Historical Spectrum of Value Theories (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 247 These criticisms, though not without point, are not offered as decisively destructive. Bergson et le calcul infinitesimal is an excellent book: clear, well-reasoned, and extremely perceptive, especially in areas of Bergson's thought which have been misunderstood or, as often, neglected. Along with t3apek's Bergson and Modern Physics it makes an important contribution to the current reassessmeut of Bergson's philosophy. P. A. Y. GtrNrr~ North Texas State University Historical Spectrum o[ Value Theories. Volume II, Anglo-American Group. By W. H. Werkmeister. (Lincoln, Nebraska: Johnsen Publishing Co., 1973. Pp. xxiii -t- 370. $8.50) Edmund Husserl once regretted that mankind had created many philosophies but not one philosophy which would be universally recognized as the only right one. He might have forgotten how terribly monotonous philosophy would be under such an "ideal" circumstance. Also in philosophical thought variatio delectat, as the reading of the second volume of Werkmeister's Historical Spectrum of Value Theories reveals again. In the first volume of this work, published in 1970, its distinguished author showed the variety of colors the axiological problem reflects in the German-speaking world. In his second volume he lets us see different ways in which values have been interpreted by Anglo-American thinkers. In his Introduction Professor Werkmeister deals briefly with some value-theoretical Ideas of such Anglo-American thinkers as Royce, Bradley, Ormond, Moore, Santayana and Laird, starting his detailed analyses with a presentation of Wilbur Marshall Urban's theory of values. In the preface of his book Valuation: Its Nature and Laws (I 909) Urban explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to the Austrians Meinong and Ehrenfels, the founders of the philosophy of values. According to Urban, the psychological equivalent of the value-predicate is always a feeling but one which actualizes pre-existent conative dispositions . Aesthetic experience, he thinks, is "characterized by repose in the object" (p. 19). Over-individual or social values are divided by Urban into economic and moral ones, the former being instrumental, the latter intrinsic. Werkmeister recalls the polemics between Urban and Herbert Schneider, whose arguments were based on pragmatism. The pragmatic value theory was developed by John Dewey, to whose "Instrumentalism" Werkmeister dedicates the second chapter of his book. According to Dewey, valuations occur in concrete situations when it is necessary to bring something into existence which is lacking or to conserve something which is threatened by possible disappearance. Valuations to him must be either ethical or economic . The special province of judgments of valuations are for Dewey conflicts between ends of conduct and means of attaining them. Values are not ascertained in but assigned to things. "The value of an economic object or of a moral act," Dewey wrote, "depends upon my desires and feelings, and therefore must remain a matter of my private appreciation " (p. 51). After having excluded the realm of the "aesthetic" from the sphere of values, Dewey reintroduced it in his book Art and Experience as a life function. Our experience of the work of art has a "satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movements." Werkmeister explains that insofar as this structure of the work of art is immediately felt, it is "aesthetic" in Dewey's sense. 248 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The book offers also a synthesis of Bosanquet's doctrine according to which values have their ultimate ground in the "nisus toward the whole," the seeing of all things in a harmonius way. It is the "vision of the whole" which gives us the sense of value, according to the famous British thinker. As for Maurice Picard, he considers values to be "relations of interest between conscious activity and environment" (p. 79). This thinker considers rightfully all instrumental values (which he calls "contributary") as objective, insists on their having degrees, but denies (likewise rightfully) degrees of truth. In Prall's "aesthetically oriented theory" we find the idea that aesthetic theory is an account not only of one type of value, but the essential nature of all value, all value being intuited and, in a way, "aesthetic." Charles G. Shaw's humanistic approach to values starts from the idea that in art humanity surmounts...