref]. The problem is that even if we recognize that all acts within the Gemütssphäre are founded on objectifying acts of some sort - say, acts of perception - this does not exhaust their intentionality. But how can a non-objectifying act be genuinely intentional at all - how, Husserl wonders, can they really "constitute" a distinctive "meaning" (Bedeutung) or "appearance" (Erscheinung) at all? (30) It would appear that to include the distinctive intentionality of the affects under the concept of act requires that a specific correlate for it - affective meaning - be found. This, in turn, however, makes it seem that "the title 'objectifying act' swallows up everything" such that "it is hard to anticipate how one should be able to retain the concept of a non-objectifying act" (Hua XXVIII:333). But then, what remains of the distinctiveness of the affective sphere?
This is no merely rhetorical problem for which Husserl has a ready solution. (31) Phenomenologically, the attempt to squeeze human pathos into the schema of act-intentionality leads to a crisis in the concept of act itself. Husserl confesses that he has not been able to "get to the bottom of the affective acts and the whole essence of the founding among them and in their relation to objectifying acts." Given that when we speak of affective "intentionality" what "intentionality means here is phenomenologically something other than what it means for objectifying acts, there remains an uncomfortable residue" that requires clarification if "the meaning and function of this intentionality" is to be made plain. The existence of this "uncomfortable residue" means that the concept of act itself is "seriously threatened": "Does the concept of act still have unity? Is it not exploded by the knowledge of this double sense of intentionality" (Hua XXVIII:337)? Here we stand at the decisive point in the development of value theory, for it is precisely in order to save the unity of the concept of act that Husserl introduces the concept of "value" - that is, precisely not in response to demands stemming from the phenomenology of the affective sphere itself. (32)
The concept of act requires a correlate. Affective life is non-objectifying, so it is hard to see what its correlate could be. To save the unity of the concept of act a correlate must be found, but it cannot be an object lest all acts turn out to be objectifying. "Value" names this correlate. "Valuing acts are not 'directed' toward objects, but toward values. Value is nothing existing; value is something that refers to being or non-being, but it belongs in another dimension" (Hua XXVIII:340). Values are the quasi-objects that populate the "other dimension" in which we undergo the world, suffer it, become exposed, and are "acted upon" as it were - because the concept of act requires a correlate. And the concept of act is indispensable because without it (and the so-called Gemütsthesen) the analogy with theoretical reason can gain no purchase and loses all plausibility. Values are theoretical postulates demanded by the project of defining an "axiological reason;" they are not phenomenological data derived from the meaning of affective life itself. (33)
§6. Nihilism, Values, and Meaning
Husserl's attempt to counteract nihilism through a "critique of axiological reason" and a "theory of value" must be judged a failure on phenomenological grounds. The essence of the failure lies in the attempt to construe the human pathos, the sphere of what we undergo, in terms of the concept of act. The "other dimension" in which the world speaks to us affectively, in which we are exposed to things such that they matter to us, is not made up of acts, though in it meaning is indeed constituted. Husserl sees clearly that our passions are not inert effects but meaningful openings onto the world, and he holds, quite properly, that a phenomenology of the human pathos can provide a bulwark against modern nihilism. But he does not see that his own approach draws fatally on the very source of the problem. As Heidegger put it in his Nietzsche lectures, thinking in terms of values is nihilism.
Husserl takes objectifying acts to be the measure of meaning-constitution. For all that this differs from modern "representational" thinking from Descartes to Kant, it remains within the orbit of such thinking insofar as it demands that Husserl construe our affective exposure to the world in terms of the concept of act, lest it lose all contribution to meaning constitution. The concept of value is a trace of this demand. As Heidegger put it in an appendix to "The Age of the World Picture," "Where anything that is has become the object of a representing, it first incurs in a certain manner a loss of Being. This loss is adequately perceived, if but vaguely and unclearly, and is compensated for with corresponding swiftness through the fact that we impart value to the object, and that we take the measure of whatever is, solely in keeping with the criterion of value, and make of values themselves the goal of all activity. . . . From here it is only a step to making values into objects themselves." (34) Value, then, is what thinking posits to make up for the fact that it has reduced being (meaning) to what it can reckon, calculate, and objectify. Such thinking is helpless in the face of what it knows, namely, that such objectification cannot do justice to the thing it grasps, that the "density" of things has escaped it. Positing values as "belonging" to these things but "in another dimension" is a mark of this helplessness.
