As one form of actuality, validity is related to affirmation in general. In validity, true propositions are affirmed, i.e., recognized and acknowledged. But on closer inspection, what gets acknowledged in such acknowledgment is not validity but a value. In other words, what the true proposition affirms—namely, truth as such—is a value. To acknowledge true propositions is to judge; but judging is the basic form of knowledge. In knowledge, a value is acknowledged. Thus, knowledge is directed to a value. The object of knowledge is a value. [83] Windelband and Rickert have followed the path of Lotze’s theory of validity to the point of making it into a theory of knowledge. Not just practical and aesthetic behavior, but theoretical behavior as well is a comportment toward values. In general, therefore, that to which consciousness relates itself is always a value. And since we can concretely characterize human behavior in these various regions as culture, values are cultural values. Therefore, philosophy has to be the philosophy of value, and as such, it is a philosophy of culture. Its project is to work out a system of values.

That is why the journal Logos, which grew out of this philosophical circle, bears the subtitle “International Journal for a Philosophy of Culture.”⁶¹

The above captures, in rough and ready fashion, the real meaning of value philosophy as worked out in connection with Lotze. In keeping with the prevailing winds of philosophy at the time, value philosophers linked Lotze’s doctrine to Kant’s philosophy.⁶² In the process, people discovered that Kant had written three critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason (re., theoretical comportment), The Critique of Practical Reason (re., practical, moral comportment), and The Critique of Judgment (re., aesthetic comportment). Kant’s three critiques are cut to order, to fit the three values of the true, the good, and the beautiful. So these three values are fundamental values.

But Kant also dealt with religion, although not in such a way that his treatment could be put on the same level as the “critiques.” Yet religion has to be given a place in the system—and for that purpose, the value of “the holy” was invented. For Windelband, of course, the holy is not an independent value—I am speaking now of the period around 1900 and before the war. But since the war, the world has become

61. [Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, ed. Richard Kroner and Georg Mehlis, with the collaboration of (among others) Edmund Husserl, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Ernst Troeltsch (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck)). This large annual—some three to four hundred pages per volume—was published in twenty-two editions between 1910 and 1933. Husserl published his “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft“ (Philosophy as a Rigorous Science) in the first volume (1910–1911: pp. 289–341).]

62. Cf. Wilhelm Windelband, Präludien. Aufsätze und Reden zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (Strassburg, 1883; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1884).