Abstract
Reference to a variety of scholars indicates a continuing perplexity concerning the meaning of Scheler’s concept of the person and its significance for material value-ethics. The acting person is said to be the fundamental category of ethics, to which the categories of virtues, norms, and Good Will are secondary. The highest moral value is that of the person; he is the bearer of moral value and of moral evaluation in terms of the objective Ordo amoris. The concept of the person – not the concrete individual person himself, which is impossible – must therefore be the object of phenomenological inquiry. This both Scheler and Hartmann undertake. The outcome of Scheler’s phenomenology is a description of the person as an unobjectifiable “trace of essence” that is phenomenally present in each of intentional acts. It is contrasted with the ego, which is the object of inner perception, and which corresponds on the psychic level to the lived body on the physical. The notion was severely criticized by Hartmann, who finds in it remnants of idealism and accuses it of unacceptable theological implications. Hartmann further insists that the objectifiable human subject must be the object of which moral categories are predicated; the subject endures throughout the life of the human organism. The chapter ends with an attempt to reconcile the two interpretations of the person, and concludes that Scheler’s concept of the ego could take over some of the functions that Hartmann finds absent in Scheler’s concept of the person. However, Scheler’s concept is far richer, has important historical resonance, and is amenable to a personalist ethics. The discussion brings us to the doorstep of ethical personalism in its normative implications.
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Notes
- 1.
Wolfhart Henckmann, Max Scheler (München: Beck, 1998), 122–23.
- 2.
Angelika Sander, Max Scheler zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2001), 88–108.
- 3.
Peter Spader, op. cit.
- 4.
Manfred S. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, op. cit.
- 5.
Cf. The Human Place in the Cosmos, op. cit., 52–53.
- 6.
Hartmann also takes this position: “There is no proper phenomenology of the person” (Ethics II, Ch 24 b, 319).
- 7.
Cf. “Idealismus-Realismus,” Teil III, 2, Gesammelte Werke, Band 9, 216–36. For an extended discussion of Scheler’s phenomenology of time, Cf. Manfred S. Frings, LifeTime (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).
- 8.
The expression reminds us of Sartre’s remarkable phrase, “we are what we are not, and are not what we are.” Note Scheler’s phenomenology and metaphysics of the “void,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 9, 219: “The emptiness of the heart is, strangely, the primordial datum for all concepts of emptiness. … A particular kind of non-being [μ̍̍̍h όν] seems to precede every positively determined being just as its foundation: the empty space.” Compare Sartre’s café from which Pierre is absent.
- 9.
Cf. Eugene Kelly, “Opfer und Werdesein in Schelers Buddhismus-Kritik.” In: Becker, Ralf, und Ernst Wolfgang Orth. Religion und Metaphysik als Dimensionen der Kultur (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011).
- 10.
Henckmann, op. cit., 132.
- 11.
For a discussion of Scheler’s view that we see the world and ourselves in the light of God: Eugene Kelly, “In lumine dei: Scheler’s Phenomenology of World and God,” in M. Barber, L. Embree, and Thomas J. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology 2010: Selected Essays from North America, Volume I (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010), 155–71.
- 12.
Note that Scheler argues that God, unlike the microscopic human being, is not confronted with an “external world.” Formalism, 480.
- 13.
Michael Gabel has written that Scheler would most likely agree to the proposition that the person also encompasses the function of a transcendental ego, that is, a foundational subjectivity in which an act and object are constituted. Cf. Michael Gabel, “Personal Identity as Event,” forthcoming.
- 14.
Note that Scheler’s later metaphysics, in which Spirit and Life are the ontological dualities from which the world “evolves” in absolute time, was unknown to Hartmann at the time of Ethics, and it is not presupposed in Formalism in Ethics. Scheler of course eventually moved away from the Christian theology that Hartmann sees as an obstacle to ethics.
- 15.
For a more complete treatment of ego and person, cf. M. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, op. cit., 86–90.
- 16.
As discussed in the first chapter, “irreducible” refers to phenomena that are not founded in phenomena whose givenness to an intuition are presupposed by them. Community, Scheler believes, is just such an irreducible phenomenon. It appears essentially in the execution of acts by human beings (it is evident to all that we are not isolated individuals, but part of some social structure), and is presupposed in such higher, i.e., less deeply founded, phenomena as “sympathy,” “friendship,” and “obligation.”
References
Henckmann, Wolfhart. 1998. Max Scheler. München: Beck.
Sander, Angelika. 2001. Max Scheler zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.
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Kelly, E. (2011). The Phenomenology of the Person. 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_9
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