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On Value

2013; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau3.1.028

2575-1433

Louis Dumont,

Critical Theory and Philosophy

Previous article FreeOn Value The Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 1980Louis DumontLouis DumontPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI saw Radcliffe-Brown only once, in this very room. In my memory I can still see him today, though somewhat hazily, delivering the Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1951.2 I must have made it to London for the occasion, from Oxford where I was a new, if not that young, lecturer. As I listened to him, he seemed to have made one step in the direction of Lévi-Strauss, and I felt comforted in my recent structural allegiance. In fact it was only a limited, passing convergence.3In those days I was busy learning a good deal from him, and from British anthropology at large, which had reached unprecedented heights partly under his influence. Yet I must confess that, for one whose imagination had been initially fired by Mauss's genial humanism, Radcliffe-Brown's constricted version of Durkheimian sociology was not very attractive.[208] Today, one feels the need to insist, beyond all divergences, on continuity on one basic point. Reading his Natural Science of Society, one is struck by Radcliffe-Brown's decided holism.4 Whatever the shortcomings of his concept of 'system', the point—should I say the importation?—was probably decisive in the development of anthropology in this country, and it made possible the dialogue with the predominant sociological tradition of the French.There is relatively little about values in Radcliffe-Brown's writings.5 Yet the expression was very much in the air in British departments of anthropology in the last years of his life. My impression was that it figured largely as a substitute for 'ideas', which stressed the relation to action and was therefore less unpalatable to the empiricist temper. No doubt the situation is quite different today. But to state plainly the reason for my use of the term, preferably in the singular, and for my choice of topic: I have been trying in recent years to sell the profession the idea of hierarchy, with little success, I may add. I thought of making another bid, this time by using the professionally received vocable, which I had instinctively shunned heretofore, I suppose because of the forbidding difficulties the term seems to present. May the attempt be taken as an effort to come closer to the Radcliffe-Brownian heritage.In fact, my intention is solely to offer an observation bearing on the relation between ideas and values, or rather to comment on [209] that observation and draw some consequences from it. The modern type of culture in which anthropology is rooted and the non-modern type differ markedly with regard to value, and I hold that the anthropological problems relating to value require that the two be confronted. We shall start from the modern configuration, which represents an innovation, then introduce in contrast some fundamental features of the more common non-modern configuration, and finally return to the modern predicament with a view to setting it 'in perspective' and to thus, it is hoped, throwing some light on the position and task of anthropology as a mediating agency.The modern scene is familiar. In the first place, modern consciousness attaches value predominantly to the individual, and philosophy deals, at any rate predominantly, with individual values while anthropology takes values as essentially social. Then, in common parlance, the word, which meant in Latin healthy vigour and strength and in medieval times the warrior's bravery, symbolizes most of the time the power of money to measure everything. This important aspect will be present here only by implication. (Cf. Dumont (1977)).As to the absolute sense of the term, the modern configuration is sui generis and value has become a major preoccupation. In a note in Lalande's Philosophical Dictionary, Maurice Blondel said that the predominance of a philosophy of value characterizes the contemporary period, following a modern philosophy of knowledge and an antique and medieval philosophy of being.6 For Plato the supreme Being was the Good. There was no discord between the Good, the True and the Beautiful, yet the Good was supreme, perhaps because it is impossible to conceive the highest perfection as inactive and heartless, because the Good adds the dimension of action to that of contemplation. In contrast we moderns separate science aesthetics and morals. And the nature of our science is such that its existence by itself explains or rather implies the separation between the true on the one hand, the beautiful and the good on the other and in particular between being and moral value, what is and what ought to be. For the scientific discovery of the world was premised on the banning as secondary of all qualities to which physical measurement was not applicable. Thus for a hierarchical cosmos was substituted our physical, homogeneous universe (Koyré (1958)). The value dimension which had been spontaneously projected on to it was relegated to what is to us its proper locus, that is, man's mind, emotions, and volition.[210] In the course of centuries, the (social) Good was also relativized. There were as many Goods as there were peoples or cultures, not to speak of religions, sects or social classes. 