Value in Modernity

Abstract

This book identifies a historical paradigm in ethics that has been largely ignored in more recent philosophy. The author calls this paradigm existential modernism and discusses its central claims through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, he offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. Scheler’s subtle phenomenological version of affective value intuitionism is a crucial influence on Sartre’s existentialism, but has so far enjoyed virtually no reception in an anglophone context at all. In the case of Musil, while his thought on emotions and moods in The Man without Qualities has begun to receive some philosophical recognition in recent years, the significance of the philosophical core of this seminal work has so far also not been fully appreciated. In this new interpretation, what we find in the existential modernists is an approach in ethical philosophy that combines a qualified form of affective value intuitionism and a kind of ethical perfectionism. A version of this approach that has much to recommend it is reconstructed.