The Unity of Fact and Value

Attempting to describe what is distinctively human through the analysis of mind, philosophy has concluded that it cannot be characterized as a "machine" with a "ghost" built into it. It has no part whatever which, when the whole machinery is set lo motion, is lo start working according to own laws and regular-ities.^{8 9} In its existence, the human being is a whole having its imprint on each and every segment and moment of its existence.

This is what Marx meant too when stating that both social nature and historical character were inherent in humankind.

This is also established in psychology: pure perception is nothing else but mere theoretical abstraction. What will come to mind as perception is already evaluated at some level, i.e.

LUKACS (1971) II, p. 218.

LUKACS (1971) II, p. 189; I, pp. 388 and 390; II, p. 98.

Cf. RYLE (1949).

processed through the psychological structure individually charac-teristic of our personality. Gestalt psychology discovered several decades ago that fields of perception showed qualities that could not be determined by single sensory stimuli, but expressed attributes of more or less extended areas (of space or t i m e ) .^{9 0} Upon this recognition, a totality concept was methodologically defined some decades ago, proposing not only that parts were at any given instance determined by the whole and that, accordingly, investigation had at any time to depart from this whole, but also that parts could not even in themselves be neutral static components, either, as it was just their configuration in one structured orga-nization that at any time made up the whole.^{9 1} In consequence, no intellectual construction reduced to elements can be turned into someting meaningful. For even in an elementary situation (with elementary conditions in an elementary isolation, etc.), human response always embodies a relative unity.

Human attachment to events and matters is necessarily discrete:

we appropriate what we encounter as mediated by our psychological reactions from the start, and not directly in their own materiality.

Of course, this builds into our perception processes an abstractive-transformative filter from the start, which makes fact and value seen as a unity. "Even, however, when the 'facts' in question are not infused with empirically intractable value-elements, they still represent patterns more or less severely abstracted from any concrete events."^{9 2} Strictly speaking, patterns referred to are by far not pure facts any longer; they are fact-value complexes. As a matter of fact they are the only factors that really exist in our human world.^{9 3}

The fact-value complex in itself is, however, not a subject of communication. Once we name or communicate on an event by

y u Cf., e.g., WERTHEIMER (1959).

9 1 Cf. STROMBACH (1983), p. 68.

9 2 STONE (1966), p. 738.

9 3 Cf. STONE (1964), ch. 7.

asserting it as a fact, it will also be filtered through linguistic mediation. And as known, language preconditions and expresses, while creating and reproducing, a given form of life.'⁴ This is so because of the ontological fact of social embeddedness (that is, at the same time being conditioned and conditioning),'⁵ and also by virtue of the particular features and instrumental defini-tion of the given medium. Language is able to communicate by making ideas "speakable" as " 'projected' into discursive form".^{9 6} Its semantics and syntax are equally built on "a linear, discrete, successive order" structure.^{9 7} In other words, both the elements of linguistic expression and its complex structures are built on an endless series of operations establishing relations (analogies and distinctions), which are from the start to wedge an evaluative moment into the fact-value complex in respect to the particula-rity of the linguistic medium too. It has two aspects. As already seen, any transformation into linguistic expression is in itself a kind of institutionalization which assumes evaluation. At the same time, the understanding of what has been linguistically communicated also preconditions transformation, i.e., further evaluation. Since communication is only conceivable through generalizing classification,^{9 8} it is justifiable lo say that "every word is to some extent a word of degree",^{9 9} made and interpreted via non-equivalent transformation. And what is not equivalent is constitutive.

That is to say that the road from individual perception through generalizing linguistic expression to a concretizing interpretation as reflected in a given situation displays the same dialectic of the individual and the general that has been used to describe

law-E.g. WITTGENSTEIN (1945).

LUKACS (1971) II, cf. VARGA (1985).

LANGER (1942), p. 93.

Ibidem, p. 80.

LUKACS (1971) II, p. 195.

WILLIAMS (1976), p. 535.

making as projecting the general and judicial application of the law conceived of as its individuation.^{1 0 0}

The statement according to which "even indisputable facts need interpretation'"^{0 1} seems to be corroborated. "It is commonly known that the facts of a case are not 'brute' facts, but interpreted facts.'"^{0 2} What are called facts are at the same time evaluation as well. In another formulation, the social nature of facts is also mediated by the evaluations inherent in the fact-value complex. Or, as one of the classics of American legal realism said, "to one brought up in [a given culture], varying emphasis, tacit assump-tions, unwritten practices, a thousand influences gained only from life, may give to the different parts wholly new values that logic and grammar never could have got from the books".^{1 0 3}

Fact and value are, in consequence, co-related to one another.

They themselves are analytical concepts; they can only be stated in unity. Their complex stands for the understanding that fact is only conceivable as evaluated and, evaluation, as being attached to fact.

As parts of a totality,^{1 0 4} they gain meaning from the whole. Both their existence and their meaning can only evolve in the process of a ceaseless interaction between these two components. In con-sequence, (1) the whole construction breaks down if any of its components is extracted therefrom; (2) the whole construction becomes re-posited if any of its components is re-posited; (3) the whole construction gels modified if any of its components is modified.

I U U E.g. PESCHKA (1965), ch. 3. For a theoretical criticism, see VARGA

(1981a) and VARGA (1981b).

I 0' AARNIO (1977), p. 70.

1 0 2 KLAM1 (1980), pp. 69 and 73.

1 0 3 Justice Holmes in Diaz v. Gonzales, 261 U.S. 102 (1923), 67 L. Ed. 550,

552 as quoted by KENDAL (1980), p. 6 1 .

1 0 4 Cf. NERHOT (1988), p. 20.