very religious—even world congresses are organized analogous to the International Union of Chemists or [84] of Meteorologists, so that today we can risk saying that religion, too, is a value. And we don’t stop there. The insights presumably get more profound: God is a value, indeed the highest value. This proposition is a blasphemy, and it is not made less blasphemous by the fact that theologians propound it as ultimate wisdom. This would all be very funny if it were not so depressing. It shows that philosophers no longer philosophize from the issues but only from the books of their colleagues. In all of this the only thing of import for science is to understand the direction of this philosophy and theology, and to get an insight into the source of this utterly radical distortion.
Windelband and Rickert have taken the path of devaluing Lotze’s doctrine of validity into a philosophy of values. We may briefly mention the major steps in this devaluation as well as some evidence.
The most important essay on the connection of value philosophy with Lotze is Windelband’s “Beiträge zur Lehre von negativen Urteil” [Contributions to a Theory of Negative Judgments].63 There he connects up with Brentano’s doctrine of judgment, which maintains that judgment is acknowledgment. Windelband shows the connection with Lotze’s doctrine of validity. (Brentano’s doctrine is mentioned, but not really in keeping with the significance it has for Windelband.)
Rickert got a fundamental grip on the idea that judgment acknowledges values in his Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, in 1892 (his inaugural dissertation at Freiburg).64 In keeping with the then-dominant view that judgment is the basic and authentic form of knowledge, Rickert broadens Windelband’s thesis: Judgment is acknowledgment of values; judgment is knowledge; truth is a value. To this day, Rickert has not retracted one of these fundamental theses. His ideas today are merely less clear, because he has subsumed into his theory of knowledge both phenomenology and some essential suggestions of his student, Lask.
As evidence, some propositions from Rickert: [85]
All knowledge begins with judgments, advances in judgments, and can consist only in judgments. . . . Knowledge is affirmation or denial. We want to try to learn the consequences of that. (First edition, pp. 55–56)Judging is a mental process. It does not belong to those processes in which we examine things with an indifferent attitude, but only to the processes of judgment: affirmation and denial {or approval and disapproval,
63. [The essay was published in the Strasburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophie(1884), as part of a festschrift honoring Eduard Zeller on his seventieth birthday.]
64. [Heinrich Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis; Einführung in die tranzendentale Philosophie (Tubingen: Mohr, 1892).]