As An "object" Value

In the 19th century, a current of relativism permeated the thoughts and the values and meanings of life were generally lost. Such crisis stimulated Meinong to reconstruct the metaphysics by taking experiences as a way leading to transcendence. Hereon he encountered a challenge:as the emprical individual beings, how can people acquire the transcendental knowledge, which was most accurate and could provide meanings and values for the real life?In order to solve this problem, Meinong modified the principles of traditional Empiricism according to Brentano's "intentionality", and established his own content-object-intentionality, which could not only explain how we grasp the objects with evidence but also help us to be free from prejudice in favour of the existent things. So a series of objects are returned to Philosophy. These objects, e.g values, are ignored by people because of its nonexistence. In theory of presentation, values were treated by Meinong as the correct object of philosophical research.Meinong's theory of objects was founded on content-object-intentionality. Our experiences are different in act, and every experience can act as "content" to make the other-presentation, through which various objects are presented to us. Ideas present objecta; judgements present objectives; feelings present values; desires present obligations.Some objects have to depend on things of lower order, but cannot be reducible to the latter. Objectives, values and obligations are such objects, they are objects of higher order. With the discovery of objects of higher order, Meinong established a prior relationship among objects and made it a transcendental structure of the experiential world and the law of psychology. Values are the most important element of this structure, they bridge people's cognition and action and bring us a good future.Meinong discussed in detail how the values are presented, grasped and actualized, and hence formed his unique theory of values. According to him, values are presented through feelings, but we have to depend on judgements to grasp a prior relation between values and their presuppositional objects. The judgements of values we make in the feelings with evidence are transcendental judgements, which can be acquired either by intuition or by induction and surmise. The latter means is more popular in ordinary judgements of values. According to whether the values come into our minds and into whose minds they come, values are divided by Meinong into various kinds.With this division, people can not only tell the subtle differences between judgements of values but also make moral judgements. Once the values are comprehended, people will dsire to realize them by creating valuable things. When people desire and pursue someone else's good, or deal with altruistic values when they pursue self-interests, their conducts bear moral values. Thus the values can break out of the horizon of pure objects and enter into the ethical order, becoming the guide in the real lives and actions.