Unconventional Nature of Value

Abstract

The article is devoted to the revision of the theory of values. Transcendental and socio-psychological interpretations of value are consistently considered. From the standpoint of phenomenological analysis, it is noted that values are understood as unconditional ultimate goals that have non-conventional normativity: something is a value not because an appropriate agreement was reached, but the agreement became possible because it is based on the gut feeling of value. It is shown that transcendental theories of value, developed within the framework of neo-Kantianism and other neoclassical philosophical movements, were supplanted by empirically oriented positivist theories of value due to the inability to offer an effective methodological program and, accordingly, to provide an explanation compatible with the standards of scientific knowledge for the historical diversity of cultural value systems despite the declared universalism of values. At the same time, an attempt to understand values within the framework of empirical approaches – as historical conventions based on the sociobiological human nature – led to the replacement of the study of values with the study of opinions about values. Although this approach fits well with the prevailing constructivist trend in the development of the methodology of the social sciences and humanities, it diverges from the phenomenology of value, since unconditionality and non-conventionality constitute the intuitive semantic core of this concept. The identification of value as a universal vector and the interpretation of value as the socio-historical implementation of this vector leads to confusion and loss of the research subject. In extreme forms, this is expressed either in the dissolution of the value in the political and in the recognition of rational conventions as universally normative, or in libertarianism. Therefore, the starting premise for any study of values should be the distinction between conventions as a result of the interpretation of values and the values themselves, the non-conventionality of which is the only stable invariant of all existing conventions in this area.