But how do we "know" that something is missing, that things have suffered a "loss of Being"? We know it because we are exposed to things, because in feeling we do not merely register the world but hearken to it and respond, resonate with that which speaks to us, that which matters to us. Nihilism - the feeling that things lack meaning - is a modern phenomenon because modern thinking takes its self-posited "representations" as the measure of being, and the only kind of meaning that can be constituted in this way (through "objectifying acts") does not matter; by itself it presents us only with "structures" or "identities" - or pictures - to which we are perfectly indifferent. In nihilism we undergo this indifference. Any attempt to redress the "loss of being" in this malady of the human pathos by appeal to a theory of value - by insisting that affective meaning can take the form of value properties that function, logically, like objective properties - is itself nihilistic. We love, suffer, hope, desire, ache as before, but these modes of our being, of our Befindlichkeit, cannot be made to look like acts with correlates, do not cluster under an identifiable "region" of the "axiological," and cannot become the field for a general Wertlehre. The human pathos itself calls for a reformation of phenomenology.
In registering the "sickness" besetting Europe Husserl wondered: "why is it that so luxuriantly developed humanistic sciences here fail to perform the service that in their own sphere" - namely, sickness of the body - "the natural sciences perform so competently?" (35) Can the human sciences, phenomenologically guided and grounded, provide "therapies" for the maladies that beset cultures? Clearly Husserl hoped that a rigorous value theory would contribute to such therapies, that by bringing reason to this sphere we could put our priorities in order so that only that would matter to us that really ought to matter. But our experience of exposure to the world, of the claims things make upon us, of what we undergo such that things mean something to us, does not support such a theory. (36) What, then, can be hoped from a connection between phenomenology and the human sciences? It seems to me that something indispensable opens up once we abandon the idea that these sciences can yield technologies of culture - namely, access to the full scope of that "other dimension" in which things speak to us, a foothold for an approach to meaning that respects the different ways in which the world gets "constituted" by human beings who can "learn through suffering," undergoing. A collaboration between phenomenology and the human sciences can help us attend to what is really being said in our "evaluative" sentences, lead us to listen to ourselves with a sensibility unprejudiced by the urge toward system, toward axiological hierarchies, divine teleologies, metaphysical personalisms, and all such substitutions for the "loss of being." In short, it can perhaps help us to forge a language for what we undergo in which things would not "incur a loss of Being." In a certain sense, that would be the sort of therapy required, wouldn't it?
1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the inaugural meeting of the Research Centre for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I would like to thank the conference participants for very helpful criticisms, especially Professors Cheung Chan-Fai, Kwan Tse-Wan, and Lau Kwok-Ying. A shorter version of the present essay was read at Seoul National University at the joint meeting of the Korean Society for Phenomenology and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, and I would like to thank the hosts, Lee Nam-In and Jung-Sun Han Heuer, for a stimulating conference that allowed me to refine these ideas further.
2. No one believes that Dostoevsky's Underground Man, who tried to take a stand against the laws of nature, is anything other than sick, his freedom "pathetic" in the colloquial, pejorative sense. On the other hand, as Max Horkheimer's analysis in "Traditional and Critical Theory" (Critical Theory: Selected Essays, tr. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. [New York: Continuum, 1972], 188-243) makes plain, the sorts of "law" proffered by the human sciences, broadly construed, are just such as call for those subject to them to take a stand on them: the reality they reflect can be changed, and it is sheer ideology to give them the status of laws of nature.
3. This distinction derives from Wilfred Sellars. See Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 76.
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 172 [H132].
