Husserl Stud

DOI 10.1007/s10743-016-9200-1

Critique of Reason and the Theory of Value:

Groundwork of a Phenomenological Marxism

Ian Angus1

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract There are three steps in my description of the ground-problem of value:

First, Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of reason is based on the systematic loss and
phenomenological recovery of the intuitive evidence of the lifeworld. But if letter
symbols are essential to formalizing abstraction, as Klein’s de-sedimentation of
Vieta’s institution of modern algebra shows, then the ultimate substrates upon which
formalization rests cannot be ‘‘individuals’’ in Husserl’s sense. The consequence of
the essentiality of the letter symbols to formalization is that no direct reference to
intuitive evidence of individuals is possible from formal structures. Second, the
crisis of reason in Marx’s Capital on commodities contains a parallel analysis of the
contradictory relation between formalism and evidence. The value-structure of
capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and imposes a homo-
geneous standard on social representation of value such that quantitative values are
not grounded in the experience of use which entails that the system of general value
becomes a mere aggregate. Third, the problem of value, or formal axiology, is the
core of a teleological convergence between phenomenology and Marxism. A short
phenomenological description of the experience of value shows that practical
activities generate valuations that are experienced with an intensity through which
they aim toward social representation. The conclusion is that the social represen-
tation of value in capitalist society intervenes into the constitution of the community
by the intensity of individuals’ value-experience to reduce its system of value to an
unthematized simple aggregate of value-quantities.

This paper is drawn from a research project supported with research time by the Shadbolt Fellowship
(Simon Fraser University, 2012) and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, grant #435-2012-0209.

& Ian Angus

iangus@sfu.ca
1
Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

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1 Phenomenology and Marxism: An Introduction

There are two fundamental thematics from which the relation between phe-
nomenology and Marxism has been posed. The first is the ontology of labour that
Marx developed throughout his life from the unpublished 1844 texts known as
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the first volume of Capital (1867) and
which can be connected to the themes of embodiment in Husserl and worldliness in
Heidegger (Husserl 1989, pp. 151–69; Heidegger 1996, section 15). The works of
Kostas Axelos and Michel Henry, among others, have been significant in developing
this approach (Axelos 1976, 2015; Henry 1983, 1985; Hemming 2013; Mei 2009).
The second fundamental thematic through which phenomenology and Marxism
converge is the critique of reason. Husserl’s last work The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology analyzed the ‘‘inner dissolution’’ of
the modern ideal of universal philosophy instituted in the Renaissance into a
‘‘theoretical technique’’ due to its reliance on a ‘‘relative, one-sided, rationality,
which leaves a complete irrationality on necessary opposite sides’’ (Husserl 1970a,
p. 46, section 5; see Husserl 1969, pp. 3, 16–7). It is no accident that twentieth-
century Marxists have often turned to Husserl’s Crisis with interest and approbation
as well as critique: Marx’s critique of political economy implies a critique of reason,
insofar as a critique of the special science of political economy involves a critique of
the form of reason within political economy as well as an implication of a more
comprehensive conception of reason that grounds the critique (Marcuse 1964,
pp. 162–6). There is a priority of phenomenology in this convergence since the
critique of reason pertains to the conceptual and historical vocation of phenomenol-
ogy as such, whereas the critique of reason within Marxism is subordinate to the
ontology of labour and the logic of capital. This essay initially pursues a
convergence between phenomenology and Marxism through the critique of reason
and thus begins from the problematic of phenomenology in order to establish and
pursue this convergence, but it finally shows that the critique of the social
representation of value is a more fundamental convergence.
To be properly philosophical, this convergence does not remain content with the
texts of the authors in question, nor even the critique of such texts, but must situate
itself within the questions themselves rooted in lived history that animate the texts.
The convergence is philosophically valid insofar as the questions that animate
Husserl and Marx converge upon a philosophical topos that might well be pointed to
but not given adequate formulation in either. Teleological interpretation is a form of
philosophical co-questioning that moves from the texts toward the things
themselves (Landgrebe 1984, pp. 53–6).
Let me anticipate the three basic steps in my presentation: First, I will review
Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of reason as based on the loss and recovery of the
intuitive evidence of the lifeworld. In this context I will argue that Jacob Klein’s
work on modern mathematical ‘‘symbol-generating abstraction’’ disallows the
return to intuitive evidence which Husserl’s conception of the healing role of
phenomenology requires. Second, I will turn to the crisis of reason implied by the
first chapter Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 on commodities in order to illustrate a

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parallel analysis of the contradictory relation between formalism and evidence.

Third, I will turn directly to the problem of value, the core of the teleological
convergence between phenomenology and Marxism on the critique of reason, in
order to demonstrate that the concrete integration of individual and community
aimed at by both Husserl and Marx is systematically discounted by the necessary
absence of the social representation of value in any other form than an
unthematized, quantitative aggregate of values registered by prices—thus requiring
a critique of capitalism as an essential element of the critique of reason.1

