Henryk Elzenberg, an influential Polish philosopher active at the Vilnius University before WW II and at the Torun University after the war, believed that values can neither be emotionally adopted, socially negotiated, established by a religious or philosophical theory nor rationally defended. They can only be discovered through moral or axiological intuition. Moral intuition reveals the true nature of value and its pronouncements can withstand all attacks from epistemological scepticism. Some people lack intuitions about value and will be lost without guidance from those who have them. But even the staunch epistemological sceptics sometimes make sound moral discoveries, are ready to act on them and find them reliable despite their disparaging philosophical opinions. It is interesting that starting from these opinions Elzenbereg not only rejected prudential and utilitarian ethics but also found ethics of virtue dry, dull and strained. He put his trust in poets and artists as he thought that their recognition of values was most credible. It is remarkable that he was the mentor of the distinguished poet, Zbigniew Herbert.
Interpersonal communication is a complicated process. Jürgen Habermas’s seminal Theory of communicative action provoked a great deal of discussion concerning social communication. Studies on social communication enable us to understand information exchange and the processes of reaching agreement or compromise. The results of that research bear on the problem of communicating values, which is the subject matter of the present article. A thorough description of the process and its conditioning factors is impossible without precisely enumerating the values in question and clarifying their ontological status. In order to discuss these issues and to get some research perspective, Polish phenomenological axiology will be referred to.
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