The Future of Humankind

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I worried that both God and the person get lost in the struggle between Geist and Drang, spirit and life, that Scheler postulates as the mechanism of evolutionary change in both the microcosm and the macrocosm. As long as these two terms, “spirit” and “life,” are understood phenomenologically, as essences visible in the world—that is, as meaning-structures and, in some cases, as existential possibilities that can be self-given in phenomenological intuition—I have no problem with them. I would agree also that they are primordial phenomena in the sense of being entirely simple meaning-phenomena, hence without further foundation. They function in, and may be given through, everyday intentional acts upon the natural standpoint. Persons seek in their daily activities to realize both spiritual and vital values. One writes a letter to a friend, eats dinner, raises a family, enjoys a symphony—all these activities are phenomenally distinct enterprises that presuppose intentional acts, and whose essential structures involve, a priori, the essences of spirit and life. But when these two essences become forces operative in physical processes in nature, then the being they are operative in becomes lost, and yet it is he who is real, not they. Put another way, it is not “life” that is operative in me; rather I am alive. I “carry” the essence and value of life; they are visible “upon” me, but it is not life that makes me alive. The goal of phenomenology is to re-intuit the phenomenon of life, and to understand the meaning-structure the word designates. Metaphysicians, by contrast, want to know how the world must be in order that these essences appear upon phenomena at all; and thus they pass beyond the given.