The a Priori and the Order of Foundation

Abstract

In Chapter Two, we explored Scheler’s concept of the intentional act. His account of it is distinguished from Husserl’s account in its emphasis upon the structural or material features of intentional consciousness, and it is to a specification of such features—what Scheler calls the material a priori—to which we turn in this chapter. He distinguishes three kinds of intentional acts, each of which reveals a different kind of fact about the world: the act of perception upon the natural standpoint through which things are given; the act of observation upon the scientific standpoint, through which states of affairs are given, and the act of intuition, or what Scheler later called the Wesensschau,through which facts about the meaning-contents of perception are given. The phenomenological analysis of all such cognition and of what is given in it constitutes for Scheler the new starting-point of philosophy. Its terminus will be an extensive description of the phenomenological facts: the meaning-contents, or what he also calls the material essences, through which the natural and scientific world-views are constituted. Philosophy must then work out its puzzles by building ethical, metaphysical, and anthropological theories that conform to the phenomenologically reduced and re-experienced meaning-structures that make up the realm of essence.