2. Aesthetic Values
(a) According to Idealism: Aesthetic values are concerned with visual art such as color, painting, and sculpturing in their various kinds. The Aesthetic values are broadly classified into two parts—the first is the knowledge of the objects, second is the existence for a moment. The knowledge of an object does not mean knowledge of a particular object but the ideal of the object. The other way of value is the enjoyment of visual art. Music is the highest and most independent form of value.
(b) According to Naturalism: Aesthetic value is the kind of experience, which gives pleasure for its purely natural character. The aesthetic experience can be illustrated by an example. The Naturalists explain the aesthetic value in terms of aesthetic experience as purely natural in character it does not involve spiritual factors the aesthetic experience occurs in the highly developed organism.
There is a minor sense in which aesthetic values are natural. There are no superior values that only a selected person is capable of enjoying. The aesthetic value dependent on essentially on the nature of the organism. They believe only empirical truth, the only truth there is. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
(c) According to Realism: There is a close relationship between perception and the ability to enjoy aesthetic value. It is believed by some that much the same relation exists between the development of visual perceptions and the ability to appreciate the visual arts. Aesthetic value perception should be refined. Which develops unconsciously.
The appreciation of beauty in the world is good to be achieved only after our insights have been sufficiently refined to behold the subtle ways of beauty. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
The aesthetic values are away from fatalism in axiology. Pleasure and joy are not the only emotions to be objectified in art. Broadly speaking, the objectification of any emotion is art. “Pain, sorrow, terror, horror, anger, cruelty, and even loathing and disgust, if they are adequately externalized or objectified, become things of aesthetic value.”
(d) According to Pragmatism: There is also an aesthetic side to value experiences, as well as experiences of value that are more especially aesthetic in character than ethical, religious, social, utilitarian, etc. That is to say that the particular value which these experiences have, or that many, if not all, experiences have when viewed from the aesthetic side, is that they possess beauty or yield meanings that we want to preserve. They may be conveyed by language as in poetry and narrative, medium expression, and appreciation. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
It is the in the form of painting, acting, drama, dance, and music. Jolin Dewey tells us that this is the only kind of world in which there can be aesthetic value. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
In a world in which everything is finished and complete, there would be no opportunity for the kind of living through indeterminacies which is the necessary basis for appreciating the finished and complete. And in a world in which everything is indeterminate, there would be no “perchings” to provide the occasion for the enjoyment of what has been completed; for it is the time of resolution which is the point of emergence of aesthetic values. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
It appears that Dewey’s aesthetics center quite completely on beauty, or pleasurable aesthetic values. But a second place is given to values that are the antithesis of beauty or pleasure. This place is that when anguish, or anguish, or tragedy are preserved in some art form, it is within a large enough time perspective, the experience being sufficiently in the past, that it has lost its acutely self-financing grasp. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
In the art form, it is re-experienced in a more objective manner because of the larger perspective. For this reason even though in essence it is still ugliness or tragedy, or some other negative values, it is yet beauty; and in response to it, there is an acceptance which is resolution and quietude. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
3. Social Values
(a) According to Idealism: One criticism that has been leveled against idealism is that it has not fostered a sense of social responsibility in those whom it has influenced. Rather commonly regarded as being preoccupied with things “abstract” and “spiritual”, it is frequently waived aside as an “ivory tower” philosophy.
It may make this theory of value more concrete if we go on and state three principles of social organization which stem from it, and which can be put to work practically at the local community level where the vast majority of us live. These are the principles of representation, coordination, and planning. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
- The principle of representation is that every part of a society or a community should have the opportunity to participate in the deliberations as well as in the activities of the whole.
- The principle of coordination is that in the deliberations of a community organized representatively, direct attention should be given to the relation of individuals, groups, and services so that each segment of the community will have some consciousness of the function. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
- Finally, the principle of planning is that communities need not remain devoid of deliberation, blindly allowing social processes to go on as they will, but that communities can muster the power of deliberation, formulate some objectives, and guide social processes at least partially in the direction of fulfilling these objectives.
