In the foregoing pages we have consistently used the expressions
"ethical and economic judgment" and "judgment of valuation" as
synonymous. This may have seemed to the reader something very like a
begging of the question from the outset, as taking for granted that very
judgmental character of our valuational experience which it was the
professed object of our discussion to establish. We are thus called upon
very briefly to consider, first of all, the relations which subsist
between the consciousness of value and the process which we have
described as that of valuation. This will enable us, in the second
place, to determine the logical function which belongs to the
consciousness of value in the general economy of life. The consciousness
of value is a perfectly definite and distinctive psychical fact mediated
by a doubtless highly complex set of psychical or ultimately
physiological conditions. As such it admits of descriptive analysis, and
in a complete theory of value such descriptive analysis should certainly
find a place. It would doubtless throw much light upon the origin of
valuation as a process, and of valuing as an attitude, and admirably
illustrate the view of the function of the consciousness of value to
which a logical study of valuation as a process seems to lead us. This
problem in analysis belongs, however, to psychology, and therefore lies
apart from our present purpose; nor is it necessary to the establishment
of our present view to undertake it. It is necessary for our purpose
only to suggest, for purposes of identification, a brief description of
the value-consciousness, and to indicate its place in the process of
reflective thought.
The consciousness of value may best be described, by way of first
approximation, in the language of the Austrian economists as a sense of
the "importance" to oneself of a commodity or defined moral purpose. It
belongs to the agent's attitude of survey or recapitulation which ensues
upon the completion of the judgment-process and is mediated by attention
to the ethical or economic object in its newly defined character of
specific conduciveness to the well-being of the self. The commodity, in
virtue of its ascertained physical properties, is adapted to certain
modes of use or consumption which, through valuation of the commodity,
have come to be accepted as desirable. The moral act likewise has been
approved by virtue of its having certain definite sociological
tendencies, or being conducive to the welfare and happiness of a friend.
Thus commodity or moral act, as the case may be, has a determinate
complexity of meaning which has been judged as, in one sense, expansive
of the self, and the value-consciousness we may identify as that sense
of the valued object's importance which is mediated by recognition of it
as the bearer of this complexity of concrete meaning. The meaning is, as
we may say, "condensed" or "compacted" into the object as given in
sense-perception, and because the meaning stands for expansion of the
self, the object in taking it up into itself receives the character of
importance as a valued object.
The sense of importance thus is expressive of an attitude upon the
agent's part. The concrete meanings which make up the content of the
object's importance would inevitably, if left to themselves, prompt
overt action. The commodity would forthwith be applied to its new use or
the moral act would be performed. The self would, as we may express it,
possess itself of the spiritual energies resident in the chosen purpose.
The attitude of survey, however, inhibits this action of the self and
the sense of importance is the resulting emotional apprehension of the
value of the object hereby brought to recognition. Now, it should be
carefully observed that the particular concrete emotions appropriate to
the details of the valued purpose are not what we here intend. The
purpose may spring from some impulse of self-interest, hatred,
patriotism, or love, and the psychical material of its presentation
during the agent's survey will be the varied complex of qualitative
emotion that comes from inhibition of the detailed activities which make
up the purpose as a whole. So also the apprehension of the physical
object of economic valuation is largely, if not altogether, emotional in
its psychical constitution. Psychologically these emotions are the
purpose--they are the "stuff" of which the purpose as a psychical fact
occurring in time is made. But we must bear in mind that it is not the
purpose as a psychical fact that is the object of the agent's
valuing--any more than is the tool with which one cuts perceived as a
molecular mass or as an aggregation of centers of ether-stress. As a
cognized object of value the purpose is, in our schematic terminology, a
source of energy for the increase of the self, and thus the
consciousness of value is the perfectly specific emotion arising from
restraint put upon the self in its movement of appropriation of this
energy. In contrast with the concrete emotions which are the substance
of the purpose as presented, the consciousness of value may be called a
"formal" emotion or the emotion of a typical reflective attitude.
