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8 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1974)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi8 and id is 1 raw text is: THE CONCEPT OF VALUES: A SOCIOPHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH * A. KHoSHKISH Is there a set of absolute values - God-given, Krishna-given, Allah-given - which should guide man's conduct and social behavior? If so, which one? Or are values meaningless, as Ayer has suggested? And if so, what does the word value stand for? To answer each of these questions to the satis- faction of either the normative or the non-cognitive school of thought will exclude the other position. Yet, dialectically speaking, the existence of one implies the existence of the other. Caught in the middle, the social scientist is often inclined to avoid the issue by confining himself within an oper- ational system. Values, as realities of social life, become structural in- gredients of such systems, but their nature is usually left undiscussed as beyond the confines of the system. In the following pages a brief remedial attempt is made in two directions - on one hand through an incursion into the empirically elaborated theories of social systems, with an inquiry about the organic nature of their concepts of values (a scrutiny, in a way, of the link between the two components of Parsons' value-orientation pattern/action system constellation);' on the other hand by an excursion from within the social sciences context towards the metaethical normative and the positivist spheres. I am not so much trying to get involved in a philosophical debate, as to explore the possi- bilities of a synthesis which could hopefully throw some light on the concept of values as social phenomena. My approach is sociophenomenological in that I will examine values-in-themselves, as realities of social experi- ence. Of course, in both the phenomenological and the social sense, values-in-themselves cannot be dissociated from their existential reality.2 It is in this dual context that I will deal with them here. * This is an abridged version of a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, 1971. 1 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951). The reader will notice the constant implication of Parsons' theories in this paper. For the sake of brevity, I have avoided footnoting the numerous references which would have become cumbersome. 2 The term phenomenology has received a broad usage - from the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl to existential phenomenology of Sartre in philosophy, the biological phenomenology of Uexkull, the cultural phenomenology of Cassirer and the social phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Schutz. Here we are employing the term to emphasize the human reality of values and hence their social reality. See notably our later Sartrian-inspired treatment of value as that which is beyond all surpassings and the lacked.

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