2 Husserl’s Crisis and its Healing Intention of Phenomenology

Husserl begins the Crisis by saying that the crisis of a science concerns its scientific
character, the task that it sets for itself, and its methodology. Excepting philosophy,
due to its contemporary tendency to fall away from reason, and psychology, insofar
as it makes philosophical claims, the positive sciences such as mathematics and the
natural sciences, as well as the humanistic sciences, are models of success within
their own domains. But if the question of crisis is posed from the perspective of the
culture in which the sciences are pursued and the role assigned to them within that
culture, then the situation is very different. The crisis of the sciences is not
concerned with their internal scientific character, but rather ‘‘what they, or what
science in general, has meant and could mean for human existence’’ (Husserl 1970a,
p. 5).
The crisis in question is a cultural issue that concerns psychology and philosophy
especially since they deal with the ‘‘enigma of subjectivity’’ that pertains to their
central subject-matter and method, but this enigma also accounts for ‘‘insoluble
obscurities in modern, even mathematical sciences’’ (Husserl 1970a, p. 4). If factual
sciences are divorced from subjectivity, which is the ground for meaning and
evaluation, the reason that they produce turns into nonsense because their cultural
significance remains unknown. Therefore, the goal of Husserl’s Crisis is to rescue
subjectivity from its loss within the objectifying modern sciences in order to
propose a phenomenological concept of reason that can ground meaning and value.
The cultural role of science was assigned in the Renaissance’s reshaping of
humanity, such that the crisis is a crisis of modern philosophy, reason, and its
historical role; it is an ‘‘inner dissolution’’ not based on an external standpoint of
evaluation. The reason for this inner dissolution is rooted in the ‘‘mathematization
of nature’’ whereby the entire field of nature is understood to be fundamentally a
mathematical structure; thus, meaningful and value-laden experiences are registered
as ‘‘subjective.’’ Built upon this is the notion that such subjective experiences, in
order to make a claim on external reality, must be ‘‘indirectly mathematized,’’ that is
to say, rigorously related to mathematical indexes. Mathematics becomes the
ontology of nature through a sleight-of-hand in which method is taken as being.

1
The pertinence of Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value to the phenomenology of
values has been noted by James Hart (1997a, pp. 1–2).

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Galileo took over the existing geometry of his time without inquiring into its
sedimented origin. Sedimented structures are those that have passed into tradition
such that their meaning is simply assumed, taken over from the past, rather than
being made self-evident to the inquirer—which Husserl also calls traditionalized.
Since geometry was sedimented for Galileo, it could appear that the evidence of
geometrical abstractions could itself provide truth. ‘‘For in the case of inherited
geometrical method, these functions [of idealization] were no longer being vitally
practiced […]. Thus it could appear that geometry, with its own immediately self-
evident a priori ‘intuition’ and the thinking which operates with it, produces a self-
sufficient, absolute truth which, as such—‘obviously’—could be applied without
further ado’’ (Husserl 1970a, p. 49). The evidence that is proper to grasping the
operation of geometrical abstractions, in the absence of an inquiry into the origin of
these abstractions, could wrongly seem to be an evidence of the applicability of
these abstractions to the lifeworld. Moreover, this issue becomes acute with the
‘‘arithmetization of geometry,’’ which is the reduction of concretely intu-
itable shapes and their ideal limits to arithmetical formulae. Thus, the whole issue
of the relation of such abstractions to the experienced lifeworld is left out of
consideration, simply assumed to be viable without evidence. This is the crisis of the
European sciences that renders irrational the fundamental issues of meaning and
value.
In his reference in the Crisis to the arithmetization of geometry, Husserl points to
the importance of the formalization of modern algebra made possible by Vieta
(Husserl 1970a, p. 44; Husserl 1969, p. 80), but he does not investigate further the
meaning of this institution of modern algebra even though it is this modern
transformed algebra that is taken over into the mathematization of nature in a
sedimented, traditionalized manner. Husserl emphasized that the formalization
made possible by the arithmetization of geometry consists in abstraction to an
undetermined ‘‘x,’’ or ‘‘anything-whatever,’’ and the systematic development of
such uninterpreted signs into sign-systems called, in Reimannian terminology,
‘‘definite manifolds.’’ As Burt Hopkins has shown, throughout his work Husserl
assumed that numbers given merely symbolically could be filled in by intuition in
the same way as the (smaller) numbers given intuitively (a pair, a half-dozen, etc.)
(Hopkins 2011, pp. 362–491). This assumption is the ground for his diagnosis of
crisis, yet it may be perceived to contain a difficulty: in the first place, symbolic
systems necessarily become externalized and emptied, but also they can become
intuitively fulfilled. The healing role of phenomenology is compacted in this
difficult, and perhaps contradictory, relation of diagnosis of a necessary emptying,
externalization, technization, due to formal, symbolic abstraction and prognosis of
restored meaning through phenomenological critique of that same formal, symbolic
abstraction:
Like arithmetic itself, in technically developing its methodology, it [a definite
manifold] is drawn into a process of transformation, through which it becomes
a sort of technique; that is, it becomes a mere art of achieving, through a
calculating technique according to technical rules, results the genuine sense of
whose truth can be attained only by concretely intuitive thinking actually

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directed at the subject matter itself (Husserl 1970a, p. 46; latter emphasis
added).
Husserl’s interest in formalization was oriented to the ideal of definite manifolds
and the role in modern reason that it makes possible, rather than to the initial
formalizing abstraction itself. The work of Jacob Klein, as presented in his ground-
breaking text, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934 and
1936), focuses on precisely this institution of modern algebra. I will argue that the
implications of Klein’s understanding of symbolic abstraction are such as to
undermine Husserl’s assumption that formalizations can be traced back to the
evidence of individuals where they receive intuitive fulfilment.
Klein’s text narrates the historical background through which the symbol-
generating abstraction that emerged with Vieta was constructed.2 Nevertheless, let
us leave aside that history here to focus directly on the upshot of that history in
characterizing the unprecedented character of symbol-generating abstraction itself.
Klein seeks to explain how the concept of number in Vieta incorporates a new
relationship between a concept and a thing.
While every arithmos [number in the ancient, or pre-Vietian, sense] intends
immediately the things or the units themselves whose number it happens to be,
his letter sign intends directly the general character of being a number which
belongs to every possible number, that is to say, it intends ‘‘number in
general’’ immediately, but the things or units which are at hand in each
number only mediately. In the language of the schools: The letter sign
designates the intentional object of a ‘‘second intention’’ (intentio secunda),
namely of a concept which itself directly intends another concept and not a
being (Klein 1992, p. 174).
Number in the non-symbol-generating sense, which is ‘‘prior’’ to Vieta’s sense,
refers to the collection of objects as a collection. It is already ‘‘abstract’’ in the sense
that it does not refer to the individuals themselves but to their connection, or
combination, into a group, even though this grouping itself is a grouping, for
example, of five glasses, or, in general, five objects. Number in this sense refers to
the grouping into a totality of concrete objects. In contrast, Klein says that Vieta’s
letter sign intends the general character of being a number. It does not designate the
grouping into a totality itself but rather the bare possibility of such a grouping. The
letter sign expresses the fact that the objects to which it may be taken to refer
contain the possibility of grouping as numbers immediately and refers to number as
grouping in the first sense only mediately. That is to say, the letters characteristic of
symbol-generating abstraction refer directly only to the mere possibility of

