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PAR TIS AN R'EVlEW
of snakes whose bite kills, imagined snakes whose bite does not, and
merely valued or disvalued snakes. We would still have to re-introduce
the ordinary distinctions of the ordinary' world which recognize that
snakes can exist independently of men but imaginary snakes cannot,
and
that snakes as valued or disvalued are essentially related to human de–
sires. What the second proposition asserts is no more than that the as–
cription of reality to anything is always an ascription of reliability in
some context; and the fact that science is concerned with those invariant
relationships that hold both in human and nonhuman contexts, is no
ground for denying the reality or reliability of values in a human con–
text. But what Vivas does is to assert the ontic being of value
outside
of any context. What Dewey and other naturalists say is that because
my headache is caused by certain variations in physico-chemical con–
ditions inside and outside my body-conditions whose existence is inde–
pendent of my experience-the headache is nonetheless real in the con–
text of my experience, and so real that it may have important effects
upon me and others. What Vivas is saying is that headaches can exist
without being felt! More, he holds that nothing can arise in human ex–
perience without having previously been. There is no genuine novelty
or creation or emergence either of values or of anything else. Make
sense of
this
who can.
It is difficult enough to hold the view that the non-value qualities
and relations of things subsist in some ontic realm independently of the
spatio-temporal existence of any or all things, and that as the realist
Bishop in one of Anatole France's novels remarked, before there were
feet, or behinds, or kicks in the world, "kicks-in-the-behind" resided in
the bosom of being from all eternity. But to maintain that values and
disvalues of pleasures and pains possess objective being independently
of the existence of sentient organisms or centers of feeling, whether
located in an organism or not, is if not altogether meaningless, an un–
supported dogma. Further, to endow values with
power
to command
human spirits is-may I be forgiven- to import strange antics into the
realm of ontics.
No one can speak or act intelligibly except on the assumption that
the value of anything is ultimately a value for someone, and that the
possibility of being experienced is at least a necessary condition for the
presence of values.
Apparently one ground for Mr. Vivas' denial of this view is his
contention that before we can choose between values we must recognize
them, and before they can be recognized they must have ontic status.
Here as elsewhere he seems to be systematically misled by the assump-
