Claim. Modern Western axiology — from Descartes and Kant through Bentham, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Windelband, analytical philosophy, pragmatism, and Communism — represents a continuous succession of failed attempts to recover the absolute values that Greek philosophy and Christianity once provided.
Elaboration. Lee constructs a sweeping narrative arc (E. Necessity for a New View of Value). Socrates and Plato established absolute values through the pursuit of true knowledge; their system collapsed with the Greek city-state. Christianity then established absolute values centered on agape; that system ruled medieval society and collapsed with medieval society. Modern attempts:
- Descartes and Kant centered values on reason (like the Greeks), but their God-concept was ambiguous, so their values fell short of absolute.
- Pascal and Kierkegaard tried to revive true Christian values via heart and faith, but did not build a firm system.
- The Neo-Kantian school (Windelband) made value central to philosophy but severed it completely from natural science — producing the modern fact/value split that, Lee argues, lets scientists develop weapons of mass destruction, environmental destruction, and pollution while ignoring values.
- Utilitarianism (Bentham) is a Hyungsang view of value tied to the Industrial Revolution; pragmatism (Dewey) bases value on usefulness and is a relative pluralism. Both relativize value completely.
- Analytical philosophy sought to exclude axiology from philosophy: value is intuited only, value-judgments are mere feeling-expressions, axiology is just analysis of value-language.
- Nietzsche is an anti-value philosophy attacking Christianity as slave morality, replacing it with will-to-power.
- Communism is also anti-value, denying religious values as bourgeois and grounding value in proletarian utility.
The diagnosis sets up Unification Axiology as the needed synthesis: it must overcome materialism, guide science, and reunite value with fact. The argument’s structural payoff is that it places UT not as one more contender but as the resolution of a centuries-long problem. The narrative’s vulnerability is its compression — major figures get one-paragraph dispatch — but the structural claim about the modern fact/value split (which Lee resolves via the Sungsang/Hyungsang correspondence in section VII.B) is genuinely substantive (D. Modern Views of Value).
See also. collapse-of-traditional-values-four-causes, christianity-cannot-answer-atheism-and-communism, absolute-standard-from-gods-love-and-truth