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For Husserl, values are noematic correlates of acts of evaluation, i.e., acts which often are encompassed under "emotions" and "feelings." These acts and their value-correlates are founded in the sense that they rest on ontifying acts, acts in which a categorial determination of the things in the world is constituted. Appreciation of something requires that there be something to appreciate. Whether Husserl held finally that we first engaged things denuded of all value properties and then slapped value properties upon them seems quite unlikely. Rather he came to emphasize a kind of primacy of a sense of will which caused him to maintain that nothing crosses our experience which is completely value free or indifferent to this elemental sense of will. At this level we have a coincidence of the elemental nisus of passive synthesis and the pre-categorial. Thus, within the existential context of this elemental sense of will, what I have elsewhere called the "general will," he gave up the theory of "adiaphora," i.e., value-neutral experiences. This sense of will, which is the teleological nisus of passive synthesis, must be contrasted with evaluation as well as will in the proper sense of the Fiat, i.e., doing (or ceasing to do) something, as an action, promise, decision, resolve, etc.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2608-5_12

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