Abstract
After a brief assessment of the programmatic application of phenomenology to value-theory (axiology) undertaken by Scheler in Formalism in Ethics, the salient characteristics of values themselves, their givenness, their nature and their functions are considered. We are subliminally aware of values in everyday mental acts of feeling and preference, and they precipitate in language as value-predicates, obligations, moral rules, and as norms of virtue. Their phenomenal content may be given specificity by eidetic experience. When considered as the objects of eidetic acts of feeling that is, ontologically, values are like Platonic forms (Hartmann), but they have no force over nature. They are realized either unintentionally by nature, or intentionally by human activity. They are a priori, that is, given before all human efforts to realize them. The emotional acts in which these eidetic experiences take place are stratified; some feelings are “deeper” than others are. Corresponding to these levels of the emotional life is the vertical step-like structure of the values themselves according to their relative worth. The contributions of D. von Hildebrand and E. Husserl to the phenomenology of value are discussed; specifically, the phenomenology of Husserl’s attempt at a formal language of morals is evaluated in its significance for material value-ethics. A central question of material value-ethics is whether this realm of values is a unified structure, or whether there are ineluctable antimonies among them.
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- 1.
“Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 380.
- 2.
“Lehre von den drei Tatsachen,” Gesammelte Werke, Band X, 431–502.
- 3.
Cf. Ethics I, Ch 14a, 184. “In their mode of being, values are Platonic ideas.”
- 4.
“Lehre von den drei Tatsachen,” op. cit., 448.
- 5.
“Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie,”op. cit., 380.
- 6.
Benulal Dhar says that they are not; indeed, he sees Hartmann’s value-Platonism as a denial of Scheler’s concept of value. For his analysis, see his Phenomenological Ethics (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2008).
- 7.
For a brief account of this dispute cf. Manfred E. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, op. cit., 181 f.
- 8.
In this context, it is worthy of reflection that for a time Scheler was dependent upon Husserl for professional advancement.
- 9.
Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (Logos I, 1910).
- 10.
“Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 379.
- 11.
English edition Max Scheler. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Translated by Manfred S. Frings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009).
- 12.
Scheler notes, however, that philosophy is a participation in the world by means of knowledge. If the world in its inner essence could not be the object of knowledge, then participation in that inner essence, if it were at all possible, would have to be by some other means: mystical ecstasy, perhaps, or the deep meditation of the Buddhist or Hindu adept. Cf. “Vom Wesen der Philosophie,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 5, 69.
- 13.
“Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie,”, op. cit., 391.
- 14.
Philip Blosser, Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics, op. cit., 31. Scheler’s doctrine reminds one of the active intellect in Aristotle: “Knowledge in actuality is the very same thing as the object of knowledge” (de An 3.5. 430a 14–21).
- 15.
“Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie,” op. cit., 415.
- 16.
Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 415 ff.
- 17.
Scheler does not make clear whether he means temporally or logically prior. His intention is probably the latter; however, that position strikes us as untenable for reasons we argue elsewhere.
- 18.
Cf. Scheler’s statements on knowledge and the world in “Vom Wesen der Philosophie,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 5, section 2, 66 ff.
- 19.
Two of these lecture series are contained in Edmund Husserl: Husserliana. Band 28: Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre. 1908–1914. Edited by Ullrich Melle (The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). Band 37: Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924. Edited by Henning Peucker (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004).
- 20.
In axiology or pure formal ethics and in formal logic the notion of apodicticity, a term used by both Scheler and Husserl to refer to the certainty of the given, has its applications. At some points, Scheler applies the term to our knowledge of the truth of moral judgment itself, suggesting a moral absolutism that he is both unable and, despite initial claims to the contrary, ultimately unwilling to justify.
- 21.
“Pure practice” will not do as a translation of reine Praktik. Husserl is referring to the process of Aristotelian phronesis, the activity of an agent that is guided by practical wisdom. It is the domain of conscious purposive human activity. More generally, Praktik refers to this activity. We will render his term “practics” if only to indicate by the neologism that the term “Praktik” has no exact equivalent in English.
- 22.
For an examination of disparities between Husserl’s and Scheler’s concept of cognitive feeling, cf. Ni Liangkang, “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Feeing in Husserl and Scheler,” in Kwok-Ying Lau and John J. Drummond, Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen in the New Century (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
- 23.
As in the familiar formula, “I like A, therefore A is good.” A more sophisticated version of this doctrine is given, e.g., in Spinoza, Ethics III, Prop. IX, Note.
- 24.
For further discussion of this ambivalence, cf. Manfred F. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, op. cit., 28; Eugene Kelly, “In Lumine Dei: Scheler’s Phenomenology of World and God” in Phenomenology 2010 : Selected Essays from North America, Part I. Michael Barber et al. (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010), 160.
- 25.
As Scheler argues in “The Essential Phenomenology of Religion,” On the Eternal in Man (Gesammelte Werke write Werke, Band 5).
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Cf. for example Scheler’s “Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung,” Philosophische Anschauungen, Gesammelte Werke, Band 9.
References
Dhar, Benulal. 2008. Phenomenological ethics. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
Kelly, Eugene. 2010a. In lumine dei: Scheler’s phenomenology of world and god. In Phenomenology 2010: Selected essays from North America I, ed. M. Barber, L. Embree, and Thomas J. Nenon, 155–71. Bucharest: Zeta Books.
Ni, Liangkang. 2007. The problem of the phenomenology of feeling in Husserl and Scheler. In Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen in the new century, ed. Kwok Ying Lau and John J. Drummond. Dordrecht: Springer.
A bibliography of translations into English of Scheler’s works up to the time of its publication is found in Max Scheler: Person and Self-Value. Three Essays (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). Subsequently there has appeared On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings, by Max Scheler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); The Human Place in the Cosmos (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008); The Constitution of the Human Being: From the Posthumous Works, Volumes 11 and 12 (Marquette Studies in Philosophy, Marquette University Press, 2008).
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Kelly, E. (2011). The Phenomenology of Value. In: Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. Phaenomenologica, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_2
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