Introduction
Axiology is the science that studies values and they have a philosophical connotation. The article briefly presents the antecedents of axiology and presents various interpretations of the concept of value, analyzing these from the perspective of Marxist philosophy. The dialectical-materialist response with respect to value stands out, stating that this is a social phenomenon, which has significance in the context of the subject-object relationship and expresses human needs and interests. It is a phenomenon that synthesizes the ideal and the material and arises in the process of reciprocal conversion between them.
One of the theoretical aspects that arouses debate among philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and other scientists is the problem of the nature of value. Many conceptions and approaches move around the concept of value, depending on the philosophical affiliation of the thinker, his culture, life experiences and particular scientific conception.
Axiology is the philosophical discipline that studies values and its historical evolution shows the traces of the theoretical confrontation between schools and currents of thought that are often opposed to each other.
Development
Origins of axiology
Although Axiology emerged in the nineteenth century, its antecedents go back many centuries, in Platonic philosophy. The word Axiology is a compound word from the Greek that means: Axio: value and logos: reason, treatise, theory. Axiology: Study of values.
In Plato's Dialogues and in his work "The Republic" we find the antecedents of the understanding of values. For this famous thinker, values refer to positive meanings (the idea of good, beauty and usefulness).
Axiology as a discipline was systematized in the 19th century. Most scholars on the subject agree that it was the German philosophers R. Lotze, N. Hartman and E. Hartman who founded the theoretical foundations of the understanding of values.
Why does Axiology appear precisely in the 19th century and in Germany?
The European 19th century was characterized by an expansive development of capitalism that coexisted with elements of feudal society more predominant in some regions than others. Germany was one of the societies where feudalism strongly marked the destiny of the nation. Especially in the countryside and to the south, the feudal regime held back the development of a more modern industry and a much more advanced thinking.
The burgeoning bourgeois class struggled to impose its dominance in the field of ideology. The philosophical foundation of the dominance of the bourgeoisie became an unavoidable need for its economic, political and cultural triumph.
Thus, in the German universities, temples of knowledge of their time, the theoretical foundations of a discipline were developed that, from its emergence to the present, continues to attract scientists and neophytes, which invites reflection, discussion and discussion. solution of complex problems of human knowledge.
Different interpretations of the concept value
If we accept that the axiological problem is closely related to the conception of the world and each philosophy argues its own conception, we will agree that the interpretations about What is value? they vary from one philosophy to another and even from one thinker to another within the same philosophical school.
Within the enormous variety of tendencies that study value, we can distinguish the naturalistic, the phenomenological, the intuitivist, the utilitarian-pragmatic, the emotivist and the Marxist conceptions.
Some of these aspects are expressed in the conception of the American psychologist Maslow, when he points out: »I am of the opinion that these values are discovered (…) that they are intrinsic to the very structure of human nature, that they have a biological and a genetics, in the same way that they are developed by culture… »(1)
The author minimizes the importance of the social context in the appropriation of values and conceives them as a product of human nature. If we analyze values as positive social meanings, their sense of existence and functionality are essentially due to social relationships, to human activity. The process of assimilation of values by man is a socially contextualized process, determined by the degree of development reached by individuals and social groups in the transformation of nature in general and of human nature itself.
For the American psychologist Rollo May, courage is… »an advance towards a form of behavior; objectives, ends of life to which we dedicate ourselves and towards which we choose to go because we believe that they are the most desirable ways of life ». (one)
May links values with the needs of choice, but the latter are determined by the social environment that forms man and of which he is a product. Analyzing values only as objectives and ends to which we are dedicated raises the subjective component of value to the detriment of its objective conditioning. In reality, the ends constitute the awareness of the needs and interests that represent the element that mobilizes human action.
Another author, Antonio Pascual Acosta, defines values as «Ideals that act as final causes, that is: they are, on the one hand, the engine that starts our action and, at the same time, the goal we want to achieve once the appropriate means are in place. Therefore, values are ends and not means, and therefore, estimable by themselves and not with a view to anything else. "(2)
By conceptualizing only the ideal side of values (purposes), the practical-material component of the same is lost, its obligatory nature by virtue of the practical needs of men. Human purposes are the subjective expression of man's objective links with the objects and phenomena of reality.
A similar conception, in which the subjectivist understanding of value is further emphasized, is that of the thinker Tomas Olagree. Referring to values, he points out that… »are ideas, images, notions… They articulate what we aspire to in the face of good." (3)
Value cannot be confused with valuation without making concessions to pseudo-scientism. Valuation exists in the form of ideal images in human consciousness, value is objective.
For pragmatism the problem is inserted in the utilitarian conception of things, phenomena, objects or processes. According to this philosophy, only what makes a profit can be considered valuable. An example that illustrates this theory is the following:
Values can be understood as strategic choices regarding what is appropriate to achieve our ends.
Positivist philosophy, faithful to its pseudo-scientific essence, analyzes the sphere of values … "as dependent (on), subordinate (a) and dilutable in the sphere of empirical laws that characterize the factual world." (4)
By making values depend on "the sphere of empirical laws," positivism denies the philosophical character of axiology and reduces values to concrete manifestations or processes (factual world).
With its apparent objectivity, positivism hides the real nature of value, its existence in relation to human activity, with human subjectivity and with the subject-object relationship of which it is the result.
