The Phenomenology of Love and Hate

Abstract

The present chapter faces three tasks that are central to Scheler’s phenomenology and also to the Christian world-view that informed his thought during his Catholic period. The first task is a discussion of his phenomenology of love and hate. The second is an exploration of the temporality of the human person from the point at which we left it in the previous chapter. The third is the completion of our analysis of Scheler’s material value-ethics as a personalist ethics by showing it to be founded upon the love of persons in and through the love of God as the chief motive to moral action. We begin these tasks in the mysterious and apparently ineffable waters where the last chapter ended. Scheler added to the tone of mystery by speaking of the “most hidden of phenomena,” the temporal quality inherent in the recondite structures of the person. Yet our discussion of the person threatens to run aground upon an even more mysterious and apparently ineffable shoal, that of love and hate. For while they are the most characteristic human phenomena—Scheler at one point declares that the human being should be called not homo sapiens or homo faber but ens amans—they are also among the most obscure. Love is said to be indescribable, and neither philosophers nor psychologists have heretofore given us much guidance in understanding it, though sociologists are prolific in their documentation of its role in the human economy. All of us experience difficulty when we are called upon to account for our loves and hates, and, when a psychoanalyst attempts to explain to us the pathways of unconscious desire that leads to the “cathexis” of one object over many others as our love-object, we are usually dissatisfied: “No, no,” we say, “that’s not it at all.”