Part One THE VALUE OF REASON I want to see you experts in good St. Paul, Romans, 16: 19 Est enim virtus perfecta ratio. Cicero, De Legibus, I, 45 Robert S. Hartman - 9789004496101 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:48:40PM via free access Robert S. Hartman - 9789004496101 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:48:40PM via free access One THE KNOWLEDGE OF VALUE Give the argument itself your attention and observe what will become of it under the test oflogical refutation. 1 Plato I . The Nature of Critique When Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique ofPure Reason he had the double task of any pioneer in a new science: to construct the new science and, in the light of it, to criticize preceding philosophies. Before his mind were the notion and structure ofa new science of metaphysics based on reason in its transcendental use, in the light of which he criticized the old philosophies of metaphysics based on reason in its transcendent use. In the famous Third Question of the Prolegomena, "How Is Metaphysics in General Possible?" corresponding to the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique, he shows that metaphysics is the discipline of pure transcendent rea­ son, of reason without reference to experience, fundamentally different from transcendental reason. Whereas transcendental reason can be checked by sense perception, as in any natural science, transcendent reason cannot. Whatever checks there are must be contained within reason itself. The checks inherent in it appear in the transcendental Ideas, which in turn are based on three funda­ mental forms ofreason, the three forms of the syllogism. These checks appear in the form of contradictions of reason with itself in its transcendental use. These contradictions arise invariably when reason speculates about non-empir­ ical objects such as the Soul, the World, or God. The task of scientific meta­ physics, in the transcendental dialectic, is to show up the contradictions reason gets entangled in (paralogisms, antinomies, fallacies of the Ideal of reason) when soaring off into the transcendent realm, contradictions that make all the efforts of reason futile-as if it were a dove that thinks it can fly more easily in the stratosphere. Contradiction, in various forms, is the technical tool Kant uses for his critique ofreason. In the Fourth Question of the Prolegomena, "How is Metaphysics as a Science Possible?" Kant shows that metaphysics as a natural disposition of reason is real, but considered by itself alone it is illusory. Taking principles from it and using them to follow its natural but false illusions, we can never produce a science but only a vain dialectical art in which one school may outdo another but none can ever acquire a just and lasting result. In order for meta­ physics to be a science it must be a system that exhibits the whole stock of a priori concepts in completeness and consistency. In this sense, critique itself is the science of metaphysics. Robert S. Hartman - 9789004496101 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:48:40PM via free access 4 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD Whoever has once tasted critique will be ever after disgusted with all dogmatic twaddle which he formerly had to put up with. Critique stands in the same relation to the common metaphysics of the schools as chemis­ try does to alchemy, or as astronomy to the astrology of the fortunetellers. I pledge myself that nobody who has thought through and grasped the principles of critique will ever return to that old and sophistical pseudo­ science. 2 The reason is that pre-critical metaphysics was nothing but analyses of concepts, and dissections of concepts do not advance a subject matter. Ever since I have come to know critique whenever I finish reading a book of metaphysical contents ... .! cannot help asking, 'Has this author indeed advanced metaphysics a single step?' I have never been able to find either their essays or my own less important ones ... to have advanced the science of metaphysics in the least. There is a very obvious reason for this: meta­ physics did not then exist as a science .... By the analytical treatment of our concepts the understanding gains indeed a great deal; but the science of metaphysics is thereby not in the least advanced because these dissections of concepts are nothing but the materials from which our science has to be fashioned .... By all its analyzing nothing is effected, nothing obtained or forwarded; and the science, after all this bustle and noise, still remains as it was in the days of Aristotle, though there were far better preparations for it than of old if only the clue to synthetical cognitions had been discov­ ered.3 Whether Kant's science of metaphysics is actually the science of meta­ physics need not be discussed here, but it is certain that his procedure was the methodologically correct one. Anyone who wishes to establish a new science has to (I) produce a coherent and consistent system that covers the subject matter completely; (2) produce criteria for distinguishing the new science from the preceding philosophies, criteria which must be part of the new science; and (3) find the distinction of the preceding philosophies and the new science in the analytic procedure of these philosophies and the synthetic procedure of the new science. Construction and critique must go hand in hand; both are two sides of one and the same coin. In the natural sciences, the great master of both construction and critique in this sense was Galileo Gali lei. In his Two Great Systems of the World, he founded his "two new sciences"; and, even more explicitly and com­ prehensively, he criticized his Aristotelian predecessors. Galileo elaborated the new science, and thus relieved all his successors in natural science of the task of critique and set them free to follow the course he had staked out. Robert S. Hartman - 9789004496101 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:48:40PM via free access The Knowledge of Value 5 The science of value today is in the same position as the science of nature at the time of Galileo and that of metaphysics at the time of Kant. It is not enough to construct a science; it also has to be used in order to criticize the still ruling value philosophy. The construction of the science began in my previous book, The Structure of Value. In the present book the other side of the coin will be presented: the science of value is used as a critique of value philosophies. In this book, I will follow the general procedure of critique, that is, criticize pre­ ceding philosophies by criteria contained in the new science. 2. The Axiological Fallacies The criteria in question are the axiological fallacies, explained in The Structure of Value. 4 These fallacies are part of the system of formal axiology. Axiology as a science is distinguished from axiology as philosophy in three ways. First, in axiology as philosophy, the concept of value is a category, while in axiology as a science it is the axiom of a system. A category is a concept abstracted from concrete reality and, according to a fundamental law of logic, its intension diminishes in proportion to its increase in extension. An axiom, by contrast, is a formula constructed by the human mind whose intension, in the form of a system, increases in proportion to its increase in extension. The inten­ sion and extension of a category vary in inverse proportion while those of an axiom vary in direct proportion.5 Consequently, a category is not applicable to reality because the range of its meaning does not cover the details of actual situations. A system is applicable to reality because it has a complexity that corresponds to the complexity of actual situations. In natural science, the system corresponding to natural reality is that of mathematics; in moral science, the system corresponding to moral reality is formal axiology. Second, the transition from a philosophy to a science is characterized by the combination of a chaos of phenomena with a formal system. In The Struc­ ture of Value the chaos of value phenomena was combined with the system of logic itself by the axiomatic identification of"value" with "similarity ofinten­ sion."6 Third, the analysis of value through the system follows necessary logical laws and not accidental philosophies of individual thinkers. By the same logical necessity, these philosophies appear logically fallacious. That is to say, the system of axiology, using the same procedure by which it positively accounts for the value world, accounts negatively for the accounts of this world by value philosophy. The construction itself contains the criteria of the critique. Perhaps a critique of axiological reason was written previously by G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica, and his book may contain a criterion for the critique of previous value philosophies in the naturalistic fallacy. Moore wrote Principia Ethica after a careful study of Kant. No doubt, Moore's book was meant as such a critique. 7 He used the naturalistic fallacy. which is confusing the property Robert S. Hartman - 9789004496101 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:48:40PM via free access 6 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD good with other properties such as pleasant, desired, and the like that belong not to ethics but to psychology and other natural sciences, to critique all forms of ethical philosophies. He criticized naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, and others-the main trends ofpre-Moorean ethics-all those ethics that we would call "classical" today, including that ofKant.3 Kant did not follow his own scientific understanding of metaphysics insofar as the metaphysics of morals is concerned, even though he regarded this metaphysics in exactly the same way as he did the science of metaphysics of the first Critique." But Moore's critique lacks the systematic basis that belonged to both Galileo's critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Kant's critique of metaphysical philosophy: the system, newly constructed, that both accounts for the field in question and the critique of its predecessors.