These conceptions fall into the terrain of subjectivism when analyzing the value category and express the interests of a social class interested in preserving its privileges at all costs and in taking control of historical events. It is very common in some of the positions analyzed to separate the axiological-evaluative problem from the social context, from the culture of social groups and from the conception of the world of individuals. The separation of the axiological concepts from these elements is a serious methodological error that can lead to obscuring the clear, scientific understanding of the problem of value.
Universal values exist by and through concrete individuals, concrete social systems. Seeking the realization of the concept of value requires starting from the socio-cultural conditioning that sustains it.
The nature of value is a philosophical problem
Although the study of values is interdisciplinary, (5) philosophy plays the leading role in examining this category. The definition of value starts from the fundamental problem of philosophy itself: the thinking-being relationship. This problem comprises four aspects, namely: (6)
Psychophysiological: Relationship between the body and the spirit that includes the nature of the psychic and the physical and that can be formulated through the question: Is the spiritual life, the psychic life of man, a manifestation of a supersensible substance, non-corporeal, immaterial that is part of your body or is it a manifestation of your body, a function of it?
- Ontological: Referring to the question: What place do spiritual phenomena occupy in the world? Gnoseological or epistemological: Referring to the relationship between human knowledge and objective reality and that is expressed in the question: Can we achieve true, faithful knowledge of reality or not? Praxiological-evaluative: Aimed at the integral performance of man, his behavior and which is manifested in the question: What should I do? In other words, how to act in the world?
Thus arises the possibility of formulating principles, rules, recommendations, aimed at human action, whose most complex form is the rational-moral act.
Man acts motivated by his needs and interests, which make the phenomena have one or another significance for him, that is, a certain value.
Thus, the praxilogical-evaluative solution to the fundamental philosophical problem: (6)
- It has its specific language: the language of evaluative judgments, norms, and prescriptions. It is based on the fact that we must not only accept the existence of objective reality and act accordingly in it, but act with dignity, realizing human values.
The fundamental aspects of the praxiological-evaluative problem are the following: (6)
- The question of the relationship between historical-social practice and objective reality The correlation between the functional value system and the structure of society The problem of the interrelation between material and spiritual values The problem of individual interrelation. society.
In turn, through this problem, the value system of the working class is founded, in correspondence with its humanistic content.
The praxiological-evaluative problem is related to the remaining problems that derive from the fundamental problem of philosophy. The ontology or theory of being is the basis of the axiology or doctrine of values. We cannot understand values without knowing what place being or thinking occupies in the world; the interpretation of values can have a materialistic or idealistic foundation. At the same time, axiology offers evaluative foundations to ontology, man makes critical judgments before phenomena, establishes a hierarchy of values that explain and base the place of man in the world, of material and spiritual phenomena in it.
Gnoseology and axiology are closely related, the answer to the question of whether or not we can know human values depends largely on the solution to the problem of the relationship between knowledge and the world. In this sense, epistemology bases axiology and, at the same time, value judgments guide the human capacity to know phenomena and objects, in relation to their needs and interests.
The thinking-being opposition in the theory of values or axiology is relative, since values exist precisely at the limit of coincidence between the spiritual and the material.
Values are closely linked to the conception of the world of man, whose core is the philosophical conception. For this reason, values are also an object of study for philosophy.
The conception of the world or conception about man's relationship with the world, his place and role in it, is an eminently philosophical question. It includes recommendations and principles aimed at human performance, at the general orientation of man in reality. Many questions that every conception of the world encompasses (What place do I occupy and what role do I play in the world? Is there a single world or are there several worlds? of our mind to order chaos and sensory experience ?, Is man part of nature or is he a special being, different from everything that exists ?, etc.) are philosophical when posing and theoretically solving the question of relationship man-world, spirit-matter.
The practical-concrete activity of men depends to a great extent on the solution to these questions. The conception of the world varies in the context of the activity, just as the valuations and the manifestation of human values vary.
Every conception of the world has a cognitive component, an evaluative component (axiological) and a behavioral component (praxiological), referring to the real actions of the subject, which exist in dialectical unity.
Starting from a materialist-dialectic response to the fundamental problem of philosophy and defending the interests of the working class, these authors understand value as:
- A social phenomenon A significance in the context of the subject-object relationship that expresses human needs and interests A phenomenon that synthesizes the ideal and the material, which arises in the process of reciprocal conversion between them A product of activity (conscious) transforming human, and therefore mobile, changing A phenomenon that permeates the entire human-world relationship (not only human spirituality, but also the objective, material processes of reification of culture). A contextualized, cultural process, a through which the identity, the metacognition of individuals and social groups is expressed. Like all human phenomena, a process capable of being modified, made aware and transformed in a practical way by man.
Conclusions
Today's society demands a solid understanding of the nature of values, since the theoretical disquisitions themselves become guides of the social performance of individuals and human groups.
In this sense, it is appropriate to insist on the need for consistent research and systematic study of the problem of values, encompassing the philosophical, psychological, pedagogical, philological and economic perspectives of the issue.
In Legal Axiology, Law is seen as a Value through which a Social Existence is possible, impregnated with Well-being; and likewise that Positive Legal Order must aspire to the materialization of the values that are the object of study of Axiology.
The value of law in human societies is tailored to the extent that it allows and encourages: justice, the common good and legal security
The Law seeks the realization of values, such as Justice, the Common Good and Legal Security; but it is also true that this is not an object of an absolutely pure nature, but rather constitutes a Human Labor of an essentially normative nature and that therefore it is found in the field of Law.
Bibliographic references
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