Idealism As A Theory Of Value

Our conclusion that idealism is the theory that affirms the reality of the ideal naturally draws us into the discussion of idealism as a theory of value. It is maintained in the previous chapter that, for idealism, reality is ideal reality, which is the true existence. But it may be held that this is a conception of reality as only a norm or standard, an Ought and therefore a value, which stands in opposition to actuality. The ideas of existence and reality, it may be said, are inapplicable to it. If value exists or is real, it would not have been set over against the actual. Rickert, for example, maintains this view. According to him, “every judgment of existence or truth presupposes an over-individual Sollen or Ought, the acknowledgment of which is necessary to give meaning to the judgment. This Sollen presupposes values; and these ‘logical values’ are neither existent nor subsistent, but merely valid.” “Logic deals neither with existents, physical or mental, nor with subsistents, but rather with the problem as to what values must be acknowledged in case any answers to the question what is or is not, what is true or not true, shall have any meaning whatever.” “However much the sciences that deal with existents or subsistents differ from each other, according to material or method, they always have one thing in common: all seek to establish what is and how it is. This we may call their ontological character: das Seiende is their problem. Objective logic, on the other hand, never enquires after this, and in so far stands above all sciences of being.” According to Rickert, then, the Absolute of Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet, etc., the intuitive understanding of Kant, the Ego of Fichte, and all such ideals presupposed by our experience are simply values, which are neither existent nor subsistent; they are, as Kant said, merely heuristic principles, the validity of which has to be acknowledged if our experience is to be true. If their validity is not accepted, our experience becomes inexplicable, we cannot know whether our judgments are true or false. For example, in Kant, without the intuitive understanding as the ideal of reason, why objects correspond to our ideas remains unanswerable. It can be answered only on the hypothesis that, for the transcendental self, the sensations are not given, but are created by it according to its own forms and categories. Similarly, without the transcendental Ego of Fichte, the problem, why nature conforms to our moral will, becomes insoluble, and is soluble only on the hypothesis that the transcendental Ego itself posits nature as the field of its moral activity. Bradley’s Absolute also is postulated as the ideal of logic and judgment; and without it as the ultimate subject that guarantees the truth of every judgment, no judgment can be true. Thus not only in logic, but also in all other normative sciences the presuppositions are values, which neither exist nor subsist, but are merely valid.