5. As Heidegger, Being and Time 176 [H137] writes, "Letting something be encountered is primarily circumspective; it . . . has the character of becoming affected in some way; . . . But to be affected . . . becomes ontologically possible only in so far as being -in as such has been determined existentially beforehand in such a manner that what it encounters within-the-world can 'matter' to it in this way. The fact that this sort of thing can 'matter' to it is grounded in one's Befindlichkeit [attunement, state-of-mind] . . ."
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 13.
7. On sickness and "ascetic ideals" see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 97-163; on "going under" and the "meaning of the earth" see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 125, 127, 137 et pass. "Umwertung aller Werte" ("revaluation of all values") is the subtitle that Nietzsche considered for his projected (but never written) book to be entitled The Will to Power. See "Editor's Introduction" in Kauffmann, ed., The Will to Power, xvii; also Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 117.
8. On the "pathos of distance" and a new "order of rank" see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 117-18, 201ff; on "giving style" see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 232; on the "great mood incarnate" see Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 231; on the "affect of command" see Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 289.
9. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 13.
10. See Steven Galt Crowell, "Nietzsche Among the Neo-Kantians; or, The Relation Between Science and Philosophy," in Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I, ed. Babette Babich and Rober S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 77-86.
11. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, tr. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 150.
12. Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 140.
13. See the discussion in Husserl's "Vorlesungen über Grundfragen der Ethik und Wertlehre" of 1914, in Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908-1914, Husserliana XXVIII, ed. Ulrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 57-58. Subsequent references to the texts collected in this volume will be given between parentheses in the body of this chapter.
14. Husserl's approach to questions of value changed in important ways after 1914. For a fine account of this see Ulrich Melle, "Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love" in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, ed. John Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 229-248. I shall ignore these developments here. Though I believe my argument could be extended to them, to do so would require another paper.
15. Husserl here operates with a general neo-Kantian scheme in which different "validity spheres" (to use Habermas's term) are distinguished: theoretical, practical, and axiological. We shall not speak further of practical reason in this paper. Husserl believes that the practical sphere of "willing" is grounded in the axiological sphere of "valuing" (for instance, Hua XXVIII:47). At the conclusion of this paper we shall find some reason to question this view.
16. Again, crucial parts of the text are devoted to sorting out the peculiar sort of priority that belongs to logical reason - oriented toward objective cognition - among the various spheres of validity. The issue is introduced at Hua XXVIII:57-8, and we shall follow it up in more detail below. Here we need only recall that "cognitivism" is the term that names precisely the tension between acknowledging the phenomenological distinctiveness of an "axiological" sphere and trying to cash it in in terms of a kind of "reason."
17. Just as the red that belongs to an object solely insofar as the object is considered as reflecting light of a certain frequency would not be the red that we express when we say that the object "looks" red. For more of this analogy, see below.
18. See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 38-42; on the "error theory" see 48-49.
19. John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 130-150.
20. McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," 134.
21. There may of course be something not so obvious to say here. See, for example, the works of Robert Sokolowski, John Drummond, and James Hart. See also Nam-In Lee, Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), in which it is suggested that the normativity of values and valuing has an instinctual basis: "die Instinktintention ist also der Auslöser des Lustgefühls und als solcher stiftet sie, indem sie sich auswirkt, das Phänomen des Wertens" (134). See also 142; and below p. ***.
22. The awkwardness of this procedure, from a phenomenological point of view, becomes apparent when Husserl remarks that his effort to "clear an open path to the pure disciplines which supposedly belong to the idea of valuing, striving, and acting reason" should proceed "in as presuppositionless way as possible" while nevertheless being "guided by the analogy with theoretical, objectifying reason" (Hua XXVIII:204). How presuppositionless can that be?
23. Husserl means by this that, for example, "desiring" something posits it as "desireable" - a claim that we will have reason to challenge below.