2
Klein’s original term was symbolische Abstraktion, whose English equivalent is simply ‘‘symbolic
abstraction,’’ and this is the term used in the essay Phenomenology and the History of Science (Klein
1985). Nonetheless, Eva Brann’s translation of Klein’s text used ‘‘symbol-generating abstraction’’
because the prior term was ambiguous in that, while the conceptual abstraction that produces the new
symbolic object is clearly an activity of thought, and thus an abstraction, the symbolic object of that
conceptual intention is not itself an abstraction. Since Klein approved this clarification, I will use the
amended term from this point on (Brann 2011, p. xxvii, footnote 3; Hopkins 2011, p. 109).

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numbering objects, even though they may be used subsequently in such numbering
of concrete objects.
This is the very meaning of the symbolic character of the signs in modern
algebra—that their being as this mere possibility of determination is the content of
their being itself: a symbolic formalism of ‘‘formations whose merely potential
objectivity is understood as an actual objectivity’’ is a ‘‘finding of finding’’ in which
‘‘the most important tool of mathematical natural science, the ‘formula,’ first
becomes possible’’ (Klein 1992, p. 75, emphasis removed). This is the unprece-
dented character of modern symbolic formalism that Klein unravels.
Husserl’s concern with formalization was limited to the issue of definite
manifolds as a consistent and complete systematization of ‘‘anything-whatevers’’
and their relations. In contrast, Jacob Klein’s investigation was oriented toward
understanding the specific and unprecedented character of the symbol-generating
abstraction to an ‘‘anything-whatever’’ that grounds the possibility of such
manifolds in the first place. While Klein seems to have seen his intentional-
historical reactivation of the origin of symbol-generating abstraction as an addition
consistent with Husserl’s phenomenological programme (Klein 1985), it can now be
seen to imply a revision of that programme in one significant respect. Husserl’s
account assumes that formal systems can be brought to adequate evidence of
individuals, similar to the way generalizations can be. This assumption is the basis
for his account of crisis as loss of meaning through emptying and externalization,
and phenomenology as the restoration of meaning through immediate, intuitive
evidence. In his study of genetic logic in Experience and Judgment, Husserl stated
that
[f]ormal logic can state nothing more about an ultimate substrate than that it is
a something still categorically completely unformed, a substrate which has not
yet entered into a judgment and taken on a form in it, and which, just as it is
self-evident and self-given, becomes for the first time a substrate of judgment.
At the same time, however, this implies that such a substrate can only be an
individual object (Husserl 1973, p. 26, emphasis added).
While the character and status of the most fundamental objects to which formal
logic applies is not an issue within formal logic itself, for a philosophical
understanding and critique of formal logic it is crucial. Nonetheless, Husserl claims
here that it follows from the fact that formal logic must be applied to a pre-formal
domain that the domain in question must be one of individuals. It is through this
possibility of re-situating formal logic upon individuals that Husserl’s thesis of the
crisis of the sciences attempts to sustain both the necessity of emptying and
externalization of meaning and its restoration through philosophical critique. But,
this fundamental element of Husserl’s analysis is not shown but assumed. Hopkins
has shown that Husserl’s ontological assumption takes the following form.
The universalities that compose the formal apriori belonging to formal
analytics and the material apriori belonging to the material sciences have an
extension that applies to individuals. Therefore, for each apriori, albeit
mediately in the case of the formal and immediately in the case of the

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material, individuals have a foundational role in the genesis of the judgments

that yield the universal structures of each apriori (Hopkins 2011, p. 484).
Husserl’s ontological assumption that both formal and material universalities can
be traced back to individuals can be more daringly stated as the claim that the
distinctiveness of formalizing abstraction—or symbol-generating abstraction, in
Klein’s terminology—has not been appreciated by Husserl.3 Hopkins has followed
out the philosophical consequence of Klein’s elaboration of the distinctiveness of
formalizing abstraction:
Husserl’s articulation of the parts and formal structures of the predicative
judgment, however, does not establish their judicative independence from the
letter symbols employed in the proposition’s symbolic expression but rather is
guided by the very assumption of this independence (Hopkins 2011, p. 488).
But if the letter symbols are essential to the very idea of formalizing abstraction,
as Klein’s de-sedimentation of Vieta’s institution of modern algebra has shown,
then the ultimate substrates upon which formalization rests cannot be ‘‘individuals’’
in the sense attributed to them by Husserl—that is to say, individuals amenable to
lifeworld experience as ‘‘that-toward-which’’ formal logic points, an independent
content prior to formalization. The consequence of the essentiality of the letter
symbols to formalization is that no such direct reference to immediate evidence of
individuals, nor a mediated version of the same reference, is possible from formal
structures. I conclude that the reference to individuals that Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy requires to restore meaning is not possible given a full understanding of
formalization based on the work of Jacob Klein.
Since this is a crucial point that alters the direction of a phenomenological
critique of reason, I would like to justify it independently through a short
phenomenological description of the essential difference between generalization
and formalization. As Husserl said, ‘‘generalization is something totally different
from that formalization which plays such a large role in, e.g., mathematical analysis;
and specialization is something totally different from de-formalization, from
‘filling-out’ an empty logico-mathematical form, or a formal truth’’ (Husserl 1982,
p. 26). This earlier analysis is referred to in Crisis and taken as the foundation of the

