i . Unsatisfactory Theories of the Origin of the Concept of Value and the Essence of Moral Facts
Ev e r y k i n d o f c o g n i t i o n is rooted in experience.
Therefore ethics, too, must have its foundation in “experience.”
But the question concerns the essence of the experience that yields moral cognition, and the essential elements that such ex
perience must contain. If I assess a deed of mine or the comport
ment of one of my fellow men as “good” or “evil,” either in recol
lection or prior to its execution, what kind of experience is it that renders the material for the judgment? It does not help to begin the investigation with an analysis of propositions of assessment which are formulated in language. So-called assessments are no different from other judgments with respect to logical form. The question here concerns the fact-material which corresponds to
“assessments,” how this material comes upon us, and the factors of which it consists. One must inquire into the immediately given facts that fulfill the predicates of such propositions as this deed is “distinguished,” “vulgar,” “noble,” “base,” “criminal,” etc., and into the ways in which such facts come upon us.
Nothing looks more paradoxical at a superficial glance than the assertion that there are such things as moral “facts” One is inclined to admit that there are astronomical, botanical, and chemical facts to which theories must “correspond” in some way or another. But what can “moral facts” be? Let us momentarily refrain from considering the universal difficulty with the concept of “facts” in general: whether every fact is a certain mental con
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struction, an X-something, which supplies an answer to a pre viously formed concept, question, or hypothesis, or whether there are genuine and pure facts. One can still see, apart from this question pertaining to the essence of a fact, a distinct difference.
Whatever the case may be, the question is not the same for both
“moral facts” and other kinds of “facts.” Looking at nature, I per
ceive stars, plants, animals, and bodies in various forms of com
position. Looking into myself, I perceive an ego, conation, will
ing, and sensations in a complex of interwoven manifolds. In a thinking fashion, I comprehend numbers, for instance, and many relations among them, in a sphere that can be called the being of ideal objects. But where can I find moral facts? Surely an ego or a willing can be good or evil, noble or base. But do I see this in the same manner as I see, in inner perception, the factors that lie in willing: conation, affirmation, the “it ought to be so,” and the sensations of muscular tension that always ac
company these factors? And is it not the case that a law, an institution, even the order or disorder in my room— things, in other words, that do not occur at all in myself, and which can
not appear in inner perception— can be connected with predi
cates that refer to the moral, such as “just,” “unjust,” “orderly,”
and “disorderly”? If I thus scrutinize the entire world, it seems that I find no “moral facts.” Indeed, in how many areas have
“moral facts” been sought in the history of philosophy?
Many thought they could find them in “inner experiences.”
But it is unsatisfactory to assume that there are many feelings of what is “seemly” or “unseemly,” for instance, or of “repent
ance,” or of “sin” and “guilt.” Do I perceive that which we call seemly and unseemly, that which we call repentance, guilt, and sin, as belonging to and in such feelings? Is a feeling itself
“seemly” or “unseemly”— just as it may be strong, weak, pleasant, or unpleasant, or just as it has this or that quality? Certainly not.
If we were to have in our hands that which we call “repentance,”
“guilt,” or “sin,” and if we were to know what it really is, then it would be meaningful to talk about the feelings that we have and find in ourselves on the occasion of repenting and knowing our
selves to be of guilt, just as we can determine a representation A and a representation B by saying that representation A is “of Bismarck,” and that B is “of Moltke.” In both cases, however, we leave what we find in inner experience and move toward objects that do not lie in lived experiences. Therefore the psychologist or the researcher whose sphere of investigation is inner experience does not concern himself with whether his facts are “moral” or
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“immoral.” Everyone knows that the psychologist must reject these differences as they impose themselves. There is no psycho
logical division between good and bad feelings. It may be that the world of ethical concepts depicts everything possible as inner be
ing and happening, so that a certain feeling of displeasure ap
pears as “repentance,” “guilt,” and the like, just as a “tree” or a
“house” appears in a certain complex of colors, forms, and shad
ows. Then, as a psychologist, one must not fix his gaze on these conceptual differences if he is to locate his objects. “Moral facts”
therefore do not lie in “inner perception.”
