Axiology and Agathology

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Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences

Axiology and Agathology

Vladimir K. Shokhin

Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract

From the very beginning, attention is given to the fact that, being introduced at the very beginning of the 20^th century, the axiology term, meaning the doctrine of values, almost immediately led to a boom in the development of theories of values (mainly in continental philosophy), whereas the agathology term, meaning the doctrine of goods, which was introduced in 1770 and then rediscovered in 1823, came to almost complete oblivion. For its rehabilitation, one of the commonplaces of the philosophy of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is reviewed, namely, the actual identification of goods and values, as a result of which the former of these concepts is absorbed by the latter.

As for values, they are also usually viewed as common human needs, rather than deep and indivisible individual “inner possessions”. Therefore, it is proposed to distinguish between universal needs and personal valuables and to stratify the world of significant things into values, preferences, and goods. As a result, the latter of these varieties is interpreted as a sphere of practical mind (both in the Ancient and Kantian senses), teleologically loaded and with the potential to be included in a new, the fourth of the large programmes of theoretical ethics (able to compete well with consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics) and, at the same time, laid into the foundation of the cluster of philosophical disciplines, which is commonly termed as practical philosophy.

Keywords: values, preferences, goods, ethics, practical philosophy, axiology, agathology, heart, taste, practical mind.

Very different fate of “close relatives”

The fact that axiology in the first half of the 20^th century became one of the most rapidly developing brands of continental philosophy is probably known to relatively many people.

Yet, the fact that the very term axiology itself (from the Greek a^,a “value” + Xoyo^ “word, doctrine”) was forged only at the beginning of the same century in France (by Paul Lapi in 1902) and in Germany (by Eduard von Hartmann till 1906) and soon received its “permanent residence” in philosophy is known to relatively few.

As for the fact that the related meaning of the term agathology (from the Greek to aya^ov “good”) was used in ethics much earlier (by the Lutheran theologian Christoph von Ammon in 1823¹) and in practical philosophy even earlier (by the Wolffian philosopher Johann Feder in 1770 His “Textbook on Christian moral teaching” contained a separate (third) section “Agathology, or on the highest good” (Agathologie, oder von dem höchsten Gute) (Ammon, 1823: 214-259). In “The textbook on practical philosophy” (1770), he divid-ed the subject matter of this discipline into Agathologie (the doctrine of goods), Telematologie (the doctrine of will), and Nomologie (the doctrine of laws). The first teaching was de-scribed in §§ 18-23 (Feder, 1770: 23-51).) to sink into oblivion, to be mentioned sometimes only in old lexicons, and to be rediscovered only in the 21^st century in some cases without the slightest suspicion that it has its past Refer to: (Shokhin, 2004; cf. Shokhin, 2014; Delcom- minette, 2006). A Prague philosopher coined the term “agath- eism” to refer to his theological doctrine (see, for example, Salamon, 2017)., it is probably known only to singular historiographers.

The reason why agathology did not survive Ammon was probably because of the lack of a philosophical rating and due to the fact that his “doctrine of the highest good” was inserted in confessional (Lutheran) ethics.

And the reason why it was not “pulled to the surface” in the era of the axiological boom and much later is primarily due to the fact that the goods were practically not distinguished from the values, and of these two concepts, the latter has been regarded much more modern, “promoted” Approximately fifteen years ago I wrote: “The word values is one of the most prestigious and respectable in modern cultural vocabulary. At the same time it is one of the most popular or even “populist” as one might say. A political figure who wants his words to be taken more seriously will prefer to say and, therefore, supposedly able to naturally incorporate the former. And why, in fact, as Occam has already stated, unnecessarily multiply entities?

Problematic synonymy

This moment has been always crucial. If the identification of the good with the desirable is very common, but not universal, and is deservedly problematic after George Moore, then the identification of goods with values is almost universal. These concepts alternate in a lot of philosophical texts only for stylistic reasons for the most part. The main reason is that these concepts are very similar to each other (such as “civilization” and “culture”, “transcendent” and “transcendental”, “philosophy of religion” and “religious philosophy”, for example). And what is similar is conveniently rounded up to synonymy.

However, it is not today when the merging of these related concepts began and was installed in the philosophical and academic environment. It is worthwhile dwelling upon the epoch of the initial formation of axiology again. In Friedrich Kirchner's popular Lexicon of Basic Philosophical Concepts, revised by D. Michaelis (1911) “value is an effective ability of things to become goods for the people that he offers a certain programme for the implementation of national or, on the contrary, international, pluralistic, or even, on the contrary, global values as it is now customary to say.