The valuing attitude we may then describe as that of "resolution" on the
part of the self to adhere to the finished purpose which it now surveys,
with a view to exploitation of the purpose. The connection between the
valuation-process and the consciousness of value may be stated thus: The
valuation-process works out (and necessarily in cognitive, objective
terms) the purpose which is valued in the agent's survey. But this
development of the purpose is at the same time determination of the
"energetic" self to acceptance of the purpose that shall be worked out.
Thus the valuation-process is the source of the consciousness of value
in the twofold way (1) of defining the object valued, and (2) of
determining the self to the attitude of resolution to adhere to it and
exploit it.[158] The consciousness of value is the apprehension of an
object in its complete functional character as a factor in experience.
The function of the consciousness of value must now be very briefly
considered. The phenomenon is a striking one, and apparently, as the
economists especially have insisted, of much practical importance in the
conduct of life.[159] And yet on our account of the phenomenon, as it
may appear, the problem of assigning to it a function must be, to say
the least, difficult. For the consciousness of value is, we have held,
emotional, and, on the conception of emotion in general which we have
taken for granted throughout our present discussion, this mode of being
conscious is merely a reflex of a state of tension in activity. As such
it merely reports in consciousness a process of motor co-ordination
already going on and in the nature of the case can contribute nothing to
the outcome.
Now if it were in a direct way as immediately felt emotion that the
consciousness of value must be functional if functional at all, then the
problem might well be given up; but it would be a serious blunder to
conceive the problem in this strictly psychological way. A logical
statement of the problem would raise a different issue--not the question
of whether emotion as emotion can in any sense be functional in
experience, but whether the consciousness of value and emotion in
general may not receive reflective interpretation and thereby, becoming
objective, play a part as a factor in subsequent valuation-processes.
Indeed, the psychological statement of the problem misses the entire
point at issue and leads directly to the wholly irrelevant general
problem of whether any mode of consciousness whatever can, _as
consciousness_, put forth energy and be a factor in controlling conduct.
The present problem is properly a logical one. What is the agent's
apprehension of the matter? In his subsequent reflective processes of
valuation does the consciousness of value, which was a feature of the
survey on a past occasion, receive recognition in any way and so play a
part? This is simply a question of fact and clearly, as a question
relating to the logical content of the agent's reflective process, has
no connection with or interest in the problem of a possible dynamic
efficacy of consciousness as such. The question properly is logical, not
psychological or metaphysical.
Thus stated, then, the problem seems to admit of answer--and along the
line already suggested in our account of economic valuation.[160]
Recognition of the fact that the consciousness of value was experienced
in the survey of a certain purpose on an earlier occasion confirms this
purpose, holding the means, in an economic situation, to their appointed
use and strengthening adherence to the standard in the ethical case.
This recognition serves as stimulus to a reproduction, in memory, of the
cognitive details of the earlier survey, and so in the ideal case to a
more or less complete and recognizably adequate reinstatement of the
earlier valuing attitude, and so to a reinstatement of the consciousness
of value itself. The result is a strengthening of the established
valuation, a more efficacious control of the new end claiming
recognition, and an assured measure of continuity of ethical development
from the old valuation to the new. The function thus assigned to the
consciousness of value finds abundant illustration elsewhere in the
field of emotion. The stated festivals of antiquity commemorative of
regularly recurrent phases of agricultural and pastoral life, as also
the festivals in observance of signal events in the private and
political life of the individual, would appear to find, more or less
distinctly, here their explanation. These festivals must have been
prompted by a more or less conscious recognition of the social value
inherent in the important functions making up the life of the community,
and of the individual citizen as a member of the community and as an
individual. They secured the end of a sustained and enhanced interest in
these normal functions by effecting, through a symbolic reproduction of
these, an intensified and glorified experience of the emotional meaning
normally and inherently belonging to them.[161] In the same way the
rites of the religious cults of Greece, not to mention kindred phenomena
so abundantly to be found in lower civilizations as well as in our own,
served to fortify the individual in a certain consistent and salutary