Are they to be found in the realm of “ideal objects,” where numbers, “the” circle, and “the” triangle are? Plato thought so.
This assumption is correct in one sense only. There is an ideal meaning-content of “the good” which I can bring into my con
sciousness with a good man and a good deed, just as I can do this with the ideal species “red” in a seen red color, i.e., the “red” in a certain shade of red. But the difference appears when we ask if objects can be found only in this realm and not elsewhere. Num
bers and triangles are given only in this realm. I cannot intuit them as I can red or green. There is only one number 3, no mat
ter how many operations I must perform to arrive at it, and no matter with which symbols I designate it. But red and green, as wrell as the tones D and C, are also to be found in another sphere.
I can intuit red without looking in the direction of the meaning
“red.” This does not mean that an “undetermined” color becomes red only when subsumed under its concept. A seen red can have thousands of shades that do not enter into the sphere of meaning.
Conversely, anything that does not fall under the meaning of a seen triangle does not belong to the sphere of triangularity: it is the “deviations” from it, e.g., different colors, etc., that are not triangular at all. Is Plato correct in saying that the “good” is of the same nature as the triangle or the number 3? Are noble, mag
nanimous, just, etc., differentiated as value-qualities, as the shades of red are differentiated as intuitive contents, or are they only “exemplifications” of the single “good” whose differences lie only in complex acts of willing, deeds, human beings, etc., as bearers of qualities such as noble, magnanimous, just? Can I not see any type of kindness that I meet in experience as a special and peculiar fact without looking at the idea of “kindness as such”— however possible it may be in such a case to think of the essence of “kindness”? This is beyond doubt. “Morality” does not lie in the realm of ideal meanings alone. It is not in the light of such ideal meanings alone that “premoral facts” become moral
ones. There are originaliter moral facts that are distinct from the sphere of the meanings of moral concepts. Plato, too, fell victim to the deception of the ancient and historically very effec
tive division of spirit into “reason” and “sensibility.” On the as
sumption that moral values— indeed, all value-facts— are com
parable to straight lines and triangles in that they do not belong to the sphere of contents of sensation, one concludes that they are only “meanings comprehensible through reason.” Yet a child feels the kindness of his mother without having even vaguely comprehended an idea of the good. And how often do we feel that our enemy possesses a noble moral quality while we stick to our negative judgment of him in the sphere of meanings, so that the appearance of his noble quality passes us by without a change in our intellectual convictions concerning him? Moral facts, as opposed to the sphere of meanings, are facts of non-formal intui
tion, not of sensible intuition, if by “intuition” we mean im
mediacy of the givenness of an object and not necessarily a pic
turelike content.
There is another analogy that must be done away with, one that claims justification on its own terms. It is often emphasized that, like mathematical concept-words, the words which express moral values possess no correlates in the contents of experience that adequately correspond to them. Just as no real cube is a perfect cube, so also, it is claimed, “no one is good but your Father in heaven”; i.e., the existence of “moral facts” as inde
pendent of the sphere of meanings is denied because moral words refer not only to something “fictionally ideal” but also to the
“ideal” that real human beings and deeds can only “approximate.”
Thus, later Platonists (like Augustine, Descartes, and Male- branche) asserted that one could not comprehend the kindness of a certain human being without referring to the idea of total kindness, or the idea of God— just as one could not comprehend a finite straight line without referring to the idea of an absolute infinite line as a measure of sorts, and taking the finite line as a
“part” of the latter. Yet the assertion that all values are “ideal”
must be rejected. There are values of the ideal and of the factual;
but a moral value as such is never an “ideal” of something that itself is not yet a value. Here one cannot see which direction of
“idealization” one should take in order to arrive at a value from properties— say, of human beings— which are value-indifferent.
A value must be caught in intuition if it is to be idealized, and it makes no difference whether we are concerned with a finite or infinite object of the quality concerned. Nor is it permissible to
Ethics of Imperatives / 167 dissolve the differences between moral value-qualities, such as the essential difference between good and evil, into mere degrees of approximation of an "ideal” of the “good” or “all kindness.”
