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Max Scheler
Continental Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Max Scheler
Birth August 22, 1874
Death May 19, 1928
School/tradition Phenomenology
Main interests History of ideas, Value theory, Ethics, Philosophical anthropology, Consciousness studies, Cultural criticism, Sociology, Religion
Notable ideas value rankings, emotional intuition, value-based ethics, ressentiment
Influenced by
Influenced

Max Scheler (August 22, 1874, Munich – May 19, 1928, Frankfurt am Main) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology.

Scheler developed further the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and was called by José Ortega y Gasset "the first man of the philosophical paradise." After his demise in 1928, Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such."1 In 1954. Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, defended his doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler."

Contents

Biography

From Munich to Cologne (1874-1919)

Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, August 22, 1874, to a Lutheran father and an Orthodox Jewish mother. As an adolescent, he turned to Catholicism, likely because of its conception of love, although he became increasingly non-committal around 1921.

Scheler studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, both philosophy and sociology under Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel in 1895. He received his doctorate in 1897 and his associate professorship (habilitation thesis) in 1899 at the University of Jena, where his advisor was Rudolf Eucken, and where he became Privatdozent in 1901. Throughout his life, Scheler entertained a strong interest in the philosophy of American pragmatism (Eucken corresponded with William James).

He taught at Jena from 1900 to 1906. From 1907 to 1910, he taught at the University of Munich, where his study of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology deepened. Scheler had first met Husserl at the Halle in 1902. At Munich, Husserl's own teacher Franz Brentano was still lecturing, and Scheler joined the Phenomenological Circle in Munich, centred around M. Beck, Th. Conrad, J. Daubert, M. Geiger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Theodor Lipps, and A. Pfaender. Scheler was never a student of Husserl's and overall, their relationship remained strained. Scheler, in later years, was rather critical of the "master's" Logical Investigations (1900/01) and Ideas I (1913), and he also was to harbour reservations about Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. Due to personal matters he was caught up in the conflict between the predominantly Catholic university and the local socialist media, which led to the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910. From 1910 to 1911, Scheler briefly lectured at the Philosophical Society of Goettingen, where he made and renewed acquaintances with Theodore Conrad, H. Conrad-Martius, Moritz Geiger, J. Hering, Roman Ingarden, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Husserl, Alexandre Koyre, and H. Reinach. Edith Stein was one of his students, impressed by him "way beyond philosophy".citation needed. Thereafter, he moved to Berlin as an unattached writer and grew close to Walther Rathenau and Werner Sombart.

Scheler has exercised a notable influence on Catholic circles to this day, including his student Stein and Pope John Paul II who wrote his Habilitation and many articles on Scheler's philosophy. Along with other Munich phenomenologists such as Reinach, Pfänder and Geiger, he co-founded in 1912 the famous Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, with Husserl as main editor.

While his first marriage had ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwängler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. During World War I (1914-1918), Scheler was initially drafted but later discharged because of astigmia of the eyes. He was passionately devoted to the defence of both war and Germany's cause during the conflict. His conversion to Catholicism dates to this period.

In 1919, he became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne. He stayed there until 1928. Early that year, he accepted a new position at the University of Frankfurt. He looked forward to meeting here Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Rudolph Otto and R. Wilhelm, sometimes referred to in his writings. In 1927 at a conference in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, arranged by Hermann Keyserling, Scheler delivered a lengthy lecture, entitled 'Man's Particular Place' (Die Sonderstellung des Menschen), published later in much abbreviated form as Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [literally: 'Man's Position in the Cosmos']. His well known oratorical style and delivery captivated his audience for about four hours.

Later life (1920-1928)

Toward the end of his life, many invitations were extended to him, among them those from China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. However, on the advice of his physician, he had to cancel reservations already made with Star Line.

At the time, Scheler increasingly focused on political development. He met the Russian emigrant-philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev in Berlin in 1923. Scheler was the only scholar of rank of the then German intelligentsia who gave warning in public speeches delivered as early as 1927 of the dangers of the growing Nazi movement and Marxism. 'Politics and Morals', 'The Idea of Eternal Peace and Pacifism' were subjects of talks he delivered in Berlin in 1927. His analyses of capitalism revealed it to be a calculating, globally growing 'mind-set', rather than an economic system. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism (cf. Max Weber), its very mind-set, however, is argued by Scheler to have had its origin in modern, subconscious angst as expressed in increasing needs for financial and other securities, for protection and personal safeguards as well as for rational manageability of all entities. However, the subordination of the value of the individual person to this mind-set was sufficient reason for Max Scheler to denounce it and to outline and predict a whole new era of culture and values, which he called 'The World-Era of Adjustment'.