'Truth this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond' noted Pascal; we cannot speak of the Good when what is held as good on this side of the Channel is evil on the other, but we can speak of the value or values that people acknowledge respectively on one and the other side.Thus, value designates something different from being, and something which, while the scientifically true is universal, is eminently variable with the social environment, and even within a given society, according not only to social classes but to the diverse departments of activity or experience.I have listed only a few salient features, but they are enough to evoke the complex nexus of meanings and preoccupations to which our word is attached, a tangle to which all kinds of thoughtful efforts have contributed, from the romantic complaint about a world that has fallen asunder to the various attempts at reuniting it, and to a philosophy of despair, Nietzsche's, contributing to spreading the term. I do not think that anthropology can disregard this situation. Yet it is no wonder that there is something unpleasant about the term. Being comparative in essence, it seems doomed to emptiness: a matter of values is not a matter of fact. It advertises relativism, as it were, or rather both the centrality of the concept and its elusive quality, to which a considerable literature testifies. It smacks of euphemism or uneasiness, like 'underdevelopment', 'methodological individualism' and so many other items in the present-day vocabulary.Yet there is a positive counterpart, modest but not insignificant, for the anthropologist: we have at our disposal a word that allows us to consider all sorts of cultures and the most diverse estimations of the good without imposing on them our own: we can speak of our values and their values while we could not speak of our good and their good. Thus the little word, used far beyond the confines of anthropology, implies an anthropological perspective and invests us, I think, with a responsibility. But of this more later.We begin with a few introductory remarks about the study of values in anthropology. The prevailing use of the word in the plural—values—is indicative not only of the diversity of societies and of the modern compartmentalization of activities but also of a tendency to atomize each configuration that is in keeping with our culture in general. This is certainly the first point that requires attention. In a paper published in 1961,7 Francis Hsu criticized [211] some studies of the American character for their presenting a bare catalogue of traits or values without bothering about the relations prevailing between those items. He saw conflicts and inconsistencies between the different values listed, wondered at the lack of serious attempts to explain them, and proposed to remedy the situation by identifying one fundamental value and by showing that it implied precisely the contradictions to be explained. The 'American core value', Hsu suggested, is self-reliance, itself a modification or intensification of European, or English, individualism. Now self-reliance implies contradiction in its application, for men are social beings and depend heavily on each other in actual fact. Thus is produced a series of contradictions between the level of conception and the level of operation of the main value and of the secondary values derived from it or allied with it.I for one cannot but applaud both the search for a cardinal value and its identification in this case as some form of individualism. One also notes that Hsu implies, if he does not state it explicitly, a hierarchy between conception and operation. Yet in the end Hsu's distinction between the two levels is still insufficient. He uses a classification of Charles Morris, who had listed three uses of value or sorts of value, among them conceived and operative value, and he goes some way toward ranking these two levels. Finally however, he speaks of 'values' for both, and thus lumps them together again in the8 same way as the atomizing authors he had begun by criticizing. In fact the two levels should be firmly distinguished. For we have here a universal phenomenon. Surely all of us have encountered this characteristic complementarity or reversal between levels of experience where what is true on the more conceptual level is reversed on the more empirical level, a reversal which bedevils our attempts at unifying, for the sake of simplicity, the representation and its counterpart in action. Whatever the peculiarities of the American case, the end cannot be its own means: either what is called 'operative values' are not values at all, or they are second-order values that should be clearly distinguished from first-order values or values proper.In general, there is perhaps a surfeit of contradictions in contemporary literature in general. An author belonging to a different era or milieu will frequently be taxed of contradicting himself simply because a distinction of levels obvious to him and therefore implicit in his writings, but unfamiliar to the critic, is missed.9 It will be seen later on that where non-moderns [212] distinguish levels within a global view, the moderns know only of substituting one special plane of consideration for another and find on all planes the same forms of neat disjunction, contradiction, etc. Perhaps there is a confusion here between individual experience which, while crossing different levels, may be felt as contradictory, and sociological analysis, where the distinction of levels is imperative in order to avoid the short-circuit that results in tautology or incomprehension. Apart from Clyde Kluckhohn, the late Gregory Bateson is one of the rare anthropologists who clearly saw the necessity of recognizing a hierarchy of levels.10There has been in the history of anthropology at least one sustained attempt at advancing the study of values. In the late forties, Clyde Kluckhohn chose to focus attention on values and to concentrate efforts and resources on a vast co-operative long-term project devoted to their study, the Harvard 'Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures'. There seems to have been in the United States, at the end of World War II, a wide renewal of interest in social philosophy and in the understanding of foreign cultures and values.11 Kluckhohn may have found in the circumstances of the time the occasion to develop what was undoubtedly a deep personal concern. In the late forties, he launched his project, which assembled a number of