The Genesis of Values (review)

As Hans Joas notes, the concept of values has become ubiquitous in popular discourse and academia, but the analysis of how values arise have failed to proliferate in the same fashion, either among sociologists or philosophers. His latest book helps to fill this gap, first by providing a lucid and cogent examination of writings on value creation by a variety of major social theorists, then by presenting his own ideas.

The book is in many ways a natural sequel to Joas's Creativity of Action. There is a survey of "classical" writers, with major sections devoted to the writings of the American Pragmatists. Moreover, the importance of values is implicit in the theory of action presented in his earlier book, in which the goals of action are seen as neither static nor fully determined by one's social environment, but rather generated via a process of reflection.

Though it is impossible to briefly summarize the varied points he makes regarding the theorists covered, Joas tries to show that they provide complementary insights that can be integrated into a single model. He argues that Friedrich Nietzsche was to first to recognize the need to see the genesis of values as an issue for social analysis, though the theory he presented, based on ressentiment, was inadequate. William James showed how religious faith could be consistent with reason, yet also be an enabling force inspiring action when reason proves insufficient. Emile Durkheim focused attention on the collective nature of religious experiences and how their functions can be replaced by practices outside of religion. Georg Simmel pointed out the importance of the "axial rotation" in which means become ends, while Max Scheler investigated the role of affect in the formation of ethical values. John Dewey, more than anyone else, brought together these various threads, portraying "adjustment" as a communication-instigated process of conceiving an idealized "whole self." More recently, Charles Taylor has pointed out how the values arise more specifically out of attempts to explicate one's prereflective commitments.

Joas's own theory revolves around the twin concepts of self-transcendence and self-formation. As far as I can understand them, the former can be interpreted as the surrender of self during nonroutine experiences that force individuals to look beyond existing repertoires of action, the latter as the creative regeneration of self as a result of reflection triggered by such experiences. A related point is that individual values are endorsed by group norms, but that norms do not specify uniquely which values apply in each action situation.

If the book offers any major frustration, the author does not develop his own theory of values much past an initial set of comments and characterizations. Of course, the demand to dot every i and cross every t, even at the cost of subtlety, may be the manifestation of a particular social science prejudice. Nonetheless, it would be nice to know how this theory could be applied to explain specific instances of value-creation, or even to predict future instances. Arguably, a theory with such capabilities was or is the goal of many of the writers he discusses in this book.

This ties in with the author's rather offhand dismissal of utilitarian approaches to the question of value. While utilitarian theorists, like others, have shied away from the question of values until recently, it is not their choice-theoretic model of action that is to blame. Indeed, a choice-theoretic model may well be a useful device to conceptualize answers to some of the questions raised by his analysis. The quest for the "whole self" can be seen as a never-ending attempt to attain a particular relation between one's empirical beliefs and explicitly held utilities, despite "nonroutine" experiences generated by unanticipated perceptions of the external world and one's own unexamined affect. Communication can be seen as a device that shapes the parameterization of those beliefs and utilities...