Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai

Kolnai’s Dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit: A “Completion” of Scheler’s Value-Ethics

Kolnai’s Dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit: A “Completion” of Scheler’s Value-Ethics FRANCIS DUNLOP Readers of Kolnai’s ethical writings cannot fail to notice the charge of “immoralism”1 which he frequently levels en passant at various kinds of ethical Naturalists and some other kinds of moral theorists. This habit of Kolnai’s derives from his early conviction that ethics cannot be a purely theoretical activity. As he says in the introduction to his dissertation: “The man who tells me what is good awakens some of the powers at work in me and urges them on; in the last analysis he does nothing else.”2 Then, in the “Concluding Remarks” , he argues that false theory and immoral practice are intrinsically connected.3 These claims are closely linked with what he calls the “two ultimate data” of ethics: “the moral need and the moral intuitions actually current in society” .4 The first is explained as the presence in us all of “life-directing motives that are not ‘biological’, or subservient to vital interests” (though could easily be led astray); it reveals itself—here we have the second “fundamental datum”—in even the most hardened villain ’s use of the common language of moral discourse, either to justify his own faults, or to show that he himself is no worse than his neighbour. Kolnai goes on to stress the importance of the moral philosopher’s becoming thoroughly familiar with all aspects of the moral vocabulary, especially the language of moral value; since positive ethical concepts all signify aspects of the moral Good, sustained attention to them, undistorted by abstract theory , cannot fail to have some positive moral effect.5 The moral philosopher is, in fact, engaged, willy-nilly, in the struggle between Good and Evil. The background to the dissertation is, then, a conviction that ethics must be able to show the moral agent how he may contribute to the more effective realisation of the Good, a task which the best-known ethical writers had done, at best, very patchily. Most of them, in Kolnai’s opinion, had been content to set forth a universal moral principle or set of principles , and leave it to others to show exactly how such “abstract” things could be “applied” to the real details of the moral life. But this cannot be done, says Kolnai, without understanding that, just as ethical value influences reality through human conduct, so reality influences what is of ethical EXPLORING THE WORLD OF HUMAN PRACTICE value in particular situations. The moral philosopher who neglects to study the latter form of influence has “only done half his job” . There is a great deal in Kolnai’s dissertation, as in his later work, which links him with Max Scheler, and Kolnai presents his own work as a “completion” of his.6 Scheler’s great achievement was his defence of the objectivity of “material” , or non-formal, values as the focus of all moral judgement and conduct. Values—the qualities of acts, persons, processes, situations, in short, of all possible kinds of objects, in all their hierarchically graded kinds from “hedonic” to “religious”—are, then, in some sense “there” for us, as persons. Once we have clearly felt the nature of, say, justice as a quality of the real or imagined conduct of a moral agent, we cannot go on living in total disregard of this knowledge. Scheler also held that the morally good act was one in which, for example, the value of promise-keeping is given precedence over that of amusing oneself by reading a thriller. Moral values thus emerge “on the back of” preferences for the higher value (in this case the spiritual value of a just act is put before the hedonic value of self-entertainment); the moral value is a resultant of this preference. Kolnai accepted much of what Scheler had to say about the ordered realm of values.7 But, like most commentators, he rejected Scheler’s account of the moral value of conduct. He thought that it could not possibly be simply a practical expression of the agent’s “preferences” between values, as Scheler seems to make it, since the moral agent frequently has to choose between values of equal rank, and can only do this in the light of the “undifferentiated ” Good; in addition, the moral agent must always have some self-awareness in moral conduct, which Scheler dismissed as Pharisaism. The “will to serve the good” and the “will to be...