Our Hierarchy of Values Might Just Be Upside Down
Let’s see what Max Scheler had to say on the subject.
The fashionable view is that the most we can get out of life is pleasure, and that in so far as we have any ethical system at all, it should centre on utility. Max Scheler, a towering phenomenologist and philosopher described by Heidegger and José Ortega y Gasset as the ‘strongest philosophical force in continental Europe’, had a different view. Indeed, he devised a pyramid of values that looks exactly the opposite of that which we, consciously or unconsciously but certainly culturally, seem to hold to be right. Given how bloody miserable everyone is, I think Max’s pyramid is worth a closer look.
For Max, there were four levels of value. These were, in ascending order, pleasure values, life values, spiritual values and sacred values. To embody or express pleasure values, we might go and have a lovely meal with a friend: these values revolve around comfort, sensation and enjoyment — those experiences that are chiefly sensual. Life values, for Scheler, cover health, strength and well-being, and so living out a healthy lifestyle (sticking to a diet and going for a brisk walk now and then) would be the main way we would express them. The spiritual values encompass the search for truth, the desire for justice, and the appreciation of beauty. And as for those highest — the sacred or holy — values, these might include meditation, piety or attendance at religious services.
For Scheler, there were four levels of value. These were pleasure values, life values, spiritual values and sacred values.
This ranking may seem intuitively sound to you, dear reader, or it may not. But its creation was not arbitrary. Scheler clearly justified the relative importance that he gave to each category of values, and did so in five ways. First, he said, the longer the expression of a value lasts, the higher it will be in the hierarchy. For instance, the expression of the desire for justice lasts much longer than the feeling of having had an absolutely divine slice of triple chocolate gâteau with cream. Second, for Scheler: the harder it is to break down the quality of the value in question, the higher it will be in the pyramid. In other words, if I can reduce the worth of a value then it will sit lower in the hierarchy than one that is irreducible: the value of goods falls as the number goods rises: the cost of a tomato increases when tomatoes are in short supply.
Third, the fewer values that we need to justify or give meaning to another value, the higher that value will be in the hierarchy. Pleasure requires the justification given by other values to be seen as significant or even interesting. The search for knowledge doesn’t. It is inherently worthwhile. Fourth, the deeper (as opposed to the stronger) the satisfaction that a value gives the one who holds it, the higher it will sit in the pyramid. For devoted religious typed, satisfaction is almost constant, as a wealth of scientific evidence (of which Scheler could not be aware) bears out. And fifth, and last, the higher a value is, the less connected it is to the existence of its carrier. The pleasure I feel when, draped across a sunbed by the swimming pool, I take that first sip of wine depends entirely on my capacity to experience it. It does not exist beyond me. Holiness does.
The deeper the satisfaction that a value gives the one who holds it, the higher it will sit in the pyramid.
Now, what is interesting is that we are increasingly taught to believe in our cold and cynical age that those higher values are connected to systems of power and oppression. The Church is merely a system of control. Art is entirely subjective; and what was once deemed to represent the zenith of artistic achievement — take Raphael’s masterful ‘Miracle of the Fishes’ as an example— is really part of a complex system of oppression. This is chiefly the fault of Michel Foucault. Foucault, by the way (along with Sartre and Lacan and Derrida), signed an open letter asking to have the age of consent removed, (as described in Sexual Morality and the Law) and was accused (I think incorrectly) by his peer Guy Sormand of raping little boys in Tunisia. We must try to judge ideas on their own terms, but it is mildly ironic that Foucault’s chief’s contribution to Western philosophy was to teach us not to take ideas at face value and consider the person who espouses them and the power advancing behind him. But I digress.
What we see, then, is an inversion of Scheler’s pyramid. For Scheler, pleasure, utility, and so on are best used in service of the pursuit of knowledge, the appreciation of beauty, and the cultivation of holiness—which I do appreciate is rather quaint, though not unsound. For us, those higher values serve the lower — ie, holiness is an idea used by organised religion to cling onto power and privilege; beauty is a means of sexual selection; truth and goodness exist only to support social cohesion; the ‘life values’ are expressed only by the simple-minded and self-denying for the benefit of the group; and all that really counts in this world is having a good time and using what is around us for our benefit. These values demand neither empathy nor morality, as Iain McGilchrist points out in his The Matter with Things. It seems to me an awful lot like we have embraced the values of a psychopath. Which isn’t ideal.
