The Philosophy of Value, The Value of Philosophy PDF

OBJECTIVES: ❖ To present a philosophy of values with the help of the noted phenomenologist of value, Max Scheler. ❖ To show the indispensable role of philosophy in value education, especially in the context of national reconstruction. OUR CULTURE OF TODAY Damaged culture It has been said ofte...

OBJECTIVES: ❖ To present a philosophy of values with the help of the noted phenomenologist of value, Max Scheler. ❖ To show the indispensable role of philosophy in value education, especially in the context of national reconstruction. OUR CULTURE OF TODAY Damaged culture It has been said often that at the root of our economic and political instability as a nation is a moral crisis of such a paramount degree that our culture has been termed a "damaged culture." Recently, we have been ranked third among the most corruption ridden countries of Asia. OUR CULTURE OF TODAY ❖Graft and corruption have become an accepted way of life for most of our countrymen, not only for government officials and their relatives. Undoubtedly, moral recovery must go hand in hand with economic and political recovery. ❖But such a moral recovery requires an understanding of values, notably in the field of education; otherwise, our value- education thrust will be haphazard and lacking in direction. WHAT ARE VALUES? Are objects of our intentional feeling feelings of something; they are oriented towards values different from the sensory feelings of the five senses (e.g., pain, tickling), from bodily vital feeling-states (e.g., tiredness, illness, health), and from psychic feeling (e.g. sorrow, joy) WHAT ARE VALUES? Spiritual feelings such as bliss and despair are essentially intentional being directed towards the value of the holy, but other feelings acts like preferring, love and hatred are likewise oriented towards values. WHAT ARE VALUES? ❖Values are given to us in intentional feeling. We "know" values by feeling them, they do not wait for our rational justification to appear in our lives. Our intellect is blind to values just as the eyes are blind to sounds. ❖This does not mean that we cannot reflect on values, but when we do (as we are doing now) we are no longer reflecting on value as value, but on value as a concept WHAT ARE VALUES? As objects of our intentional feeling, values are essentially qualities and are not to be mistaken for goods, though goods are carriers or bearers of values. The misconception of value for goods may be due to our language. WHAT ARE VALUES? “Halaga” - Filipino word for value is “Bale“ - Spanish origin, which may also mean "worth“ "Bale" refers also to that small piece of paper Filipino brings to the sari-sari store, with the words "good for" a can of milk or a bag of sugar. But values should not be mistaken for goods ❖values qualify our life and do not easily give in to quantification; as qualities, values are objective and immutable, whereas goods as carriers of values vary and depend on the subject, time, circumstance, and situation It is important to stress here the immutability, the objectivity of values; for values, especially higher values, call upon the person and when the person fails to respond to a value, it is not the value that is destroyed but the person himself. Justice as a value calls on the person to be just, and if he does not respond to this call by being just, it is not the value of justice that is destroyed but the person himself. We are here reminded of the words of Socrates: "To do injustice is worse than to suffer injustice." As qualities, values transcend man. THE AMBIGUITY OF VALUES LIES IN THEIR IMMATERIALITY. Our life attains a quality because values constantly present themselves to us, and intervene in our life as:  instigators of action a prospect for commitment a reason and standard for behaviour and expression, norms and principles of conduct criteria for aesthetic appreciation and economic utility A value gives itself in an object to be desired, but once the goal is attained it affirms itself in the form of another demand. It is in this sense that we can speak of the universality of values--they exercise an influence on the totality and unity of our life. Values form a kind of horizon to our life. More especially, values generate an ought-to-be and an ought-to-do. For instance, because justice is a value, justice ought to exist and I ought to be just. Values, in other words, ground our obligations, beliefs, ideals, and attitudes, without being identical with them. HOW DO WE EXPERIENCE VALUES? Found in the notion of the human being as a person. All of us experience values ( man and woman) A person is the seat of the spirit, which spirit transcends nature. As spirit, the person is not part of nature, but apart from it; he (she) can determine himself (herself), direct his (her) own life. - Max Scheler HOW DO WE EXPERIENCE VALUES? A manifestation of this is the human being's capacity to go against the drive of evolution, the instinct for survival--the person can willingly take his own life. THE PERSON IS THE UNITY OF DIVERSE ACTS, BUT AMONG THESE DIVERSE ACTS, THERE ARE THREE THAT CHARACTERIZE THE PERSON UNIQUELY: 