Scheler also advocated an international university to be set up in Switzerland and was at that time supportive of programs such as 'continuing education' and of what he seems to have been the first to call a 'United States of Europe'. He deplored the gap existing in Germany between power and mind, a gap which he regarded as the very source of an impending dictatorship and the greatest obstacle to the establishment of German democracy. Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945) suppressed Scheler's work.

Philosophical Contributions

Scheler's Phenomenological Attitude

When the editors of Geisteswissenschaften invited Scheler, about 1913/14, to write on the then developing philosophical method of phenomenology, Scheler indicated a reservation concerning the task which was the fact that he could only report his own viewpoint on phenomenology and that there was no "phenomenological school" defined by universally accepted theses. There was only a circle of philosophers bound by a "common bearing and attitude toward philosophical problems."2 Scheler never agreed with Husserl that Phenomenology is a method in the strict sense, but rather "an attitude of spiritual seeing...something which otherwise remains hidden...."3 Calling phenomenology a method fails to take seriously the phenomenological domain of original experience: the givenness of phenomenological facts (essences or values) "before they have been fixed by logic,"4 and prior to assuming a set of criteria, as is the case in the empirical and human sciences as well as other (modern) philosophies which tailor their methods to the methods of these sciences.

Rather, that which is given in phenomenology "is given only in the seeing and experiencing act itself." For example, the essence of love is never given to an 'outside' observer with no direct contact of the phenomena, but only in the experience of loving. Phenomenology is an engagement of phenomena, while simultaneously a waiting for its self-givenness. Phenomenology is not a methodical procedure of observation as if the its object is stationary

Material Value-Ethics

A fundamental aspect of Scheler's phenomenology is the extension of the realm of the a priori to include not only formal propositions, but material ones as well. Kant's identification of the a priori with the formal was a "fundamental error" which is the basis of his ethical formalism. Furthermore, Kant erroneously identified the realm of the non-formal (material) with sensible or empirical content. The heart of Scheler's criticism of Kant is within his theory of values. Values are given a priori, and are "feelable" phenomena. The intentional feeling of love discloses values insofar as love opens a person evermore to beings-of-value (Wertsein).

Additionally, values are not formal realities; they do not exist somewhere apart from the world and their bearers, and they only exist with a value-bearer, as a value-being. They are, therefore, part of the realm of a material a priori. Nevertheless, values can vary with respect to their bearers without there ever occurring an alteration in the object as bearer. E.g., the value of a specific work of art or specific religious articles may vary according to differences of culture and religion. However, this variation of values with respect to their bearers by no means amounts to the relativity of values as such, but only with respect to the particular value-bearer. As such, the values of culture are always spiritual irrespective of the objects that may bear this value, and values of the holy still remain the highest values regardless of their bearers. According to Scheler, the disclosure of the value-being of an object precedes representation. The axiological reality of values is given prior to knowing, but, upon being felt through value-feeling, can be known (as to their essential interconnections). Values and their corresponding disvalues are ranked according to their essential interconnections as follows:

  1. Values of the holy vs. disvalues of the unholy
  2. Values of the spirit (truth, beauty, vs. disvalues of their opposites)
  3. Values of life and the noble vs. disvalues of the vulgar
  4. Values of the agreeable vs. disvalues of the disagreeable
  5. Values of utility vs. disvalues of uselessness.