The overall principle is the part of the whole relation guided by it. The social theory will be comprised of a broad framework.
(a) According to Naturalism: Naturalists consider that society is less organic while the individual has an important place. – Similarly, Rousseau’s naturalism rooted man in nature rather than society. So much did he regard man as a child of nature, as over against society, that he proposed in his Emile to keep Emile away from society until adolescence.
In his social contract, he reveals how the problem of social organization is complicated by the importance of the freedom of man. Individual man, he contended, is not a man unless he is free; if he is in bondage, he is less than a man. Yet unbridled freedom is neither in harmony with his own welfare nor the welfare of society. Evidently, some social organization is needed, but one which can be filled rather satisfactorily by democracy. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
For in a democracy, although an individual man sacrifices his own individual freedom to obey the will of the State, preserves his freedom by participating in the decisions which determine what the will of the State is to be.
(c) According to Realism: As to social phenomena themselves, realists are likely to be quite “realistic” in making allowance for things as they actually are. This is one point at which realism as technical philosophy may blend into what is popularly understood as being realistic. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
Accordingly, there is not as much disposition on the part of realists to judge actual social conditions by the ideal as in idealism. It is not strange to realists, for example, that individual men commonly need to be prompted to the desired action by incentives, and more specifically that mercenary gain will move them to action where the vision of an ideal will not.
Since individual men are distinct individual units, since they are physical organisms at least, and since they have to live by bread and either sink or swim in the economic stream in proportion to their own enterprise, what else should we expect? It is only “natural” that money is as powerful as it is in moving men to action. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
It follows then that if any social group, local or more inclusive, is to organize itself so that positive social benefits are to be enjoyed by the group as a whole, it must hold out real incentives to individual men and not depend only on the power of an idea to self itself.
(c) According to Pragmatism: The theme that values, according to pragmatism, are rooted in the individual-social life process has been reiterated so often already that it is scarcely necessary to say that social values are fundamental in the philosophy of pragmatism. Almost every other kind of achievable value is achieved because of the social process in which each individual participates when he is normally fitted to his sphere. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
It may be that this is just another way of saying that for pragmatism, society is not just a conglomeration of individuals but an organic process upon which individuals depend and by which they live. As the soil is to plants and trees, so society is to the individual, a matrix that nurtures human life in its individual forms and makes possible all of the flowerings of personality.
There is another class of social values which are aspects of the freedom of individuals to live and grow. If the individual is to have this freedom within his relation to the community, then the community must respect him as an individual and regard him more in the light of what he may become rather than judge him on the basis of what actually is at present.
Accordingly, the community must afford him certain civil, religious, academic, and other freedoms, by means of which his various potentialities may be made actual. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
In addition, it must allow him sufficient freedom for play and recreation that he may come into possession of a sense of self-filament which arises only in a free play of activities. But this must be balanced by the opportunity to work, by which an individual fulfills his place in society productively and gains thereby the self-realization which comes only as an accompaniment of meaningful work.
4. Religious Value
According to Idealism: By and large, be found that axiology and religion are intimately related. The relation is that a person’s religious convictions if he has them, will determine significantly what the value of life shall be for him. Stated more specifically, Hocking holds that religion is as much a matter of ideas as it is of feelings and that the root ideas in religion are bound to constitute a criterion by which the rest of life is judged. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
Of course, the most central of the ideas in religion is the ideas of God. We must have a God-idea.
The religious values are of six types, which are as follows.
- One of these two central values is the experiences of God in self-consciousness.
- The second of these two great religious values is the experience of love for God.
- One of the less fundamental values of the transformation of the self which sometimes takes place in worship, and in which the whole-part relation is significant. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)
- To mention another of these secondary religious values, Hocking finds that religious experience has value on an epistemological score. (BEd 2nd Year Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles Study Material Notes)