Max Scheler: The Human Person in Action and in the Cosmos

Abstract

Falsely labeled a student of Edmund Husserl in the past, Max Scheler’s significance, and difference from his phenomenological contemporaries, is to be seen in his uncompromising criticism of the phenomenological method, of consciousness as such, and of the transcendental ego. While he did make use on occasion of methods and reductions a la Husserl, his numerous contributions to ethics, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion, sociology and to contemporary political and cultural issues are based on the overwhelming power of phenomenological intuition. This is to say that, whereas methods lead to a result once methodological procedures are carried out, the nature of such a result is, as it is in mathematics, already given to some degree as something to be sought and established before an application of a method. In Scheler’s phenomenology, there is a phenomenologically intuited, a priori meaning-content, i.e., a noematic phenomenon, at the very outset of phenomenological investigations—hence, his copious presentations on human phenomena such as shame, the tragic, resentment, love, sympathy, repentance, aging and dying, model persons, the moral condition of philosophical knowledge, Asian culture, et al. The fabric of intuition bears out at the same time the order of values and their ranks as felt in the human heart (ordo amoris). With this, broadly speaking, Scheler keeps up an age-old tradition—one neither espoused in his own time, nor today—that love precedes knowledge, or knowledge is neither antecedent to, nor constitutive of love and feelings.