1. the act of reflection or the act of making oneself the object of one's thinking 2. the act of ideation or abstraction, of deriving an essence from existence 3. the act of loving LOVE AND HATRED They are movements of the heart towards values. They open up a hierarchy of values. *Love directs us to higher values whereas hatred directs us to lower ones. *The Pilipino word “mahal (love)” also means “esteem” or “of high value.” HIERARCHY OF VALUES HIERARCHY OF VALUES ❖Lowest rank: Sensory Values (the values of pleasant and unpleasant, technical values, and luxury values). ❖ Vital Values of noble and vulgar, the values of civilization. ❖Spiritual values of justice/injustice, truth/falsehood, and the Aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness, both of which are related to ego. ❖The highest values are the holy and unholy. Both spiritual and holy values refer to our being a person or spirit. HIERARCHY OF VALUES For Scheler, the moral values of good (positive) and evil (negative) are not to be found in this hierarchy of values but in their realization; they, so to say, "ride on the back of the deed.“ A deed is good if it prefers a higher or positive value in place of a lower or negative one. On the other hand, a deed is evil if it prefers a lower or negative value in place of a higher or positive one. HIERARCHY OF VALUES “To the extent that good is the realization of higher values, the spiritual and the holy which refer to our being persons, and to the extent that evil is the realization of lower values, the sensory and the vital which refer to our likeness to the animals, then good enhances our personhood while evil degrades our humanity.” THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY ❖ The Western tradition has always associated philosophy with wisdom, forgetting the "love" that precedes wisdom in its original meaning. ❖ Pamimilosopo means also to be pedantic, to be theorizing and to juggle concepts in a dull and narrow manner. ❖ “To philosophize" was originally to search passionately for wisdom, to love it because one was not in full possession of it. EASTERN VIEW OF PHILOSOPHY The Hindu word for philosophy is "darsana" which means "to see", not just with the eyes or the mind, but with one's whole being. What is to be seen with one's whole being is none other than the truth or the real, namely, what is unchanging, eternal and universal. The Chinese tradition terms philosophy as "cheh-hsueh". Hsueh means learning, but cheh is a compound character made up of a hand, a measurement, and a mouth; that is to say, philosophy is learning to measure one's words with one's deeds. THE BEGINNING OF PHILOSOPHIZING ❖Plato traces it to wonder, Descartes to doubt, Jaspers to the limit situation. Whether it is in wonder, or doubt, or helplessness that one begins to philosophize, something of the very nature and reality of the human situation does impel the person to do so. ❖ Robert Johann calls it the tension of human experience. This tension springs from the very nature of the person as openness to reality, as response-ability to the other (nature, fellowman, society, or the Absolute), as not being identical with oneself or as self-becoming. THE BEGINNING OF PHILOSOPHIZING ❖ For Gabriel Marcel, to philosophize is secondary reflection, to be concerned with the mystery of being, not in the theological sense of being unknowable but in the sense of a "problem" which encroaches upon one's own being and that of others. ❖ To philosophize is to be concerned with meaning or in Pilipino, kahulugan whose root is "hulug" meaning "fall" as one would say in English, "fall into place". To philosophize then is to integrate, both past and future in the act of presenting the meaning of one's life, both personal and social. MEANING OF SAGEHOOD IN THE ORIENTAL TRADITION “Philosophy is the person's inner longing to achieve harmony or unity with one's self, with nature, with others, with God.” PHILOSOPHER AS LOVER OF JUSTICE AND PEACE Justice implies a vision of the totality of the situation and a respect for the dignity of the human person. The philosopher must also be a peacemaker or a lover of peace, for peace reconciles the conflicting forces within and without one's self. THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY ❖ Philosophy awakens us from our spiritual slumber, our take-for-granted attitude in the same way as does literature or the arts. ❖Philosophy not only sensitizes us but also brings us to the level of holistic, critical and evaluative reflection. ❖Philosophy attempts to see the totality of any human experience, it can provide us with a vision. ❖Philosophy invites us to be integrative. INTEGRATIVE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY ❖ Philosophy does not impose but springs from the responsible freedom of the philosopher as a human being. ❖ Philosophy urges us to be moral persons, persons of integrity who are in self-possessed because their speech, feelings, thinking and action are one. This unity derives from commitment to the value of persons. ❖ Philosophy invites us to be true to ourselves and our humanity, by committing ourselves to the value of other humans