24. There are, for instance, very interesting discussions of the adiaphoron, failure of excluded middle, and so on.
25. This law is formulated in specifically causal terms at Hua XXVIII:78.
26. As should be obvious, these "laws" lead us into the debates recently conducted in ethics and "moral psychology" over the status of "internal" and "external" reasons for acting, etc. The critical points I am making about Husserl's formal axiology would be relevant to many of these attempts as well, but I shall not consider them in this limited context.
27. Larry Temkin, "Intransitivity and the Mere-Addition Paradox," Philosophy and Public Affairs. See also Temkin, Inequality (Oxford).
28. Nor is the problem essentially altered if we admit, following Lee (Phänomenologie der Instinkte, 142f), that objectifying acts - both passive and active, predicative and pre-predicative - are themselves "wertend' since they are oriented toward a kind of "satisfaction." For the question concerns whether we can make sense of objective criteria for "satisfaction" as such, without which we cannot speak of a special kind of "reason." And we can specify such criteria in the case of "truth," whereas we cannot in the case of affective "valuing" as such.
29. This of course does not mean that pre-predicative affectivity is discontinuous with all forms of linguistic expression, or predication. It may, for instance, call forth the non-objectifying language of lyric poetry in much the way that perception calls forth object-identifying judgments. If something like this is even conceivable, the general question must be asked: is the judgment-form, used to express these evaluative "acts," a reliable guide to the normativity that characterizes the realm of feeling? Is it, for example, true that when I take pleasure in the heft and flow of my pen this entails, or tends toward, a claim that "the pen is good," that is, toward a norm of correct evaluation? It is certainly true that I can make an objective judgment about the quality of the pen - that it is objectively a "good" pen. But this is because I can note that it fulfills its function as a pen in an exemplary way, and this sort of evaluation does not refer to the sphere of feeling at all. A computer could make such a judgment. On the other hand, just because I express myself in predicate form about some delight I take in something does not mean that that delight is from the start oriented toward a norm of objective predication in which a property is attributed to an object. But to question Husserl's assumption here is to question whether, at the level of affect itself, there is an analogy with theoretical reason, whether it is plausible to speak of "correct" or "incorrect" desiring, hoping, enjoying, and so on. Even if we grant a normativity to the affective dimension, it may not be rational - which does not make it irrational.
30. It should be noted that this sort of language derives from the fact that in this text Husserl is posing his question in the framework of the Kantian schema of practical and theoretical philosophy.
31. But see John Drummond, "Complicating the Emotions" (lecture delivered at the Husserl Circle, 2002), for an argument that Husserl in fact possessed the means to do so already in the Logical Investigations. It remains to explain why he didn't avail himself of these distinctions in the lectures on value theory.
32. Interestingly, in his "Value-Theory and Phenomenology," which introduces the volume Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, ed. James Hart and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 5, James Hart registers an anxiety here: Does "the topic of value strive to explicate and therefore enrich our appreciation of the concrete context of experience," or "is it a bogus notion?" Believing that an "exorcism of value" is not an option for phenomenology, Hart ingeniously assimilates values to "how we experience the world" rather than to "what we experience" (6). Whether this leaves anything like a rational "theory" of values in tact is not something we can pursue here.
33. Two further bits of evidence are worth mentioning here. At one point [324-5, 334?] Husserl struggles with the suggestion that it is not the affective acts themselves but the reflective acts which objectify the affective acts that attribute "values" to objects. Though he dismisses this, it is obviously the case. This is further suggested by the "speculative" - merely constructive, postulated - character of Husserl's claim that values are "given" in something like perception (279, 281). His general defense of this derives from the idea that "Erkenntnis nur findet, nicht erfindet" [ref], but this begs the question of whether reflection on the affective sphere led by the analogy with theoretical reason is in fact an instance of phenomenological Erkenntnis.
34. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 142.
35. Husserl, "The Crisis of European Man," 150-51.
36. I should add that I am speaking here only of the sphere of the affects; I am not extending this to the broader sphere of ethical obligation, which has a different structure and is related to the affective level differently than the way Husserl thought. Ethical obligation is not a function of our Befindlichkeit.