3
I already pointed out in Technique and Enlightenment: Limits of Instrumental Reason that the
relationship of formal logic to individuals is a simple presupposition, without appreciating the critique of
Husserl that this implied (Angus 1984, pp. 35–8). Burt Hopkins’ preliminary studies for his meticulous
text on the relation between Klein’s work and Husserl’s phenomenology, The Origin of the Logic of
Symbolic Mathematics, revived my interest in Klein, which occasioned my understanding that the
references to Klein in Technique and Enlightenment similarly did not appreciate the significance of his
work for a revision of the task of phenomenology (Angus 1984, pp. 7–9). However, the account of the
‘‘presupposition of individuals’’ in that text already demanded that Husserl’s account of the crisis of the
sciences be supplemented with an understanding of ‘‘technique’’ as a specific adumbration of individuals
to ‘‘abstract evidences which […] are isolated ends pursued within the context of typifying situational
knowledge in everyday life’’ (Angus 1984, p. 53). This grounded an appropriation of the work of Max
Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt in a critique of instrumental reason. An essay on Husserl and Klein
stimulated by Hopkins’ work on Klein pulled together these threads in order to argue for the significance
of a ‘‘transcendental history of reification’’ in which ‘‘unlike formal abstraction, emergent universal-
izations are not nodes within a system but points of origination’’ (Angus 2005, p. 208).

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analysis of ‘‘emptying’’ and therefore crisis (Husserl 1970a, p. 46, footnote).

Generalization refers to abstraction in the form of a species-genus relationship of
subordination and superordination. So, I can generalize from the desk on which I am
writing to desks in general, from there to furniture, from there to made objects, and
finally to objects-in-general. Given any level of this structure, one can abstract to a
higher-level concept and specify toward a lower-level concept. Formalization, in
contrast, abstracts from any concrete object all at once, as it were, to the concept of
an anything-whatever, or an undetermined ‘‘x.’’ It may be thought that the formal
anything-whatever is the highest genus, subsuming all material universals.
There is a sense in which this might be true, the sense in which any of such
material universals could be the starting point for a formal abstraction, as concrete
objects also could be. But there is no necessity for – indeed no sense at all in – a
step-by-step process of abstraction from species to genus upward to the highest
material universal. The formal universal is reached by a definite kind of abstraction
directly from any individual at any level of a genus-species hierarchy. In any case,
this partial overlap must not be allowed to muddy the fundamental distinction
between the two forms of abstraction. This distinction is clearest when we consider
not abstraction to a higher genus but specification of a lower species.
We may specify—Husserl uses the term ‘‘specialization’’ for what I am here
calling ‘‘specification’’ (Husserl 1982, p. 26)—the genus animal to ‘‘mammal,’’ then
to ‘‘primate’’ and then further to ‘‘monkey’’ Each specification chooses an example
from a finite, closed set of possibilities. Instead of ‘‘mammal,’’ the specification
could have been ‘‘oviparous (or, egg-laying) animal,’’ then ‘‘bird’’ and further
‘‘chicken.’’ Specification in this sense from a formalization is not possible. From
‘‘anything-whatever,’’ or ‘‘x,’’ we cannot specify toward lower levels of abstraction
in anything like the way that generalization requires. Why not?
The reason is because every specification from a generalization chooses an
example from a series of possibilities all at the same level of abstraction. For
instance, one chooses ‘‘mammal’’ or ‘‘oviparous animal’’ from a determinate and
closed set of possibilities for determining the specific kind of animal under
consideration. In contrast, every concretization of a formalization chooses from a set
of objects of an indeterminate plurality not only of objects but objects at different
levels of abstraction. Thus it is not a meaningful set of concrete possibilities.
Concrete examples of anything-whatever can include a pear, the art theory of Ernst
Gombrich, e = mc2, the five toenails on my left foot, a photograph of Lake Louise,
and a story that I vaguely remember told to me by my mother in 1953. This is not a
meaningful set of objects worthy of the name ‘‘specification’’ because there are no
features that would close the set nor any features that would hold the set to objects
of a similar sort in any sense of ‘‘similar.’’ They are similar only in being objects of
any type whatever as are all objects—which is another way of saying that the set of
possibilities is not closed, and without a closed set of possibilities at each step of
specification, the process does not terminate in an immediate intuition of an
individual object.
Thus, a specification of ‘‘x’’ could be ‘‘x’’ – which is to say that an abstract sign is
an anything-whatever that exemplifies the sign ‘‘anything-whatever’’ as much as
does a more concrete object. Formal abstraction thus evades the logic of species-

