Value

A term broadly used in the philosophical and sociological literature to indicate the human, social, and cultural significance of certain phenomena of the real world.
In essence, all the various objects of human activity, as well as all social relations and the natural phenomena that fall within their range, may be regarded as “value objects,” or the objects of value relations; in other words, they may be evaluated in terms, for example, of good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, the permissible and the prohibited, or the just and the unjust. Such valuations may be graduated—that is, they may indicate different levels of the respective attribute. The methods and criteria used in the very process of evaluating the respective phenomena are crystallized in the social consciousness and in culture as “value subjects”; these value subjects—namely, attitudes and valuations, imperatives and prohibitions, or goals and projects that are expressed in the form of normative notions—serve as the compass points of human activity. Value objects and subjects are thus the two poles, as it were, of man’s value relationship to the world.
In the structure of human activity the value aspects are interrelated with the cognitive and volitional aspects; the value categories themselves express the “limiting” orientation of the knowledge, interests, and preferences of various social groups and individuals. The evolving rational cognition of society, which includes an examination of the nature and origin of values, affects the entire range of value relations, preventing such relations from assuming the character of metaphysical absolutes. Marxism rejects the idealist conceptions of the ahistorical and suprasocial nature of values, emphasizing the social, practical, historical, and cognizable nature of human values, ideals, and norms.
Every specific historical form of social organization may be described in terms of a specific set and hierarchy of values. Such value systems represent the highest level of social regulation; they formulate the criteria of what is accepted by a given society and social group—such criteria serving as a basis for the development of more specific and specialized norm-monitoring systems, as well as development of the corresponding societal institutions and, in fact, of people’s goal-oriented actions, be they individual or collective acts. The assimilation of these criteria on the level of the personality structure—that is, the internalization of values— is essential to the personality’s development and to the maintenance of a normative order in society. The integration of social systems and their inner contradictions and dynamics are reflected in the structure of the corresponding value systems and in the way each social system affects different social groups.
Personal value orientation systems are important elements of the value relationships in society; they represent man’s entrenched and not fully conscious attitudes toward various elements of the social structure and toward values themselves. Subjectively colored valuations are not directly coincident with the socially significant characteristics of values. The empirical study of value orientations is an essential part of sociological research dealing with such issues as education, choice of occupation, public work, and job-related activity.
Value systems are formed and transformed in the course of society’s historical development. Since these processes are connected to the changes that take place in different spheres of human activity, their timetable does not coincide with the timetable of other changes, such as socioeconomic and political ones. Thus the aesthetic values of antiquity retained their significance even after the fall of the civilization that had given them birth; similarly known for their enduring influence are the humanist and democratic ideals of the European Enlightenment, which had their roots in the ancient and Hellene cultures.
The materialist conception of history is equally opposed to those historical views of society wherein the latter is treated as the actualization of a system of “eternal values” or, alternatively, as a succession of changing types of values—for example, the replacement of transcendentally oriented values by secular ones, or of unconditional values by conventional ones. At the same time, a concretely historical analysis of the origin and evolution of value systems is an important aspect of any scientific study of the history of society and culture.
===REFERENCES===
Vasilenko, V. A. Tsennosl’ iotsenka. Moscow, 1964.
Problema tsennosti v filosofii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1966. [Collection of articles.]Drobnitskii, O. G. Mir ozhivshikh predmetov: Problema tsennosti i marksistskaia filosofiia. Moscow, 1967.Liubimova, T. B. “Poniatie tsennosti v burzhuaznoi sotsiologii.” In the collection Sotsial’nye issledovaniia, fase. 5. Moscow, 1970.Tugarinov, V. P. Teoriia tsennostei v marksizme. Leningrad, 1968.Stolovich, L. N. Priroda esteticheskoi tsennosti. Moscow, 1972.O. G. DROBNITSKII
Category:Philosophy
Category:Sociology