A tentative Marxist interpretation of the problem of values

Abstract

Our contemporaries have raised many new questions in connection with the interaction between cognition and values. Many authors speak of a "crisis of the old values" and of the necessity to find new ones pertaining to morality, culture and life. The XV World Congress of Philosophy (Varna, Sept. 1973) will be the place to put forth various stands as regards these values and their relationship with science. Does the cognizable contradict the valuable and does the cognitive contradict the axiological? We support the stand that a relative differentiation exists between them, yet they can be in a state of inner unity. Science itself may have an enormous significance as far as value for mankind is concerned, provided it is developed in harmony with its humanistic aspiration and serves its own all-round and free development.And so, what are values? Values are a specific instrument of relations between the individual and his natural and social environment. Two moments are always prominent in every value relationship a) the objective source (things, phenomena and properties of value to people); b) the evaluating subject. Value arises out of their integration and not outside of their linkage, a Consequently, value is not something either purely objective, nor purely subjective. As V. P. Tougarinov points out, value is the fusion between the objective and subjective moment on the basis of the objective properties of the thing that is given evaluation.~ Values are neither something natural, nor supernatural qualities, but a specific social relationship. Without man, there can be no values in Nature, only objective properties and qualities of things, phenomena which the subject, man, evaluates as good or bad on the basis of his personal experience. The Soviet author S. I. Popov points out that "the material needs and interests of people and their awareness constitute in themselves this natural historical basis on which spiritual needs and interests arise, as well as man's value relationship towards a reality." 3 Consequently, values exist whenever there has been an established communication, a link between the subject which has cognition of and transforms the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, the thing which is the object of the subject's impact in the desired and " 'useful-to-man" direction.