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genus in the sense that the genus is not necessarily more formal than the species;
hence, formal abstraction is not an abstraction of the species-genus type. It is an
abstraction in which the specification may be at the same level of abstraction as the
formal abstraction, which is equivalent to saying that because the set of possible
concretizations does not contain a principle of closure the levels of abstraction are
collapsed into a distinct form of abstraction in which self-reference is as likely a
specification as a more concrete example. In generalization, the closed set of
possibilities excludes certain non-members of the set and thus defines a definite and
meaningful set. In contrast, the set of anything-whatever specifications does not
exclude anything and is thus the set of everything in general. Therefore, the
application of formalizations to contents—whether they be individuals or objects of
whatever sort—necessarily contains an arbitrariness insofar as the formal concep-
tual structure is not rooted in an intuition of contents; rather, the contents are simply
subsumed under a pre-given form.
The consequence of the distinction between generalization and formalization is
to disallow, in the latter case, the sort of specification to individuals that Husserl
assumed applied—at least teleologically through the phenomenological restoration
of meaning—to both forms of abstraction. It is this phenomenological restoration of
meaning with reference to immediate intuition of individuals that Husserl thought
could overcome the crisis of modern reason. This leaves us with the question of
what relationship to meaning and value might be restored if Husserl’s attempt to
trace symbolic abstraction back to intuited meaning is not viable and therefore
cannot overcome the crisis caused by formalization. Before addressing this issue
directly, however, I will address Marx’s critique of reason in order to show that an
identical problem of the grounding of abstract structures is diagnosed by him.

3 Critique of Reason in Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1

While the critique of reason is not the main focus of Marx’s work, a critique of
political economy requires a critique of the form of reason in political economy and
thereby implies a more comprehensive conception of reason. In this sense, its
structure is in formal identity with Husserl’s critique of Galilean science.
Additionally, there is a critique of philosophy in Marx’s work that is formally
identical to the necessary introduction of the concept of the lifeworld by Husserl in
order to perform his critique of modern, Galilean reason. In The German Ideology,
Marx and Engels defined ideology as an inversion of the relations between ideas and
the social individuals who think ideas. ‘‘Individuals […] have been conceived by
philosophers as an ideal, under the name ‘Man.’ They have conceived the whole
process […] so that at every historical stage ‘Man’ was substituted for the
individuals and shown as the motive force of history’’ (Marx and Engels 1970,
p. 192). Philosophy becomes ideology by creating an abstraction and positing the
actual individuals as predicates of that abstraction, such that the historical process
appears to be the product of the abstraction Man acting as a force supervening
individuals. Thus, ideology tells the story of the history of ideas as if ideas had a
history apart from the individuals who thought and expressed the ideas.

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Since Hegel always represented the apogee of philosophy for Marx, he insisted
on distinguishing his dialectical method from Hegel’s: ‘‘For Hegel, the process of
thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of
‘the Idea,’ is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external
appearance of the idea’’ (Marx 1977, p. 102). In phenomenological terms, ‘‘we
measure the life-world—the world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete
world-life—for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively
scientific truths’’ (Husserl 1970a, p. 51). Marx called this garb of ideas ‘‘commodity
fetishism.’’ Both Marx and Husserl—the first through the concept of ‘‘real
individuals’’ and the second through that of the ‘‘lifeworld’’—aimed to turn
philosophy away from ideology by a recovery of concrete thinking rooted in lived
experience.
More significant than these formal identities is the actual content of Marx’s
critique of reason embedded in his account of the logic of capitalist society.
Capitalist society is defined as the system in which labour-power has become a
commodity and thus commodity relations extend to the whole of society and nature.
Insofar as any thing or being appears in the capitalist world, it appears as a
commodity or an owner of a commodity. I will pursue a reflection here concerning
necessary limits to the social representation of value grounded in the logic of the
‘‘pure’’ capitalist system analysed in Capital, Volume 1.
Capital begins with an analysis of the ‘‘immense collection of commodities’’ that
constitutes the form of wealth on the surface level of capitalist society (Marx 1977,
p. 125). A commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value. A use-value
depends on the concrete and specific characteristics of a thing such that it satisfies a
human need; it is an ‘‘individual object’’ in Husserl’s sense. Marx sees nothing
problematic in use-value as such, since it is simply the appropriation of nature for
human use, and he is far removed from any attempt to classify some needs as
fundamental and others as superfluous, or to restrict human needs to certain goods.
The enigma thus resides in exchange. One commodity can be exchanged for a given
quantity of another commodity, which gives rise to money as the universal
equivalent that mediates the relations between the entire immense collection of
commodities. A quantity of money, or a price, signifies the value of a given
commodity in relation to another commodity and, since each commodity has a
price, to commodities in general. We may then designate the value represented as a
price to be the restricted value of a given commodity as a fraction of the aggregate
value of the entire collection of commodities. Correlatively, we may designate the
value of the entire collection of commodities to be the aggregate general value.
Since capitalist society registers value through exchange, and in no other fashion,
we may conclude that the system of universal equivalence renders the value of a
commodity socially as a restricted quantitative measure and the totality as a general
aggregate. But the point here is not only the distinction between restricted and
general concepts of value but that a commodity price system reduces general value
to restricted value. The totality of value present in a given society is only available
through the sum of restricted values of specific commodities. The total system of
value is present as a simple aggregate of restricted values so that it is never
addressed as such by any actor, neither pursued nor actualized directly, and is rarely

