James G. Hart

Phenomenology of values and valuing

Preface. Introduction: Value-Theory and Phenomenology J.G. Hart. 1. The Concept of Objective Value D.E. Marietta, Jr. 2. Image and Artistic Value J.B. Brough. 3. Problems of the Value of Nature in Phenomenological Perspective or What to do About Snakes in the Grass L. Embree. 4. The Value of Absence S.W. Laycock. 5. The Part Played by Value in the Modification of Open into Attractive Possibilities R.W. Jordan. 6. The Notion of Value in Christian von Ehrenfels K. Schuhmann. 7. Values, Reasons for Actions and Reflexivity T. Nenon. 8. Values as Ontological Difference K.W. Stikkers. 9. Schelers Theory of Values Reconsidered P. Blosser. 10. Husserls Phenomenology of Willing U. Melle. 11. The Summum Bonum and Value-Wholes: Aspects of a Husserlian Axiology and Theology J.G. Hart. 12. A Bibliography of Axiology and Phenomenology H.P. Steeves. Notes on Contributors. Index of Names. Index of Topics.

Being’s Mindfulness: The Noema of Transcendental Idealism

This paper wishes to suggest that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is indeed metaphysical (cf. n. 15) but in a way which is yet to be determined. Further, I propose that acknowledgement of the metaphysical side of Husserl’s thought can serve as a determining factor in the proper interpretation of the discussions of the noema, especially as it appears in Ideas I.

Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light

The light metaphor seems inescapable in our description of the appearing of things in the world. Indeed an elemental sense of things appearing is their coming forth into the light or their becoming visible or luminous. Since ancient times this has motivated an analogy between mind and light. In this paper I want to review some of the issues, especially the special place self-consciousness has in a meditation on appearings and light.

The Summum Bonum and Value-Wholes: Aspects of a Husserlian Axiology and Theology

For Husserl, values are noematic correlates of acts of evaluation, i.e., acts which often are encompassed under “emotions” and “feelings.” These acts and their value-correlates are founded in the sense that they rest on ontifying acts, acts in which a categorial determination of the things in the world is constituted. Appreciation of something requires that there be something to appreciate. Whether Husserl held finally that we first engaged things denuded of all value properties and then slapped value properties upon them seems quite unlikely. Rather he came to emphasize a kind of primacy of a sense of will which caused him to maintain that nothing crosses our experience which is completely value free or indifferent to this elemental sense of will. At this level we have a coincidence of the elemental nisus of passive synthesis and the pre-categorial. Thus, within the existential context of this elemental sense of will, what I have elsewhere called the “general will,” he gave up the theory of “adiaphora,” i.e., value-neutral experiences. This sense of will, which is the teleological nisus of passive synthesis, must be contrasted with evaluation as well as will in the proper sense of the Fiat, i.e., doing (or ceasing to do) something, as an action, promise, decision, resolve, etc.

The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings

In this paper I attempt to systematize Husserl’s remarks in the Nachlass on the study of religion. I will not be dealing primarily with his own philosophical theology which he regards as the culmination of his transcendental phenomenology, but rather with what he thinks religion is and what is studied when people study religion. I will first briefly discuss how religion is a developing cultural phenomenon which comes to have a relationship to philosophy and reason. This leads us to the consideration of a variety of senses of theology.

Agent Intellect and Primal Sensibility In Husserl

This paper is in many ways a conversation with Iso Kern about his profound meditations and monumental research on Husserl’s theory of intellect. For the purpose of this conference it centers on several references to the Aristotelian-Scholastic term, agent intellect, which we find in Ideas II. These rich texts, however, have parallels elsewhere in other working papers of Husserl, both published and unpublished.1 In this particular case we have the special problem of deciding why Husserl “out of the blue, ” as it were, employs this Aristotelian term in a context which resonates with issues which are specifically Kantian and Husserlian. I will propose that whereas the Kantian problematic is central there are indeed aspects of the Aristotelian theory in Husserl’s thought and the use of the Aristotelian terms in these contexts is quite appropriate. Whereas Husserl would seem to share in the nineteenth century critique of a“faculty psychology” and thus of certain versions of “intellect, ” “agent and passive intellect, ” etc. in favor of an empiricist and associationist account of the genesis of the various functions and achievements of mind, the wondrous achievements of passive synthesis as well as the relatively distinctive achievements of the I or center of acts occasion meditations which are reminiscent of ancient themes in the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic tradition.

Being and Mind

In Eucharistie Presence Robert Sokolowski mentions the thirty years of friendship and collegiality with Thomas Prufer who died a year before its publication. The blossoms of this friendship have blessed all of us who are here today and this dyad forms part of the sense of this great day which I am dubbing the “Sokofest.”

I, We, and God: Ingredients of Husserl’s Theory of Community

The following essay attempts to outline some features of Husserl’s theory of community and to propose incidentally that it is a central consideration of his social theory, ethics, and theology. Most of the topics treated here find a more complete discussion in a MS which I hope to finish soon. I begin by connecting Husserl’s philosophical theology to the theme of community.

Hannah Arendt: The Care of the World and of the Self

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Kant’s city, then called Konigsberg, in East Prussia. (For her life, see Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s 1982 biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World). Whereas for her family and many of the five thousand Jews in Konigsberg Moses Mendelssohn was the exemplary social and cultural figure, the Social Democrat and Reform Rabbi Hermann Vogelstein was the religious and political leader. Arendt as a little girl had a crush on Vogelstein. After learning of some of the complexities of a secular Jewess marrying a Rabbi, this little girl was led to remark: “I will marry a rabbi with pork.” (When older she proclaimed to the rabbi that she no longer believed in God, and he replied, “And who asked you?”) In her teens she was fascinated with Kierkegaard and when sixteen she read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews.

The Absolute Ought and The Godly Person of a Higher Order

We have seen that personal being is an identity affixed to the I as the source-pole of acts, an identity which these acts constitute. The formulation of the task of being a person approaches an analytic proposition: The human is capable of a substantial personal identity across the flux of changing experiences, i.e., is capable of true self-preservation, when he or she is capable of preserving the true self substantially, i.e., through position-takings which are irrevocable and unregrettable. Our discussions of the common life, the original primal encompassing “we,” and the analogy of love have urged that the true self to be preserved is a social self. In this chapter we wish to establish more firmly this claim. We shall see that what Husserl calls “the absolute ought” is, first of all, the general framework within which true self-identity gets sorted out as a matter of prudence, telos,and duty in conjunction with the interpersonal-social sense of the true self. Universal ethical love becomes the name of the intentionality of this overriding “must” (Soll); the divine personality of a higher order is the ultimate name of the true self-preservation which alone can fulfill the immanent ideal of the ethical reduction which gives rise to the inquiry into this overriding ought. We best start by returning to some aspects of the ethical reduction.