scholars and issued in an imposing array of publications over the next decade. Today this considerable effort seems largely forgotten. Unless I am deeply [213] mistaken, it has not left a deep mark in American cultural anthropology. Is this one more example of those fashions that disconcertingly displace one another in our discipline, particularly in the US; or are there internal reasons to the discredit, and, in the worst case, are values a mistaken focus or a 'non-subject', something I could hardly believe? I am not able to answer this complex question. I shall only try to draw from Kluckhohn's endeavour a lesson for our benefit. There must be such a lesson if we believe with him that values are a central problem. For Kluckhohn was not naïve: he was obviously a man of wide culture (with a German component, I suppose, as is the case with several of the early American anthropologists), and, moreover, he anticipated much of what I shall have to say here. Yet, whatever contributions the project may have brought to the knowledge of each of the particular groups or societies studied, the results seem disappointing as regards Kluckhohn's main aim, namely the advancement of comparative theory. How can we account for the fact?Clyde Kluckhohn was closely associated with Parsons and Shils in the symposium that was published as Towards a General Theory of Action and to which he contributed an important theoretical essay which can be taken as the chart of the Harvard Project.12 It is clear that Kluckhohn developed his own position while agreeing on the broad 'conceptual scheme' of the symposium. He dissented only from the rigid separation between social and cultural systems.13 To be brief I shall mention only three main points in Kluckhohn and two of his main associates. First, that (social) values are essential for the integration and permanence of the social body and also of the personality (p. 319)—we might say with Hans Mol for their identity14—is perhaps obvious, but it is in practice too easily forgotten, either by anthropologists insisting unilaterally on change, or by philosophers abstracting individual values from their social background. Saint Augustine said somewhere that a people is made up of men united in the love of something.Second, the close link between ideas and values—here 'cognitive' and 'normative', or 'existential' and 'normative', aspects—is clearly acknowledged, as it was by Parsons and Shils (1951, pp. 159–89), under the central concept of 'value-orientation' [214] as defined by Kluckhohn (1951, pp. 410–11). (The concept is open to criticism on another score, as was shrewdly noticed by an anthropologist.)15 Thus the scheme for the classification of values used by Florence Kluckhohn includes by the side of values proper a minimum of ideas and beliefs. One may prefer the more ample treatment of the Navaho case by Ethel Albert, which includes not only the normally unverbalized 'value-premises', but also a complete picture of the worldview as the 'philosophical context' of the value system strictly defined.16The third point is the clear recognition of the fact that values are 'hierarchically organized'. Clyde Kluckhohn's programmatic article had a very lucid and sensitive page on the question (p. 420), but it is perhaps Florence Kluckhohn that most developed this aspect. Early in the research, she proposed a grid for the comparison of 'value-orientations'. It is a scheme of priorities distinguishing, in each instance under three terms, different stresses relative to relations between man and nature, to the conception of man, to relations between men, to time, and to action.17 The author underlines the importance of hierarchy and of nuances in hierarchy. Each value system is seen as a hierarchical combination sui generis of elements which are universal in the sense of being found everywhere. This was a solution to a problem that much concerned Clyde Kluckhohn himself. He was reacting against an excessive stress on relativity in anthropological literature. He wanted to avoid falling into (absolute) relativism, and he tried to salvage a modicum of universal values.18 Florence Kluckhohn found this universal basis in the very material which was elaborated into different value systems, in each case, by an original combination of particular value emphases.Let me briefly articulate a double criticism. The scheme does [215] not yet apply broadly enough the recognition of hierarchy, and therefore gets stuck in a measure of atomism: no relation is posited between the five subdivisions. What for instance about the relative stress between relations to nature and relations between men (items 1 and 3)? A universal basis seems here to be unduly assumed. The scheme remains thus inevitably sociocentric. Indeed, it is actually centered on a White American and even a Puritan model. Other cultures may make different choices, but only in terms derived from the American choices.A later text by Clyde Kluckhohn adds a new scheme of classification of his own to a presentation of those of Ethel Albert and Florence Kluckhohn. The paper,19 apparently Kluckhohn's last word on the question, would deserve longer consideration than can be given to it here, less for the scheme itself than for the preoccupations that lead up to it. The general, universal bearing of the project is stressed, while the provisional character of the particular scheme is granted. The effort is to make the scheme purely relational: it consists of a series of qualitative, binary oppositions. What is more, it is supplemented by an effort to bring out, by tabulation, the associations between features and thus to reconstitute to some extent the systems analysed.How is it, then, that a considerable effort containing so many correct perceptions leaves one finally unsatisfied? We are left, on the abstract side, with grids into the pigeon-holes of which we should be able to distribute the elements of any value system. It is clear that, notwithstanding Clyde Kluckhohn's last