1297. HRN's whole approach evidently . . .

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HRN's whole approach evidently depends on distinguishing without separating "facts" and "values," or "being" and "value," and so also "theoretical reasoning" and "practical reasoning," and so on (c.f., e.g., RM: 78). But what is this, I ask myself, if not his way of doing what I do by distinguishing without separating "[the structure of] being in itself" and "the meaning of being for us," and so also "intellectual questions" and "existential questions," "science" and "wisdom," etc?

Another question I find myself asking is whether HRN doesn't, in his way, support my position that, although faith is directly concerned with value, and so with the meaning of being for us, it is and must be concerned indirectly with being, and even, in fact, with the structure of being in itself. I ask this question not least because of what he himself says in contrasting his objectively relational value theory with subjectively relational theories. He typically draws this contrast by saying that good is relative to "need," not to "desire." But in at least one passage he says, "The interpretation of values as relative to structure and organic needs, rather than to desire and consciousness provides for such an objective relativism. The value of deity would appear, on the basis of such a theory, to be quite independent of human desire and the consciousness of need, but not independent of the human constitution and its actual need" ("Value Theory and Theology"). Here "need" is supplemented by "constitution," but also by "structure," these terms evidently being synonyms.

Third question: Does what HRN says here about values being objectively relative to structure – the structure of the object valued as well as that of the subject who values, or ought to value – explain why, in taking theology to be distinct from "metaphysics and ontology," he is careful to note that they are "not necessarily in opposition" (RM: 12)?

5 December 2006

The passage cited from "Value Theory and Theology" is to be found on p. 113 in Julius Seelye Bixler et al., The Nature of Religious Experience (New York: Harper, 1937). The following parallel passage occurs earlier in the same essay, on p. 106: "This principle [sc. of value relativity] does not mean that values must be regarded as relative to desire or to consciousness, that there is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so. It is generally recognized that objectivity of a sort must be provided for in any value theory, that the 'ought-to-be-ness' of justice, truth and peace does not depend upon the fact that men happen to desire them. But it does not follow that values are independent of structure and process. Such independence can be maintained only by means of a vitiating abstractionism and the denial of the relative standpoint of the observer. There can be no doubt of the absolute claim which truth and justice have upon man, but to abstract them from his nature and to call them valid apart from any being for whom they are valid, to say that they ought to be, rather than that man ought to be truthful and just, is to abandon the realm of experience and to enter into doubtful regions of metaphysical abstraction. There is, however, another and more serious way of refusing to take the principle of relativity seriously in the field of value thinking. It consists of the exaltation of values recognized as relative to human structure into the final values of reality, in the recognition of the human standpoint as the last standpoint which man needs to recognize, or, at least, as the standpoint whence the values of the universe become visible as an integrated system." 

Missing from what is said in the second paragraph is any account of HRN's explicit insistence that "value can be abstracted from the object as little as from the subject. Value has no existence save in valued beings, and they possess value not as an independent quality but by virtue of their character or constitution, as that which corresponds to a need.... [A] being is found to have the value of deity not as a separate quality but by virtue of those characteristics which enable it to fulfill the need for deity.... The question about value as a question of the valuing mind or of the needful organism is always a question about being having value.... [I]t is being which is sought, not value as such" (113 f.). HRN couldn't be clearer, then: on both sides, on that of the object valued as surely as on that of the subject valuing, value is relative to "structure," "constitution," "character," "characteristics," etc.