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Max Scheler
A Synopsis of his Thought
Professor Manfred S. Frings
Prof. Manfred S. Frings is the acknowledged
expert and leading Max Scheler scholar. Visit
his excellent website at: http://www.maxscheler.com/Scheler1.htm
Synopsis of his Thought
It is customary to divide Max Scheler's philosophy
into two periods of development. The first
period spans the time between his dissertation
(1897) up to his work On the Eternal in Man (1920/22). Most of this period is covered
in volumes 1 through 7 of the Collected Works. The second period spans the years 1920/22
to 1928, and is covered in volumes 8 through
15 of the Collected Works.
During the first period, the predominant
areas of investigation were value-ethics,
feelings, religion, political theory, and
related areas thereof, all treated under
the aspect of Max Scheler's very own understanding
of phenomenology.
(1) [1897-1920/22] In his first two major
works, The Nature of Sympathy and Formalism in Ethics
and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Scheler focused on human feelings, love,
and the nature of the person. He showed that
the ego, reason and consciousness presuppose
the sphere of the person and denied the possibility
of a pure ego, pure reason or pure consciousness.
In this, Scheler criticized the well known
positions held by Husserl, Kant, and German
Idealism. It is the human "heart"
or the seat of love, rather than a transcendental
ego, reason, a will or sensibility, that
accounts for the essence of human existence.
He distinguished many types of feelings,
most of them are quite hidden and personal,
and among which human love is shown to be
the center. The human person is at bottom
a loving being (ens amans). From this followed
a major tenet that runs through the entire
first period: feelings and love have a logic
of their own, quite different from the logic
of reason. In this Scheler followed the seventeenth
century French mathematician and philosopher,
Blaise Pascal.
In their initial inceptions, all feelings
are conjoined to experiences of values. There
are five value ranks feelable by all humans.
They are felt in variable body-feelings,
feelings of needs, feelings of life, and
feelings of the person and of the Divine.
Feeling values are comparable to seeing colors.
Just as colors are independent of the things
they are on (blue can be the sky or a cloth),
so also values are independent of the things
they are felt with. The value of holiness,
for instance, can be experienced with God,
but also with a fetish, or with mother earth
as in American Indian cultures. Nevertheless,
throughout the countless variegated feelings
of values, there is a hidden order just as
there is a hidden spectral order among the
countless variegated colorations.
The spectral order of values is fivefold,
situated deeply in man's order of love, or
"ordo amoris," quite different
from a rationally contrived order. Each rank
of this order is felt in particular kinds
of feelings. The order begins with the lowest
rank of sensible values, the pragmatic values
of usefulness and needs, values of life,
the rank of mental values (having three kinds:
aesthetic values, juridical values, and values
of the cognition of truth) and, finally,
the value of the holy (plus all their respective
negative values).
Scheler's ethics is based in large part on
the initial "leaning" towards values,
or what he calls pre-rational "preferring."
If a person freely leans toward something,
say, toward a value higher than one given
at the moment, the difference of the heights
of those values is pre-rationally intuitive,
although we might subsequently make judgments
that contradict those initial leanings. Whenever
an initially preferred value is being realized,
however, a good automatically "rides"
on the back of the realization of this higher
value. If a child, for instance, spontaneously
leans toward giving his or her mother a hug
rather than keeps on playing with cookie
cutters in a sand box, realizes a value higher
than that of play (even without specifically
"willing" to do so).
Since the emotive depths of all personal
feelings can also be insincere and subject
to deceptions, Scheler offered a number of
studies into value deceptions. To such studies
belong, among others, Ordo Amoris, The Idols of Self-Knowledge,
Repentance and Re-Birth, and Ressentiment. These studies appear to be rare masterpieces
on their respective subject, replete with
inspiring insights into our emotional life,
even in our era of technology when feelings
are frequently minimized by rational explanation
and calculation that often fail to show what
is truely going on within us, or in others.
While both his earlier and later works cannot
be separated from Scheler's pioneering work
on Sociology of Knowledge (1924), his book On the Eternal in Man is the nearest bridge to his second period.
In this book, Scheler's philosophy of religion
suggests that the Absolute is given in a
"sphere" or region of our mind
that offers two alternatives:
(1) it is either filled out with faith in
God, or (2) with belief in idols. In either
case, however, this "sphere" of
the Absolute in us remains unaffected even
if it is filled out with nothingness as may
be the case with an agnostic or a nihilist.
This sphere of our mind is a tether between
human existence and the Ground of Being accessible
only in religious acts such as of repentance,
etc. -- acts, only Scheler has shown to be
different in essence from all others acts
of the mind.
Mention should be made also of some other
current topics Scheler addressed, among others,
during his first period of production, such
as "Shame and Modesty," "The
Meaning of Suffering," "Death and
After- Life," "The Meaning of the
Feminist Movement", "On the Tragic,"
and "Problems of Overpopulation."
The second period is characterized by almost
daring elucidations of the Deity as unfinished
and becoming along with the becoming of the
cosmos and human history themselves.
(2) [1920/22-1928] Scheler defies the notion
of a creator-God. Deity, Man, and World form
one becoming process of unification taking
place in absolute time. Absolute time is
no measurable clock-time used in science
and daily life. Absolute time resembles the
time that passes when we are not thinking
of time, e. g. while you had been reading
on this site. Absolute time is inherent in
all processes of self-regeneration, aging,
self-modification; atomic processes, plants,
and animals included. While a number of geniuses
of modern science and philosophy (e. g.,
Einstein, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Newton)
had their own understanding of time, Scheler's
concept is quite different. Simply put: without
a self-generating life, no time. And absolute
time, in turn, is the condition, Scheler
shows, for the measurable time we are so
used to identify as time per se. Insofar
as he associated with it a four-dimensional
expanse, however, his concept of absolute
time does come close to Einstein's general
theory of relativity with which Scheler was
quite familiar.
The process of a universal, cosmic becoming
in absolute time has two increasingly mutually
penetrating poles; (1) an uncreated vital
energy, or "Impulsion," and (2)
"Spirit." Without life, which is
the form of impulsion, spirit is shown to
be impotent to bring anything into existence.
Spirit needs realizing factors such as life-conditions,
history, economics, get to-politics, social
and geographic conditions that make possible
for spirit to realize ideas "with"
them. Sometimes such realizing factors allow
ideas to at least in part work in practice,
sometimes, as we all know, they just don't.
Needless to emphasize that Scheler's position
on the functions of impulsion and spirit
is akin to pragmatism, especially that of
W. James whom he considered to be a "genius."
One can get a glimpse of the unity of the
becoming of the unfinished Deity, World, and Humanity, in Scheler's essay Man's Place in Nature. But the posthumous bulk of this is contained
in Volumes 11 and 12 of the Collected Edition.
References to Buddha can be found in these
volumes, especially with regard to the notion
of suffering and non-resistance. Max Scheler's
non-Darwinian theory of evolution is more
compatible with recent archeological findings
in Chad which point to a previously unknown
genus-species being at the basis of humankind's
famiily tree, rather than to the ape-hypothesis.
©copyright 1997- Manfred S. Frings.
All rights reserved
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