and pathetic effort to affirm a structural, or structuralist, approach and to recapture the living unity given at the start, the whole has vanished into its parts. Atomization has won the day. Why? Because, I submit, the attempt has been unwarily to unite fire and water, structure, hierarchical structure, and classification, that is, classification through individual features. The need for classification was certainly reinforced by the attempt to compare five cultures in one compass, and the most valuable products of the project are probably the monographic pictures in the manner of Albert that it produced. A somewhat unpalatable conclusion follows, namely that a solid and thorough comparison of values is possible only between two systems taken as wholes. If classification is to be introduced further on, it will have to start from wholes and not from itemized features. For the time being we are closer to [216] Evans-Pritchard's 'historiography' than to Radcliffe-Brown's 'natural science of society'.Kluckhohn noticed that the term 'value', chiefly used in the plural, had come recent into the social sciences from philosophy. He saw in it a kind of interdisciplinary concept20 and, probably largely for this reason, mingled occasionally individual and group values. The term 'value-orientation' itself is indicative of a commanding concern with the individual actor (see p. 214 n.1 above). Of course, all this tallies with a behavioural approach, but it is above all an index of the philosophical background of our anthropological problems. The philosophical debate is of intimidating dimension and complexity. Yet we cannot possibly leave it out entirely in an attempt to clarify the anthropological question. Fortunately, I believe that, conversely, an anthropological perspective can throw some light on the philosophical debate and that it is thus possible to take a summary and yet not ineffectual view of it.There are two kinds of philosophers, or rather two kinds of philosophizing in the matter. One locates itself within modern culture and is careful to work in accordance with its constraints, its basic inspiration, its inner logic and its incompatibilities. From that point of view the conclusion follows that it is impossible to deduce what ought to be from what is. No transition is possible from facts to values. Judgements of fact and judgements of value are different in kind. It is enough to recall two or three major aspects of modern culture to show that the conclusion is inescapable. First, science is paramount in our world, and, as we recalled at the start, to make scientific knowledge possible the definition of being has been altered by excluding from it precisely the value dimension. Second, the stress on the individual has led to internalizing morality, to finding it exclusively within the individual's conscience while it is severed from the other ends of action and distinguished from religion. Individualism and the concomitant separation between man and nature have thus split the good, the true and the beautiful, and have produced a theoretically unbridgeable chasm between is and ought to be. This situation is our lot in the sense that it lies at the core of modern culture or civilization.Now, whether this situation is comfortable or reasonable is quite another question. The history of thought seems to show that it is not, for no sooner had Kant proclaimed this fundamental split that his gifted successors, and the German intelligentsia as a [217] whole, hastened in various attempts to re-establish unity. It is true that the social milieu was historically backward and that German intellectuals, while inspired by individualism, were still imbued with holism in the depth of their being. But the protest has continued down to the present day. It must be admitted that, for one who turns away from the environment and attempts to reason from first principles, the idea that what man ought to do is, let us say, unrelated to the nature of things, to the universe and to his place in it, will appear queer, aberrant, incomprehensible. The same holds true of someone who would take into account what we know of other civilizations or cultures. I have said elsewhere that most societies have believed themselves to be based in the order of things, natural as well as social; they have thought they were copying or designing their very conventions after the principles of life and the world. Modern society wants to be 'rational', to break away from nature and set up an autonomous human order.21 We may thus be inclined at first flush to sympathize with those philosophers who have tried to restore unity between facts and values. Their attempts testify to the fact that we have not entirely broken away from the more common mould of mankind, that it is still in some manner present with us, underlying and perhaps modifying the yet compelling modern framework. But we should be on our guard…The attempt can take different forms. One consists in annihilating values entirely. Either value judgements are declared meaningless, or the expression of mere whims or emotional states. Or, with some pragmatists, ends are reduced to means: having construed a category of 'instrumental values', they proceed to deny the distinct existence of 'intrinsic values' that is, of values proper.22 Such attempts seem to be an index of the inability of some philosophical tendencies to take into account real human life, to mark a dead end of individualism. Another type can be taken as a desperate attempt at transcending individualism by resorting to a modern ersatz of religion. In its Marxist form, and through it and somewhat similarly in totalitarian ideologies in general, this doctrine has proved fateful; it is sometimes regarded as sinister, at least in continental Europe, and rightly so. Here we must firmly side with Kolakowski in his impassioned [218] condemnation of the trend, as against certain rambling intellectuals.23We follow Kolakowski especially on one point; the danger