The editor of a magazine preparing an advertising announcement will say that its authors appeal to the reader for whom liberal or, on the contrary, traditional values are significant or close (or both, as it often happens in our country). A writer or a director informing about his plans in an interview will almost certainly mention that he sees his task as promoting people's awareness of genuine social, aesthetic, or common cultural values (and, most often, all of them together). And a bank or other commercial enterprise that invites you to buy its shares will sometimes present the case in such a way that only the holders of its securities can understand what “true values” are. As a result, the word we are interested in undergoes a clear degradation, turning from a term of theoretical reflection into an “iconic” word of everyday language” (Shokhin, 2006: 7). All this remains valid for the present time when the research of what is sometimes a little tastelessly termed the “axiosphere” in all areas of life from the so-called sociological values (housing, work, wages, recreation, etc.) to gender ones is in full swing. “Value systems” of a wide variety of respondents in all parts of the world are regularly calculated by such “sociological giants” as the World Values Survey (WVS), and provide good grants to numerous armies of sociologists in the main countries of the world.

Worthy of aspiration”. Everything that a person feels impelled to, wants, and sets as a goal is a value for him/her. Although goods, according to Kirchner, as we have just seen, correlate with values like the determining and the determined, the good itself is designated as everything that a person attaches value to, since it promises him/her pleasure whether in memory, in pleasure proper, or in anticipation (Kirchner, 1907: 1095, 375-376).

Yet, lexicons can only reflect what already exists in the philosophical culture. One of the first scholars who gave an authoritative definition of value was the theorist of the Austrian economic school Friedrich von Wieser (a student of K. Menger, its founder and one of the strongest critics of Marx), who wrote a special monograph “On the origin and basic history of economic value” (1884). “Value (Wert)”, according to Wieser, “is the human interest, which is thought of as the `state of the goods' (Zustand der Güter)”. In his Introduction to Philosophy (1895) which went through as many as 12 editions, Oswald Külpe, the founder of the Würzburg school of psychology, while mapping philosophical disciplines, O. Külpe considered it possible (as many others before and after him) to distinguish not only objective values (the value of money, for example, that one can get) and subjective values (personal preferences), but also positive and negative ones (Wert / Unwert), which are equivalent to goods (Güter) and, accordingly, non-goods (Übeln). “If something satisfies someone or if something is preferred to something,” says Külpe, “it is a (relative) value or good. And if it leaves someone unsatisfied or even rejected, it is a negative value or evil”. They also correspond to pleasure and aversion, happiness and misery, honour and contempt etc. (Külpe, 1910: 233-235). In the book The Idea of Value, which is often quoted in modern English-language philosophical literature, John Laird considered it most correct to present the concept of value through the selective approach. The selective conception assumes an approach to any value X as a good from a certain point of view (timologically)⁵ as to an irrespective good (as if, according to the old expression, X were a good in the eyes of God). But the good, in its turn, is defined by Laird through value: the good is either a character or a property of value. To say that beauty is or contains good is to say that the good has value, and to say that love is the greatest good is to recognize it as the greatest value (Laird, 1929: XVII, 321-322).

This “circular relationship” between value and good has been pointed out by such an astute critic of axiology as Martin Heidegger. In his lectures on European nihilism in the early 1940s, where Nietzsche's “re-evaluation of higher values” was very sympathetically interpreted, Heidegger unobtrusively demonstrates that the concept of value itself is logically a “non-reference” one: the good is usually defined through value, which, in its turn, is defined through the good, and such is the relationship of value with the concepts of significance, purpose, and foundation. In short, axiology revolves in logical circles and, claiming to interpret the entire world culture, is not the best product of the second half of the 19^th century only (Heidegger, 1997: 45, 47-48).

In Heidegger's assessment of the concept of values, there was a lot of sharpness. He wrote that being a sort of pseudo-concepts for this reason, “values” are also responsible for an individual's pseudo-existence: they made the mankind believe in the idea that any attempt on them threatens to destroy its existence, but, in fact, value is just a weak and leaky cover for “the objectivity of things that has lost its volume and background”, since it is responsible for the fact that a person lives his/her `pseudo-life' while measuring and calculating everything, and this pseudo-existence is comparable to Plato's cave, from which the true human existence must be “extracted” Refer to (Heidegger, 1997: 47) for the fact that the defi-nition of value of something is inseparable from comparing things with each other through “weighing” them.. There is a certain contradiction in these harsh cavils: a concept, which, according to Heidegger, is so “weak and leaky”, can hardly exert such a powerful influence on humanity and keep it under such a strong hypnosis (therefore, it should not be compared with Plato's cave, but rather with the Advaitic Maya). However, in his verdict on the circular definitions of values and goods (as well as related concepts), he was undoubtedly right. In analytical philosophy, however, the problem noted by him was not given due attention. This contradicts to the analytical method itself, which should first of all be aimed at demarcating the concepts under the research. Below are just a few specimens.