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focused upon as such. General value is no more than the non-thematic, unintended
sum of individual valuations registered as prices.
The social representation of value is through a system of exchange whereby the
specific, concrete uses of commodities are left aside and left without social
representation. Of course, when one buys a specific commodity, one buys it
precisely for its specific qualities, but these specificities concern only the user for
the act of using and are not registered socially except as a quantity expressed as
price. As Marx says, ‘‘the exchange relation of commodities is characterized
precisely by its abstraction from their use-values,’’ whereas ‘‘use-values are only
realized in use or consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth,
whatever its social form may be’’ (Marx 1977, pp. 127, 126). Wealth refers to the
concrete character of uses that a society produces and distributes; in a capitalist
society, wealth takes the form of restricted and general value in a quantitative
system of mensuration in which general value is simply aggregate restricted value.
The social representation of wealth—or ‘‘value’’ in the wider axiological sense—
thus bears no relation to the concrete characteristics that constitute that wealth for
the individuals who comprise that society nor to the social sum of individual
valuations. I conclude that in capitalist society there is always a struggle to represent
in socially compelling form one’s use-derived experience of value against its
systematic rendering through a system of quantitative mensuration as a restricted
quantity of an unthematized general aggregate—for example, the way in which
one’s environmental concerns are registered socially through the willingness to pay
a higher price for goods with better ecological records.
The crucial and much-discussed section at the end of chapter 1 on commodities,
entitled ‘‘The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret,’’ links the account of the
commodity with which the text begins to the concept of capital in Part II, and
thereby to the concept of the exploitation of labour by capital in Parts III and
subsequently. The argument of this short section provides the key to the logic of the
capitalist system by linking commodity, capital and labour. Moreover, it claims that
there is a systematic lack of social knowledge by the social actor in the capitalist
mode of production that in an abstract, scientific, form structures the science of
political economy. Marx’s critique of political economy is thus fundamentally a
critique of fetishism and the analysis of fetishism rests upon a critique of the form of
reason operative in social action that is carried over into the specialized science of
political economy.
The fetishism attaching to the commodity form is due to that form itself but,
since use is unproblematic, it originates in exchange-value, which is registered by
price. The core of the fetishism of commodities is that relationships between
humans appear as relations between things. This occurs only in capitalism.
Consider, as Marx does, the case of simple commodity production prior to
capitalism where producers of commodities make their products independently and
then bring them to the market to be sold. In this case it is true that the relations
between producers are not established until they exchange their products, and
therefore that whatever social relation they have is established through the
mediation of products. But in capitalist commodity production, production is not by
independent producers but by an already social process of production such that the

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equalization of the products of labour in exchange entails the equalization of the

independent labours exercised in their production. The independent labours are each
a fraction of the total social labour that creates the collection of commodities. But,
because the relation between labours appears to be established through that of their
products, it is ‘‘precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the
money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social
relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appears as
relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly’’ (Marx 1977,
pp. 168–9). Commodity fetishism consists in the systematic concealing of the social
relations of producers by the quantitative system of mensuration that represents and
regulates the relations between products. The social relations of producers thus
occur ‘‘behind their backs’’ and cannot be brought under conscious control. This
systematic absence of self-knowledge in social action is reproduced in an apologetic
scientific form in political economy, such that it produces a systematic lack in the
social representation of value.
Commodity fetishism thus is, in both social action and political economy, the
name for a necessary absence in the social representation of value due to the
hegemony of the system of quantitative mensuration in exchange.

4 The Problem of Value in Phenomenology

In the third step of my argument, I will suggest that Husserl’s analysis of the crisis
of modern science, when modified by the consequences of Klein’s account of
symbol-generating abstraction, and Marx’s critique of political economy, under-
stood as a critique of the reduction of general to restricted value, both aim
teleologically toward a phenomenological critique of the social representation of
value. In other words, formal axiology is the domain in which the convergence
between phenomenology and Marxism on the problem of the relationship of abstract
sign-systems to individual objects of value can be effectively addressed.
The term ‘‘axiology’’ refers to the perception of value in the things of the world
that underlies the disciplines of aesthetics, economics, and ethics.4 ‘‘We shall
employ the term ‘value’ as a philosophical equivalent of the goodness, the
excellence, the desirability and what not which we attribute to certain sorts of
objects, states, and situations: such value is very plainly correlated, and correlated in
principle, with attitudes that we call ‘valuations’’’ (Findlay 1970, p. 6). Such an
axiology is ‘‘formal’’ insofar as it does not justify specific judgments of value but
attends to the conditions for such perception of valuable noemata within the horizon
of the world.

4
The origin of the discipline of axiology is still debated. Most histories refer to Eduard von Hartmann,
Grundriss der Axiologie (1908), but Wilbur Urban in his Valuation: Its Nature and Laws (1909) both
claims to have constructed the term himself in two articles for The Philosophical Review in 1902 and also
refers to Christian Ehrenfels’ System der Werttheorie (1897). J. N. Findlay attributes the English term to
Urban as a translation of Werttheorie whose origins reached back to the Austrian economist von
Neumann and philosophers Ehrenfels and Meinong (Findlay 1970, p. 1).

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In Logical Investigations, Husserl described the experience of value-perception