does not arise only from the violent attempt to implement such doctrines, but is contained in the doctrine itself under the form of value incompatibilities that call for violence on the level of action. To confirm this point: in an article of 1922, which in retrospect appears prophetic of later developments in Germany, Karl Pribram has noted the parallel incongruity and structural similarity of Prussian nationalism and Marxist socialism. Both, Pribram pointed out, jumped from an individualistic basis to an illegitimate, holistic ('universalistic') construct, the State in the one case, the proletarian class in the other, which they endowed with qualities incompatible with their presuppositions.24 Totalitarianism is present in germ in such encounters. Philosophers themselves are not always sensitive to such incompatibilities, but their constructions are seldom applied to society.25 Here a question arises: it is convenient to link totalitarianism with such incompatibilities—yet there exist incompatibilities in societies without their developing into that scourge. Tönnies insisted that both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are present as principles in modern society. My provisional answer is that they are found on different levels of social life, while it is characteristic of modern artificialism to disregard such levels altogether and thus to make for collision between what it consciously introduces and the substratum which it does not really know. There may well be, indeed there actually is, a need for reintroducing some measure of holism into our individualistic societies, but it can be done only on clearly articulated subordinate levels, so that major clashes with the predominant or primary value are prevented. It can be done, that is, at the price of introducing a highly complex hierarchical articulation, which can be imagined, mutatis mutandis, as a parallel to the highly elaborate Chinese etiquette.26 This point will become clearer in what follows. At any rate, we should in the first place, as citizens of the world and of a particular state within it, abide with Kolakowski by the Kantian distinction as an integral part of the modern make-up.[219] Now what are the consequences of the distinction for social science? Let us take as vanished the times when a behavioural science banned the study of social values together with that of conscious representations at large. We do study social representations as social facts of a particular kind. Here two remarks are called for. First, it is clear that we maintain this 'value-free' attitude on the basis of the Kantian distinction, for otherwise our own native view of 'facts' would command value judgements and we should remain locked up in our own system, sociocentric as all societies are except, in principle, our own. The point simply confirms the link between science in general and the is/ought separation. But then our approach is philosophically questionable. It may be argued that we should distinguish tyranny from legitimate rule. Leo Strauss maintained against Max Weber that social science could not escape evaluation,27 and it is true that Weber was led by this 'value-free' stand to undesirable admissions, such as his 'ethic of conviction'. More radically, one may contend that values cannot really be understood without our adhering to them (note the proximity to the Marxist plea), and that to relativize values is to kill them. In a discussion, A. K. Saran maintained the thesis in its full consequence.28 According to this view, cultures cannot communicate, which means cultural solipsism, a return to sociocentrism. And yet, there is point in it in the sense that comparison implies a universal basis: it must appear in the end that cultures are not as independent from each other as they would claim to be and as their internal consistency seems to warrant.Stated otherwise, our problem is: how can we build a bridge between our modern ideology that separates values and 'facts' and other ideologies that embed values in their worldview?29 Lest our quest should appear futile, let us not forget that the problem is in a way present in the world as it is. Cultures are in fact interacting, thus communicating in some mediocre manner. It behoves anthropology to give a conscious form to that groping and thus to answer a contemporary need. We are committed to reducing the distance between our two cases, to reintegrating the modern case within the general one. For the moment, we shall try to formulate more precisely and thoroughly the relation between them.[220] Values are in general intimately combined with other, non-normative representations. A 'system of values' is thus an abstraction from a wider system of ideas-and-values.30 This is true not only of non-modern societies, but also of modern societies, with one cardinal exception, namely that of (individual) moral values in their relation to scientific, 'objective' knowledge. For all that we said previously about ought bears exclusively on individual, 'subjective' morality. That this morality is, together with science, paramount in our modern consciousness does not hinder its cohabiting with other norms, or values of the common sort, namely traditional social ethics, even if some transition, some substitution of the former for the latter is taking place under our eyes. Thus the modern value of equality has spread in the last decades in European countries to domains where traditional ethics were still in force; from the French Revolution, in whose values it was implied, up to our days, the equality of women had not imposed itself against subordination as entailed by a whole nexus of institutions and representations. Now the struggle between the two 'systems of values' has intensified, and the outcome has still to be seen: our individualist values are at loggerheads with the considerable inertia of a battered social system that is gradually losing its own justification in consciousness.A convenient example of the inseparab