Thus, in the article “The Theory of Value”, Thomas Hurka, a renowned Canadian ethicist and political philosopher, who is in a certain sense “responsible” for axiology in modern analytical practical philosophy, interprets the doctrine of value, or, of the good (which means the same for him) as one of the two main branches of ethical theory alongside the “theory of the right”. His article starts with the “postulate of identity” in the field under the discussion: “The theory of value or of the good is one of the two main branches of ethical theory, alongside the theory of the right. Whereas the theory of the right specifies which actions are right and which are wrong, the theory of value says which states of affairs are intrinsically good and which intrinsically evil. The theory of the right may say that keeping promises is right and lying wrong; the theory of value can say that pleasure is good and pain evil, or that knowledge and virtue are good and vice evil. Since these states are not actions they cannot be right or wrong, but they can have positive or negative value” (Hurka, 2007: 357).

In his book The Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good, the authoritative American theologian and philosopher Robert Adams distinguishes between the types of goodness, insisting, for example, that it is not enough to characterize the virtue simply as the good. Thus, perfection for Adams is equivalent to intrinsic goodness. Yet, the world of the goods, according to Adams, is partly diversified: the differences in temperament, experience, vocation, moral and religious views are likely to make some people more susceptible to some goods, and others to other goods (Adams, 2006: 186). However, Adams also suggests identifying types of goodness or, equivalently, value. Thus, utility is a purely instrumental goodness or value that something has as a means to something else that is good or valued.

E.J. Bond, the author of the article “Theories of Good” for the second edition of the L. and S. Becker's famous ethical lexicon (2001), is also well known among the ethicists, as is his book on the related topic Ethics and Human Well-Being (1996). He distinguishes between functional goodness (with syn- cagorematical meaning of `good food', `good knife', `good doctor', etc.) and goodness in its proper sense, which belongs to life, honour, pleasure, etc. There is, however, one thing that is the highest good, such as pleasure, for example. In general, the good (or the highest good) can be spoken of in various ways, but the good as such is something that has value in itself and for itself, regardless of its relation to anything else, or, in another way, it is the “intrinsic value” (Bond, 2001: 620).

In one of her articles, American Kantian Christine Korsgaard, the author of Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), suggests distinguishing several subject fields. In the section “Differentiations of the good” of her survey “Theories of the Goods”, the most significant of them, according to Korsgaard, is the distinction between the things that are valued as means, or “instrumental goods”, and as ends, or “final goods”. This distinction is indistinguishable from another one - between internal and external values. To say that something is intrinsically valuable is to say that it is good because it is due to its intrinsic nature, whereas to say that something is externally good is to say that it is good because of its relations to the things outside of it. The means, for example, have an obvious external value, since their goodness comes from the fact that they contribute to other things, whereas the ends have an intrinsic value. Goodness can also be divided into objective and subjective. It is worthwhile regarding them as the goodness for everyone and the goodness for someone, even though the goods and values are viewed as interchangeable concepts.

In Korsgaard's point of view, philosophers of the 20^th century discussed the issue of their relationship as per the following propositions:

1) the good is something “inherently subjective”, and people have a reason to strive for common objects only when their interests coincide;

2) subjective values always serve the basis for objective ones (if it is subjectively good for me to have something, it is objectively good for me to have it);

3) some subjective values, such as those related to needs, are basic for the objective ones, others are not;

4) subjective values are always basic for the objective ones (if it is subjectively good for me to have something, then it is objectively good for me to have it);

5) subjective values are derived from the objective ones (I cannot insist that something is good for me because it makes me happy if I do not consider my happiness objectively good) (Korsgaard, 1998: 132). In other words, “values” can be substituted for “the goods” in absolutely any position and nothing will change from this.

A slightly different map of contemporary discussions on the issues related to the good is drawn in Johan Branmark's review article “The Good” (2006). The author, who is also quite close to deontology Deontological ethics proceeds from the fact that the norms of correct action are set by the performance of duty and based on obligations. This differs it from consequentialist ethics with consequences of actions as a criterion, primarily in the form of individual and social benefits. It also differs from aretaic ethics with the criterion corresponding to virtues and, in some cases, directly to personified moral models. Ultimately, deontologi-cal ethics goes back to Kant., divides the differences between ethicists in connection with the concept of the good (what does it mean to be good?) and the conceptions of the good (which things are really good?) In his discussion of evaluative concepts, he refers to John Rawls.. Scrutiny of the concept of the good begins only with Moore, of the conceptions already with antiquity. Considering the issue of whether the good is a single concept, Branmark claims that for Franz Brentano and many others this question would have been rhetorical, but gradually it ceased to be so, while Peter Geach proposed to distinguish between predicative and attributive use of the concept of the good. So, if the proposition “X is AB” is used predicatively, then it can be divided into “X is A” and “X is B”, and if this is impossible, then A is used attributively. When applied to goodness, the judgments like “This is a good event” will be predicative, and the judgments like “This is a good knife” will be attributive. Whereas Aristotle leaned toward an attributive understanding of the good and Moore toward a predicative one, Geach believed that “good” is always an attributive adjective, since nothing is just good. Branmark argues that the predicative use of “good” corresponds to the indication of “value”, while the attributive one does not (Korsgaard, 1998: 151).