with reference to the idea of a ‘‘good soldier.’’ He resolves the statement that ‘‘a
good soldier should be brave’’ into the idea that ‘‘only a brave soldier is a good
soldier,’’ which means that bravery is a value that inheres in the essence of being a
soldier as such (Husserl 1970b, p. 82). Concrete phenomenological description
suggests that it is not the case that things in the lifeworld are perceived as value-free
things to which values are then added ‘‘subjectively’’ as it were, as one might think
if one were to begin from the abstract sign-systems predominant in Galilean science
and political economy. Rather, the perception of a soldier, in its very soldier-ness,
involves a judgment of value—that a ‘‘good’’ soldier is brave, whereas a soldier who
runs away is a ‘‘bad’’ soldier. Goodness and badness are inherent to the essence of
soldiering, such that it is perfectly sensible to say of a soldier who runs away that he
or she is not a real soldier, because the ‘‘reality’’ or ‘‘essence’’ of soldiering
involves a value-laden practice. As Steven Crowell says, ‘‘the normative statement’s
validity depends upon a non-normative, purely theoretical, account of what a soldier
is (a functional definition)’’ (Crowell 2002, p. 49). The essential definition itself
contains a set of practical activities endorsing a value to which the object must
measure up. Husserl goes on to say that ‘‘the sum total of these basic norms plainly
forms a closed group, determined by our fundamental valuation,’’ such that a
normative sphere is characterized by a basic norm which is a standard through
which all valuation within that sphere is determined and which constitutes its
unifying principle (Husserl 1970b, p. 85). Pleasure functions as a basic norm, for
example, of a scientific hedonic or utilitarianism.
In the first period of Husserl’s ethical and axiological researches, he was
concerned to determine the order of rank of values within a hierarchy of presenting,
feeling and willing as a parallel to the problem of truth in epistemology (Husserl
1988, pp. 3–4). Winthrop Bell summarized this approach as ‘‘the realm of all that
which in any possibility ought-to-be is definitely characterized—it is the realm of
values. […] The formal laws yield a systematic discipline corresponding to formal
logic’’ (Bell 2012, p. 312; see Hart 1997b, pp. 193–4). A second period saw the
abatement of this hierarchy and a certain restriction of rationalism insofar as the
holding of a value by a person or community came to the fore (Donohoe 2004,
pp. 128–9). In Husserl’s later ethics, science itself becomes an ethical enterprise,
such that reason is always a striving for reason, and the ‘‘rationalization of
everything spiritual—according to norms, or according to normative, a priori
disciplines of reason, of logical, axiological and practical reason’’ has a ‘‘value-
creating significance’’ (Husserl 1981, p. 329). This introduces two significant
elements that mitigate Husserl’s earlier axiological rationalism.
The individual, in being an individual personality, has personal values that are
absolute. ‘‘[W]ith values that receive their personal meaning from the depths of the
person and from personal love, there can be no choice and no ‘quantitative’
differences, no differences of weight’’ (Husserl, manuscript B I 21, 53a quoted in
Melle 1991, p. 131). Such individual values derive from love—which one can attach
to the specific way of being an individual person—rather than from reason, since
reason as source would prescribe an identical set of values for each individual.
Husserl’s prime example of such individual value is the love of a mother for her

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child. In such an act of mother-love ‘‘I do not merely feel joy, but in so feeling posit
the act as good and valuable’’ (Crowell 2013, p. 270). While the child as person has
a value as a person among other persons, for the mother the child has an absolute
value and is in this sense not comparable to other persons. As Husserl comments,
‘‘my child is the ‘closest’ to me, and therein is contained an irrationality of the
absolute ‘ought’’’ (Husserl, manuscript A V 21, 119b quoted in Melle 1991, p. 134).
This irrationality, in the sense of rational unaccountability, characterizes the
distinctiveness of the person and both the form and the specific content of
attachment to others and things of the experienced lifeworld.
One expression of this unaccountability or absoluteness is the choice of an
individual vocation. One person may choose to be a teacher and another a social
worker or a scientist; there is no contradiction between these choices, since many
vocations are needed and a personal calling underwrites the choice—so that it is not
a choice that is mandated for everyone. Yet each of these values is absolute, such
that ‘‘there is no hierarchy of goods when absolute oughts conflict, precisely because
the oughts are absolute. Thus, one ought has to be sacrificed for another’’ (Donohoe
2004, p. 135). In such a situation there is no rational basis for choice.
An individual value is not simply a value in general, that is, under the tacit
condition that a greater value is not in question, a value whose practical
feasibility would absorb the lower value in question. Rather, an individual
value, a value which exclusively concerns the individuality of the person and
the individuality of what is valued, can by no means be absorbed, but only
sacrificed (Husserl, Manuscript E III 9, 33a quoted in Melle 1991, p. 132).
Precisely because there is no order of rank between personal values, ‘‘the
destruction of an absolute value remains a dis-value, it remains a burden on the
soul’’ Melle 1991, p. 132). One may say that in making such sacrifices the
individual becomes the individual person by settling the lived relation between
personal values.5
The relation of individual and community thus necessarily rules out a
straightforward identity, which would undermine the individuality of the individual.
Rather, it entails a conception in which the individual has a certain vocation that fits
into the whole in a certain fashion expressing that individuality (Drummond 2000,
pp. 40–1; Heinämaa 2014, p. 207; Donohoe 2004, p. 138). The whole is thus not a
5
Jan Patočka has developed Husserl’s concept of sacrifice in a direction that is problematic in the present
context. He argues that its mythico-religious origin shows that sacrifice is a binding of oneself to
something higher and therefore that the apparent loss is simultaneously, and more importantly, a gain,
such that the term ‘‘sacrifice’’ is in the end a misnomer. While it is true that the higher value is not created
by the person, it is nevertheless affirmed by the person in a significant manner that I have called
‘‘intensity.’’ Intensity involves the assertion that the value will have a place in the person’s lifeworld. It is
thus quite possible that the binding to a higher value comes at the cost of the life of the person—and
therefore also the other personal values of that person. If so, it would seem that Patočka’s revocation of
the term ‘‘sacrifice’’ is not warranted: the binding to a higher may also be a sacrifice of not only the lower
but of other higher values. I say this cautiously in light of Patočka’s own sacrifice, not to disagree with
him about the joy of binding to a higher value, but to say that, even so, sacrifice is not revoked because
what is lost would only be ‘‘lower.’’ This ‘‘lower’’ is the very condition for the assertion of ‘‘highness,’’
not only this higher but all other highers to which the person is open and whose intensity propagates
(Patočka 1989, p. 336).

