Realms of Value by Ralph Barton Perry (review)

uo BOOK REVIEWS Realms of Value. By RALPH BARTON PERRY. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. Pp. 509 with index. $7.50. The first volume of this work entitled General Theory of Value was first published in 1926, and reprinted in 1950. It received more attention than any other work in English on the subject of " value," and was widely used as a basis for class discussion. A favorite topic for discussion with the reviewer and others was how Professor Perry, now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, could be a realist in the theory of knowledge and still take a non-realistic tum in his theory of value. The subtitle of that famous volume was, " Construed in Terms of Interest." What the author meant by " interest " was naturally to be considered. It is easy to suggest the reason for the discussion the book enjoyed. It was an elaborate study, done on an high level, and written in an English style that seems to us to have been maintained by almost all the great English philosophers from Hobbes to Russell. Perhaps the study was too elaborate in the care with which it attempted to prepare the way for its own definition of value. In this regard it might be thought to be labored. But this feature, if possibly overdone in relation to definition, made a substantial contribution in another .regard since in chapter after chapter Mr. Perry sought to show how the value phenomena are given and imposed on us in various fields, such as general biology, psychology, economics, politics, religion, and ethics. Perhaps for some split second a man can exist without valuing. We believe that he cannot. Whatever else it is, to be is, for man, to operate, to act, and this in his case is to seek. Professor Perry has always made much of this circumstance both in the old work and in this new volume which comprises the Gifford Lectures given at the University of Glasgow in 1946-47, 1947-48. We think that he might have made even more of the circumstance. Man is a seeking, striving animal-and surely Mr. Perry says so with a good deal of emphasis, since he tends to base all human value on moral value, and to hold that moral value is achieved in the resolution of a conflict or struggle. We think that here he might have gone much further, without any straining of the evidence. He might have asked whether struggle, seeking, conflict belong only to man, or belong to life, or whether they are as possibly as wide as our given universe. It .is true, as he said long ago in an article, that it is up to the individual philosopher to decide whether he will cut the value cake thick or thin; that is, whether in defining value he will aim to cover value for all life, or only for human life. Our own view is that it is not altogether up to the individual to make this decision. The " value philosopher " begins, as Professor Perry has said, with valuing phenomena or data. The question then is, where are BOOK REVIEWS 111 these experienced or observed? Is it only in the individual himself? Mr. Perry is no solipsist. Then the human family is not so diverse from the animal family, the living family, the being family, that we .are not free to raise the question of valuing, seeking, as a possible characteristic of the given universe. Possibly all nature is struggling and groaning, each type of thing in its own way. Here, it seems to us, Tolstoi was challenging in his work What of Life? But Tolstoi might have gone further and said, precisely in regard this struggle, What of being? As a matter of fact, emphasis on effort and struggle is constant in Western philosophy, and it seems to have this same constancy in Oriental thought. The Greek thinkers repeatedly mentioned orexis and horme as if these were to be taken for granted in the universe. Mediaeval theologians and philosophers, perhaps Jewish as well as Christian, thought that not merely man but the whole of creation is in some kind of inevitable contest, a lethal...