This does not mean that there are no voices against this identification. Yet, they are very rare and not always intelligible. Thus, T.J. Hig- gings, the author of the article “Moral Good” for the “New Catholic Encyclopedia” (2003), in its conclusion complains that the concept of good is now almost replaced by the concept of value and that both concepts are thought to be almost identical. Intrinsic values encompass truth, beauty, talent, health, peace, morality, and religion. Value, therefore, encompasses the entire spectrum of human desires and interests, rather than individual actions and objects of desire. But in this case value, according to the author, covers less than good (Higgings 2003: 354).

Higgins's complaints are quite justified: according to a well-known law of logic, the larger the scope of a concept is, the poorer its content becomes, and the inflation which “the values” are subject to cannot but affect (as in the case of any defaults) the neighbouring categories as well and the coin called “the values” in modern culture, becomes worn-out. And this is not the opinion of the author of these lines alone. The oldest American axiologist of the 20^th century, Abraham Edel, noted the success of the “general theory of values”, designed to unite all normative philosophical disciplines from ethics to the philosophy of religion. Long ago, he wrote that “descriptively, a man's “values” may refer to all his attitudes for-or-against anything” (Edel, 1953: 198). Later, he stated that “its influence dissipated... when the use of the term “value” became so trivial and lost any definite meaning” (Edel, 1992: 1269).

Listening to the language

I think that implementation of “anti-inflationary measures” should begin first of all by following the advice of the same critic of classical axiology, Heidegger, who strongly recommended listening to the language that he, as we know, even considered “the abode of Being”. This course of action will not contradict Moore's intuitionism, from which meta-ethics as such begins. So, in my opinion, the Russian language has some advantages in the area under study, and the opinion that it should only be a borrowing party is unfounded. Thus, this language does not need to resort to special lexical constructions to distinguish between dobro (approximately “benignity”, “benevolence”) and blago (the good), which was done in his time by Kant, who did not become consistent here. In Russian, they are differentiated naturally - both morphologically and grammatically: one can form a plural from blago, but one cannot form a plural from dobro. This corresponds to “the things themselves”: there are many goods, but there is only one “benignity” equal to itself. But benefits from the language are waiting for us in the case of values as well.

The fact is that there is no lexical difference between “value” and “value/cost” in the languages of economically more developed cultures. Value/cost is lexically the same not only in English. German Wert, Swedish varde, French valeur, Spanish valor, Italian valore, etc. also have the same initial commodity meaning, which makes it difficult to distinguish it from “good (beneficial) things”. And the fact that “the borders of my world are the borders of my language” (as another notorious philosopher of the 20^th century noted) is convincingly evidenced by the history of practical philosophy. Thus, not least of all, Thomas Hutcheson's approaches to calculations of the goods See, e.g., his opus magnum “A System of Moral Philoso-phy” (published posthumously in 1755), where calculations of public goods and “estimation of the value of this life” along with measuring of corresponding evils are undertaken (Hutcheson, 1755: 101, 223 etc.). See his detailed calculations of intensivity, duration, reli- were due to the fact that in English the word “goods” means not only “the benefits” but, and in the first place, simply the “commodity”. In utilitarianism, consideration of goods as a `commodity' item was “substantiated” with both the worldview and the vocabulary since Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism and Hutcheson's follower¹¹. Yet, value means “the importance or worth of something for someone” only in its secondary sense, whereas it is “cost” in the primary one. Is it surprising that goods and values are perceived (as fractions with the same denominator) as almost indistinguishable? The genius of the Russian language is that it is the only one of the cultural priorities in which stoimost' (“cost”) and tsen- nost ' (“value”) are also distinguished lexically (as well as dobro and blago, see above), and the spirit of the language makes it possible to distance the cost-for-all and the value-for-some- one. That is why a closely related word is drago-tsennost' (“what is most valuable”), which means not something that has a good value/cost in general, but something extremely precious for someone personally. However, in his time it was Kant who distinguished “Wert” from the word “Würde”ability narrowness and other indexes of pleasures (i.e. values) and pains (non-values) in his An Introduction to the Principles (and did it more consistently than he did with the case of good). Nevertheless, the second word does not mean value in the specified hue of personal drago-tsennost' but in the general meaning of “dignity” (Russian dostoinstvo = Roman honestum), which all men possess as humans in contrast to things.