Socratic-Platonic intellectual idealism was mistaken at the out
set in denying values of the bad, with their manifold qualities, as positive facts, and in identifying the bad with that which is the greatest distance from the highest good, or “the good,” as well as in equating the bad with “appearances” (ny ov as opposed to
ovtws ov). But values of both the good and the bad occur at all levels of being, if one wishes to distinguish levels of being. How
ever, one cannot identify the “good” with the ultimate level of being (the Sv, as Plato says) nor can one regard the bad as only a relative level of being.
Modern rationalism (e.g., that of Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff) commits the same error in using the unclear concept of “perfec
tion” for this purpose, identifying the more perfect with a “higher degree of being,” and absolute perfection with the ens realissi- mum. Perfection presupposes value-facts, and, if applied to something, it assumes a meaning only when a certain value- property in a thing in relation to which this thing is perfect has been comprehended.
But if moral value-facts do not belong to the sphere of pure meanings, where are they, and how are they to be found? Before responding to the question, let us consider another theory on the matter. This theory holds that there are absolutely no genuine ful
fillments of the words good, noble, etc., neither in the sphere of meanings nor anywhere else, and that we are concerned here with human inventions that have their original existence only in words of language. According to this theory such words have no intentional function at all, but are only expressions of feelings, affects, interests, and acts of desire. The first of these assertions was held in its most radical form by Thomas Hobbes. It is also behind many statements made by Nietzsche, e.g., his claim that there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena.
Despite basic differences in the interpretation of “ideas” and
“meanings,” this opinion shares more with Platonism and its schools than it realizes. For in both this theory and Platonism, autonomous value-facts— and moral value-facts in particular—
are denied, and the entire sphere of the moral is pushed over into the sphere of an unintuitable area of thought. In the later theory,
“interpretation” replaces eternal ideas that are only comprehensi
ble through meanings. Initially such interpretation grows
unarbi-trarily out of the factual conations, interests, and needs of a group; later it supposedly falls victim to more or less arbitrary definitions and conventions. There is no knowledge of the morally valuable, but rather the fixation of what is to be called that; it is not evidence and truth but -purposefulness that decides moral conflict.
The central point of this theory is its claim that there is no such thing as a definite moral experience. Words designating values— especially moral values— and propositions and moral evaluations containing such words are not considered words and propositions reflecting facts or words and propositions having an intentional cognitive function in relation to such facts; they are considered mere expressions of reactions to extant emotive and conative processes, processes which are not comprehended as psychic facts of inner perception. At a higher level of develop
ment such words and propositions become arbitrary expressions of a readiness to act in a certain situation. Hence they are not forms of communication of something known; they are, rather, means to guide our deeds and those of others in a certain di
rection. Accordingly, praise and reproach precede moral value- cognition. Propositions such as “This deed is good” (or “This personality is good,” etc.) are not based on value-cognition. On the contrary, the concepts of good, bad, etc., follow only from reflection on the acts of praise and reproach as well as on their directions and laws. Praise and reproach, however, are only the immediate expressions of the fact that the praised (reproached) lies in the direction of a present and factual conation (counter
conation) in the one who is praising (reproaching).1
Ethical nominalism must be clearly distinguished from the psychological doctrine which holds that “moral facts” are found in the sphere of inner experience ( “psychologism” ) and in the feelings and conations, etc., that one comprehends there. For nominalism asserts the opposite, namely, that there are no such
“facts,” and that definitions and secret and hidden conventions govern our moral evaluations.
Ethical nominalism does not maintain that a proposition such as “This man’s conduct is good” is different only in words from the proposition “I find in myself, or there is in me, a feeling
i. See m y criticism of Adam Smith’s ethics of sympathy. His ethics takes as its starting point the cofeeling of a neutral onlooker and his praise and reproach. See Zur Phanomenologie und Theorie der Sympathie- gefiihle (Bibliog. no. 6 ), pp. 1-9. [See Wesen und Formen der Sympathie
(Bibliog. no. 18 ), pt. A, chaps. 1, 2.— Ed.]