Further essential interconnections apply with respect to a value's (disvalue's) existence or non-existence:

  1. The existence of a positive value is itself a positive value.
  2. The existence of a negative value (disvalue) is itself a negative value.
  3. The non-existence of a positive value is itself a negative value.
  4. The non-existence of a negative value is itself a positive value.5

And with respect to values of good and evil:

  1. Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing.
  2. Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing.
  3. Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher value in the sphere of willing.
  4. Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower value [at the expense of a higher one] in the sphere of willing.6

Goodness, however, is not simply "attached" to an act of willing, but originates ultimately within the disposition (Gesinnung) or "basic moral tenor" of the acting person. Accordingly:

  1. The criterion of 'good' in this sphere consists in the agreement of a value intended, in the realization, with the value preferred, or in its disagreement, in the realization, with the value rejected.
  2. The criterion of 'evil' in this sphere consists in the disagreement of a value intended, in the realization, of a value preferred, or in its agreement, in the realization, with the value rejected.7

One may note that most of the older ethical systems (Kantian formalism, theonomic ethics, nietzscheanism, hedonism, consequentialism, and platonism, for example) fall into axiological error by emphasizing one value-rank to the exclusion of the others. A novel aspect of Scheler's ethics is the importance of the "kairos" or call of the hour. Moral rules cannot guide the person to make ethical choices in difficult, existential life-choices.

A disorder "of the heart" occurs whenever a person prefers a value of a lower rank to a higher rank, or a disvalue to a value.

The term Wertsein or value-being is used by Scheler in many contexts, but his untimely death prevented him from working out an axiological ontology. Another unique and controversial element of Scheler's axiology is the notion of the emotive a priori: values can only be felt, just as color can only be seen. Reason cannot think values; the mind can only order categories of value after lived experience has happened. For Scheler, the person is the locus of value-experience, a timeless act-being that acts into time. Scheler's appropriation of a value-based metaphysics renders his phenomenology quite different from the phenomenology of consciousness (Husserl, Sartre) or the existential analysis of the being-in-the-world of Dasein (Heidegger). Scheler's concept of the "lived body" was appropriated in the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Max Scheler extended the phenomenological method to include a reduction of the scientific method too, thus questioning the idea of Husserl that phenomenological philosophy should be pursued as a rigorous science. Natural and scientific attitudes (Einstellung) are both phenomenologically counterpositive and hence must be sublated in the advancement of the real phenomenological reduction which, in the eyes of Scheler, has more the shapes of an allround ascesis (Askese) rather than a mere logical procedure of suspending the existential judgments. The Wesenschau, according to Scheler, is an act of blowing up the Sosein limits of Sein A into the essential-ontological domain of Sein B, in short, an ontological participation of Sosenheiten, seeing the things as such (cf. the Buddhist concept of tathata, and the Christian theological quidditas).

Major works (English translations)

  • (1958) Philosophical Perspectives, translated by Oscar Haac, Boston: Beacon Press.  144 pages. (German title: Philosophische Weltanschauung.)
  • (1961) Man's Place in Nature, translated by Hans Meyerhoff, New York: The Noonday Press.  105 pages. SBN 374-5-0252-8.
  • (1973) Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism, translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.  620 pages. ISBN 0-8101-0415-6. (Original German edition: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913-16.)
  • (1987) Person and Self-value: three essays, edited and partially translated by Manfred S. Frings, Boston: Nijhoff.  201 pages. ISBN 90-247-3380-4.

Secondary references

  • Frings, Manfred S. (1965). Max Scheler: A concise introduction to the world of a great thinker. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press.  223 pages.
  • Frings, Manfred S. (1969). Person und Dasein: Zur Frage der Ontologie des Wertseins. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.  118 pages.
  • Frings, Manfred S., editor (1974). Max Scheler (1874-1928): centennial essays. The Hague: Nijhoff.  176 pages.
  • Kelly, Eugene (1997). Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler. Boston: Kluwer.  247 pages. ISBN 0-7923-4492-8.
  • Nota, John H., S.J. (1983). Max Scheler: The Man and His Work, translated by Theodore Plantinga and John H. Nota., Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press.  213 pages. ISBN 0-8199-0852-5. (Original Dutch title: Max Scheler: De man en zijn werk)
  • Ranly, Ernest W. (1966). Scheler's Phenomenology of Community. The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff.  130 pages.
  • Staude, John Raphael (1967). Max Scheler: An intellectural portrait. New York: The Free Press.  298 pages.

References

  1. ^ Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, “In memoriam Max Scheler,” trans. Michael Heim (Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 50-52.
  2. ^ Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, "Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition," trans. David Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 137.
  3. ^ Ibid.
  4. ^ Ibid.
  5. ^ Der Formalismus in der Ethik (GW II), 48
  6. ^ Der Formalismus in der Ethik (GW II), 49
  7. ^ Der Formalismus in der Ethik (GW II), 49

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