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mere sum of individuals but a community of qualitatively different parts that

expresses a value-laden communal spirit—what Husserl called a ‘‘personality of a
higher order’’ and Marx the ‘‘social individual.’’ This, as Husserl noted, is because it
is a ‘‘personal world’’ in which objects of value have an ‘‘intersubjective use-value’’
where ‘‘subsequently it is further seen as a ‘commodity’ sold for that purpose’’
(Husserl 1989, pp. 197–8).
In the interest of brevity, let us summarize three characteristics of a Husserlian
description of the essence of value in which, as James Hart notes, ‘‘the ‘ought’ is not
disconnected from the ‘is’ […] on the other hand, the ‘ought’ is not simply derived
from and dependent on what actually is’’ (Hart 1997b, p. 217). A thing (noema) is
perceived as valuable (e.g., useful, beautiful, or worthy of respect) within one’s
practical attachments in the experienced lifeworld when it stands out as not only
itself but also a structuring force within such practical attachments. A judgment of
value operates within practical attachments as one of a plurality of values that, taken
as a whole, structure the relative natural worldview of a given group. Such values
are always for a person acting within the social group. It takes a person to perceive a
value, and to take that value personally, even though values are not created by
persons but inhere in things. In being for a person, though existent within a
community, a value takes on significance for both person and community through
an emotion. ‘‘The valuable properties of things, according to Husserl, are disclosed
by the emotions or feelings’’ (Drummond 1995, p. 170). The degree of personal
attachment may be measured by the willingness to sacrifice one value for another. In
short, there is a meaningful thing whose value is part of its essence, a purpose
situated within the structured order of values, and an emotional intensity determined
by the individual’s attachment as a personal value which locates both the value and
the person within the community’s structured order of values. A value has meaning,
purpose and emotional intensity. The meaning and quality of the value is in the
noema, whereas its intensity is noetic and registered through sacrifice. The same
value can be perceived as a value by different persons but its intensity varies
according to its role in the scale of personal values. It is this intensity that locates the
role of the person in the maintenance or construction of community.
Values are rooted in practical activities and given in immediate intuition with an
intensity experienced by a person. The willingness of that person to sacrifice
competing values registers that intensity socially. Such decisions register both the
irreducible irrationality—that is to say, non-universality or singularity—of that
intensity, and its rationality, by making it socially significant and open to universal
accounting. The social representation of value, through the ‘‘higher-level person-
ality,’’ or the ‘‘social individual,’’ of a social group, at which the rationalization of
such valuations given in intuition aim, is thus constituted by a non-homogenous
totality of values determined by the character of the social group. Valuations given
in this form are the ground for the concrete integration of individual and community
aimed at by both Husserl and Marx, in which the role of the individual is not to take
on the social form as such but to emphasize a certain aspect, from a certain
direction, based in a personal intensity.
A short comparison to Max Scheler’s social theory of value will serve to indicate
the ground of the convergence between Marx and Husserl on a critique of the social

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representation of value which is developed here. Scheler developed the Husserlian

intuition that ‘‘goods are, according to their essence, things of value’’ into the
concept of the ‘‘relative natural world-view,’’ whereby a social group takes a certain
view of the world to be the world as it is in itself: the world-view is taken to be
natural by the group, though the sociologist of knowledge can see that it is actually
relative to that group (Scheler 1973, p. 9). ‘‘To the relative natural world-view of a
group subject […] belongs whatever is generally ‘given’ to this group without
question and every object and content of meaning within the structural forms
‘given’ without specific spontaneous acts, a givenness which is universally held and
felt to be unneedy and incapable of justification’’ (Scheler 1980, p. 74). The
lifeworld of a given group is an organized but unquestioned structure of value-
perception. If we recall the previous interpretation of Marx, it is clear that in
capitalist society the relative natural worldview, or system of general value, is
reduced to being an unthematized aggregate of individual restricted values
registered as prices. Similarly, Husserl’s connection of values to an individual
person, such as is expressed in a vocation, disallows a simply non-conflictual overall
social system of value through the concept of ‘‘sacrifice.’’ Thus, Scheler’s
phenomenological description of a social value-system can pertain only to pre-
capitalist or non-capitalist social forms, while the issue within capitalism is how
such a value-system can be thematized at all to become the object of a social
representation of value.6

5 Conclusion: Institution of Reason in the Rationalization of Values

Phenomenological philosophy is the struggle for reason through a critique of

limited, one-sided reason that voids meaning and value within a historical crisis of
culture. I have argued that this struggle for reason can only be recovered in the
contemporary world through its teleology toward a rationalization of values.
Practical activities in the lifeworld generate valuations that are experienced with an
intensity through which they aim toward social representation. Marx showed that the
value-structure of capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and
imposes a homogeneous quantitative standard on the social representation of value.
The social representation of value in capitalist society thus intervenes in the
constitution of the community by individuals to reduce its relative natural
worldview, or system of general value, to the unthematized simple sum of
restricted values registered as prices. Such a rationalization of values, while it aims
at a community of shared general value, is reduced to the status of an unthematized
aggregate by the structure of capitalist society. The contradiction in our current
situation is that critique of one-sided reason aims at social representation of general
value while such representation is systematically reduced and blocked from rational
accounting.

6
It has been recognized by Phillip Blosser that the problem of human agency is a difficult one for
Scheler’s purely objective theory of value (Blosser 1997, pp. 163–4).

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The central element in the convergence between Husserl and Marx detailed here
is that, after Klein’s work, the inability to specify from a formal system to
individuals pertains to both Galilean science and political economy. The exchange-
value of a commodity can be specified only within a quantitative mensuration that
cannot reach its qualitative individuality (use-value). Similarly, Galilean science
cannot be specified to individuals but only taken up into formal relations. This
convergence thus pertains not only to the critique of reason (with which we began)
but also to the relationship between reason and its embodied, ontological ground.
Thus, it may be argued that the convergence through the social representation of
value underlies and explains those on reason and ontology mentioned in the
introduction. The current presentation is thus a groundwork for taking up the
relation between phenomenology and Marxism in a new manner focused on the
problem of value.7

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