Throughout this second book, we have explored several non-essential aspects of axiology: how such a project might accord with our era, the reconfiguration of knowledge it would entail, whether it is practical or theoretical in nature, and so forth.
These aspects are non-essential in the sense that the content of axiology could conceivably be developed without addressing them.
The essential character of a discipline likely lies in its method. As Descartes stated, It were far better never to think of investigating truth at all, than to do so without a method ¹. All the results a discipline can achieve, along with the procedures used to reach them, flow from the method employed.
I will now devote our third stage of reflection to developing this method and outlining the results it may yield.

Book III/ A Method for Axiology

I/ Where to Find the Value of Things?

A/ In the Object?

When we seek the value of things, our most instinctive response is to look for it within the things themselves. I refer to this instinct as 'axiological objectivism'. Value is scrutinised within the object itself, at its core, through various methods; by observing the world directly, we assume we will uncover its value.

The failure of this approach seems clear if we accept that values remain unfounded. We have already examined some of the latent, unthematised methods that objectivism employed, such as the qualitative method and hedonism; we must now turn to the two methods that objectivism both favoured and explicitly theorised: intuitionism and formal axiology.

1/ Axiological Intuitionism

1/ Presentation of Value Intuitionism

It may be somewhat inaccurate to describe intuitionism as a 'method'. A method is typically characterised by a set of procedures—a collection of 'techniques'—employed to reach a truth that is not immediately accessible. It lays down the rules through which a given goal is to be achieved. Axiological intuitionism, however, holds that no mediating rules are needed to grasp the value of a thing, since this value presents itself to us directly.

Furthermore, a method presupposes a problem to be solved. For intuitionism, however, the problem of values does not even arise. This does not imply that, for intuitionism, the solution to the problem of values is self-evident; rather, it suggests that there is no problem of values at all. The value of any given thing is immediately apparent to us, requiring no further inquiry. Everyone instinctively knows what holds value and what does not, since intuition—a faculty within us—reveals it directly.

Those who raise the question of values are likened to philosophers who, as Berkeley says in his Principles of Human Knowledge, have first raised a dust, and then […] complain that [they] can't see. In other words, philosophical reflection has not uncovered a genuine problem—namely, the problem of values—but has instead conjured an artificial one from scratch, where there are only solutions or, rather—since a solution presupposes a problem—only facts.

1. Rules for the direction of mind, IV