course of institutional and private life.[162]
It has been taken for granted throughout that there are but two forms of
valuation-process, the ethical and the economic. The reason for this
limitation may already be sufficiently apparent, but it will further
illustrate our general conception of the valuation-process briefly to
indicate it in detail. What shall be said, for example, of the common
use of the term "value" in such expressions as the "value of life," the
"emotional value" of an object or a moral act, the "natural value" of a
type of impulsive activity? In these uses of the word the reference is
apparently to one's own incommunicable inner experience of living, of
perception of the object, or of the impulse, which cannot be suggested
to any other person who has not himself had the experience. My pleasure,
my color-sensation in its affective aspect, my emotion, are inner and
subjective, and I distinguish them by such expressions as the above from
the visible, tangible object to which I ascribe them as constituting its
immediate or natural value to me. This broader use of the term "value"
has not found recognition in the foregoing pages, and it requires here a
word of comment. So long as these phases of the experience of the object
are not recognized as separable in thought from the object viewed as an
external condition or means, they would apparently be better
characterized in some other way. If, however, they are so recognized,
and are thereby taken as determinative of the agent's practical attitude
toward the thing, we have merely our typical situation of ethical
valuation of some implied purpose as conducive to the self and economic
valuation of the means as requisites for execution of the purpose. Our
general criterion for the propriety of terming any mode of consciousness
the _value_ of an object must be that it shall perform a logical
function and not simply be referred to in its aspect of psychical fact.
The feeling or emotion, or whatever the mode of consciousness in
question may be, must play the recognized part, in the agent's survey of
the situation, of prompting and supporting a definite practical attitude
with reference to the object. If, in short, the experience in question
enters in any way into a conscious purpose of the agent, it may properly
be termed a value.[163]
Æsthetic value also has not been recognized, and for the opposite
reason. The sense of beauty would appear to be a correlate of relatively
perfect attained adjustment between the agent and his natural
environment or the conditions suggested more or less impressively by the
work of art. There must, indeed, be present in the æsthetic experience
an element of unsatisfied curiosity sufficient to stimulate an interest
in the changing or diverse aspects of the beautiful object, but this
must not be sufficient to prompt reflective judgment of the details
presented. On the whole, the æsthetic experience would appear to be
essentially post-judgmental and appreciative. It comes on the particular
occasion, not as the result of a judgment-process of the valuational
type, but as an immediate appreciation. As an immediate appreciation it
has no logical function and on our principles must be denied the name of
value. Our standpoint must be that of the experiencing individual. The
æsthetic experience as a type may well be a development out of the
artistic and so find its ultimate explanation in the psychology of
man's primitive technological occupations in the ordinary course of
life. It is, as we have said, of the post-judgmental type, and so may
very probably be but the cumulative outcome of closer and closer
approximations along certain lines to a perfected adjustment with the
conditions of life. It may thus have its origin in past processes of the
reflective valuational type. Nevertheless, viewed in the light of its
actual present character and status in experience, the æsthetic must be
excluded from the sphere of values.
Thus the realms of fact and value are both real, but that of value is
logically prior and so the "more real." The realm of fact is that of
conditions warranting the purposes of the self; as a separate order,
complete and absolute in itself, it is an abstraction that has forgotten
the reason for which it was made. Reality in the logical sense is that
which furthers the development of the self. The purpose that falls short
of its promise in this regard is unreal--not, indeed, in the
psychological sense that it never existed in imagination, but in the
logical sense that it is no longer valued. Within the inclusive realm of
reality the realm of fact is that of the means which serve the concrete
purposes which the self accepts. The completed purpose, however, is not
_means_, since still behind and beyond it there can be no other concrete
valued purpose which it can serve. Nor is it an ultimate _end_, since in
its character of accepted and valued end the self adheres _to_ it, and
it therefore cannot express the _whole_ purpose of the self to whose
unspecifiable fulness and increase of activity it is but a temporary
probational contributor. It is rather in the nature of a formula or
method of behavior to which the self ascribes reality by recognizing and
accepting it as its own.