In the course of this second book, we have therefore examined a number of inessential aspects of axiology: how such a project would fit into our times, the reconfiguration of knowledge that would ensue, its practical or theoretical nature, and so on.
These characteristics are inessential, because it would be conceivable that the content of axiology could be unfolded even if these questions were not answered.
The essential character of a discipline is probably its method. As Descartes said, It were far better never to think of investigating truth at all, than to do so without a method ¹. In fact, all the results that a discipline can lead to, as well as the procedures that will be used to achieve them, derive and flow from the method used.
It is to the development of this method and the outline of the results to which it could lead that I would now like to devote our third moment of reflection.

Book III/ A method for axiology

I/ Where to find the value of things?

A/ In the object?

When we look for the value of things, the most natural reflex is probably to look for it in the things themselves. I call this reflex ‘axiological objectivism’. Value scrutinised in the thing itself, at the heart of it, questioned in various ways, by various methods; it is by studying the world itself that we will discover its value.

The failure of this attitude seems obvious to us, if we accept that values are in fact still unfounded. We have already examined some of the latent methods, not explicitly thematised, that objectivism was able to use: the qualitative method, hedonism, etc., but we still have to examine the two methods that were favoured by objectivism and conceptualised: intuitionism and the projects for a formal axiology.

1/ Axiological intuitionism

1/ Presentation of value intuitionism

It is perhaps inappropriate to describe intuitionism as a 'method'. A method, in fact, is characterised as a set of procedures, a set of "tricks" that we use in order to reach a truth that we cannot immediately grasp. A method sets out the rules by the mediation of which a goal is to be achieved. What axiological intuitionism maintains is precisely that there is no need to have recourse to the mediation of such and such rules in order to grasp the value of a thing, since this value immediately presents itself to us.

Furthermore, a method is given as a set of rules for arriving at the solution to a problem. For intuitionism, on the other hand, the problem of values does not arise. It does not mean that for intuitionism the solution to the problem of values is self-evident, but more radically that there is no problem of values. The value of this or that thing is immediately apparent to us, without our even needing to question it. Everyone knows perfectly well what has value and what does not, because a faculty within us, intuition, reveals it to us immediately.

Those who ask themselves the problem of values then appear like the philosophers who have first raised a dust, and then […] complain that [they] can’t see, as Berkeley says in his Principles of Human Knowledge. In other words: philosophical reflection has not led to discover a problem, the problem of values, but to create from scratch an artificial problem where there are only solutions, or rather - since a solution presupposes a prior problem – only facts.

1. Rules for the direction of mind, IV