Values and Imperatives, Alain Locke… An Excerpt

“We must realize more fully that values create imperatives as well as the more formally superior - imposed absolutes, and that norms control our behaviors as well as guide our reasoning. 

The common man, in both his individual and group behavior, perpetuates the problem in a very practical way. He sets up personal and private group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypostasizes them as universals for all conditions, all times and all men. 

Whether on the plane of reason or that of action, whether “above the battle” in the conflict of “isms” and the “bloodless” ballet of ideas” or in the battle of partisans with their conflicting and irreconcilable ways of life, the same essential strife goes on in the name of eternal ends and deified ultimates

Such the translvaluations of value as from time to time we have, lead neither to a truce of values nor to an effective devaluation; they merely resolve one dilemma and sets up another one. 

And som the conflict of irreconcilables foes on as the divisive and competitive forces of our practical parallel the incompatibilities of our formal absolutes. 

We cannot declare for value-anarchism as a wishful way out, or find a solution on that other alternative line alley of a mere descriptive analysis of interests. That but postpones the vital problems of ends till the logically later consideration of of evaluation and post-valuational rationalizations. 

To my thinking, the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and actin of intolerance and mass coercion. 

This calls for a functional analysis of value norms and a search for normative principle in the immediate context of valuation. 

Alain Leroy Locke 

Reflection: An Anthology of African - American Philosophy