b/ The Superficial Diagnosis Made by the Doxa

a) First Judgment of the Doxa: Our Era Is Defined by a Relativism of Values

To understand our era, we must begin with a certain 'doxa'—a body of received opinion—in tune with the times and particularly prevalent in academic circles. It can occasionally be instructive to draw on personal experience, even if this cannot serve as a basis for generalisations.

During student discussions, when I merely raised the possibility—without asserting the reality—of a science of values, the response was unanimously dismissive. One distinguished professor remarked, 'In this day and age, it makes no sense to attempt to create a science of values.' According to him, the idea of objective values, or of finding an answer to the problem of values, belonged to Descartes' era. Such a project could only have flourished in the Classical period; my idea, he said, was like a weed growing in unsuitable soil.

Paradoxically, this reaction contributes usefully to our reflection rather than stifling it. It points to a particular tendency of the post-modern age. Can we suggest, then, that post-modernism is characterised by the abandonment of the question—or even the very concept—of objective values?
For certain philosophers and sociologists, Mannheim among them, this is self-evident: Today there are too many points of view of equal value and prestige, each demonstrating the relativity of the other, to allow us to adopt a single position and consider it unassailable and absolute ¹.

The collective work The Future of Values examines the axiological profile of our time directly, taking it as given that values lack any foundational basis:
The suspicion that values are historically and culturally relative, along with various demystifying efforts that reduce them to ideological cloaks masking mechanisms of power, has shaken philosophical, religious, and artistic faith in the absolutes of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
This profound crisis of values, which has greatly influenced the last two centuries, has brought about significant uncertainties. Does the absence of a transcendent foundation, one that would allow us to anchor eternal values in an unchanging sky or receive them through an undeniable revelation, signify the twilight of values? ².

What awaits us, we are told, is not the discovery of this missing foundation, but something altogether different: In a world marked by the global convergence of cultures, should we expect fierce antagonisms, possibly violent clashes between conflicting values? Or might we witness unforeseen and innovative hybridisations between value systems whose origins and orientations currently appear mutually alien? The future lies not in foundations but in hybridisation—yet how can one bloom be grafted onto another if neither has roots?

The author, J. Bindé, observes that without a foundation, values are reduced to mere matters of fashion: Thus, the phenomenon of fashion—which has until now pertained only to realms governed by arbitrariness and convention, such as clothing—is now permeating our entire conception of values. We live in an age of ephemerality, accelerated obsolescence, and subjective whims, as if the most sacred values, now rootless, could float on the securities market and drift away. [...] How, within this all-encompassing climate favouring the frivolity of values, can we still contemplate their gravity? ³ Clearly, even the possibility of rediscovering a foundation is not on the table.

1. Ideology and Utopia, I, VI
2. The Future of Values, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford, 2004, p.14
3. Ibid, p.15-16