Persons and Power: Max Scheler and Michel Foucault on the Spiritualization of Power

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max scheler, in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, and Michel Foucault, in volumes 2 and 3 of his History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self, offer ethical projects that seem very different but which are nonetheless complementary in several significant ways. Both thinkers, inspired by Nietzsche, attempt to rethink the genesis of the moral ought without appeal to any rule of reason?whether it be in the form of an utilitarian calculus, a Kantian categorical imperative, or a social contract? conceived as external to and constraining of desire. Both Scheler and Foucault challenge Western philosophy s deep, long-standing distrust of eros (often cast in the feminine) and belief that it stands in need of control by logos (often cast in the masculine). Their methods are radically different, though: Scheler derives an emotive a priori from a phenomenological analysis of concrete acts of preferencing while Foucault is explicitly antiphenomenological as he carries out specific historical, genealogical studies of ethical norms governing the sexuality of aristocratic males in Greek and Roman antiquity. Furthermore, both Scheler, now in his later Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, and Foucault, in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, invite us, although Foucault more explicitly, to think the relationship between subjects and power differently than the manner in which we are accustomed to doing. Power is not to be thought as something that subjects, assumed as already constituted entities, possess or lack. Rather, they invite us to consider how we, as subjects, are constituted by historical relationships of power. For Scheler, power is one of several drives {Triebe) beneath the real factors of personal and social life, which, in conjunction with various ideal (or spiritual) fac tors, constitute individual and social subjects. In a similar vein, subjects, for Foucault, are proximities within ever-shifting matrices of power, or, alterna tively, conduits of power.