What Is Revaluing Values?

All talk of ethics these days seems to me tangled to the point of stasis. There may be schools of ethics but if there are they are hardly in the public realm. I hear the name of Rawls dropped here and there and I was at Union Seminary when Reinhold Niebuhr was there. Since then no major ethics figure has emerged from religious climes that I know of  and our public intellectuals such as they are appear to inhabit various sides of various issues, hardly a platform for the advancement of ethical principles.

If I think backward and come to Kierkegaard I note that he relegated ethics and aesthetics to a place less important than religion in his thinking. I am not aware that Nietzsche propounded an ethic though he did what seems to me the fundamental work needed to make such a project possible. If I go backward further I find ethics to be a province of philosophy with radically different positions depending on who is philosophizing.

These days I am partial to what I can understand in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. I am not trying to be humble, merely indicating that, unlike Peirce, I have no facility in mathematics or the sciences. If I have any claim it rests in  being a person who, in Tillich's term, has an ultimate concern which could be called a quest for a universal ethic.

Universalism has been the underpinnning of my thinking and the consistent principle underlying my own conclusions. The ethic which I would advance is based on the theory (assumption) that it is in the very nature of reality and of human beings to live in an immanent frame where values - the term "willed values" is in my understanding is an oxymoron - are the engine of history.  Human beings by their choices individually and severally determine the course of events. Insofar as ethics has any reality it refers not to a choice of what is right or wrong but to the values whose espousal makes a life vibrant, beautiful, admirable. I think that in this I am not far from Peirce. Nor, for that matter, from Jesus and a number of others who have been movers of history because they held and practiced the most admirable of values.
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The task of ethics is to determine  the values which, acting in harmony, constitute a sort of human summum bonum. My candidates are non-idolatry as the root value and democracy, tolerance and helpfulness as active and dynamic values within the immanent frame.

I believe that one reason why ethics has been left off in the mist is that it is often confused with virtues - like those enunciated by Aristotle. The problem with virtues is that they may or may not be inherently admirable and good. The values I have advanced are progressive. They make for development, for progress. They resonate with continuity and evolution.

With this preamble, revaluing values can be understood as an argument such as the one I make here, Had Nietzsche been a proponent of these values, he might have achieved the revaluation of values which he properly urged on the West.  We will never know.

As we move forward in this crucial century, I believe that the validity of the four values I advance here and elsewhere will be proved out. I held these long before the advent of today's democratic movements. But I believe their resonance is merely proof of the theory underlying the project. We are those who live by willed values. Self-realization is the willing of ontological or realistic or truthful or beautiful values.