Max Scheler
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 149th anniversary of the birth of Max Ferdinand Scheler (22 August 1874–19 May 1928), who was born in Munich on this date in 1874.
Scheler is primarily remembered as another founder of phenomenology, following Husserl but also taking his own position and his own place in the phenomenological tradition. One respect in which Scheler and Husserl closely agreed was their untimely anti-naturalism, though the two express it in different ways. Marvin Farber, among the first Americans to study phenomenology, had this to say of Scheler’s anti-naturalism:
“Attempts of various kinds were made to stem the rising tide of evolutionary naturalism, and scientific philosophy in general. This was a primary motive of philosophical idealists at the close of the nineteenth century and in the first part of the twentieth century. Members of diverse tendencies and schools, who were normally at war with one another or otherwise engaged in internecine doctrinal strife, were in unison in opposing the naturalistic conception of man and his works… Max Scheler, was preeminent among the anti-naturalists. Similarly, his ‘philosophical anthropology’ was designed to provide an alternative, acceptable to fideists, to the theory of many of the special sciences. He was a most determined critic of the evolutionary theory in biology as well as of its philosophical influence…”
While Scheler is noted for his ethics and his philosophy of religion, John H. Nota says that, in his later period (and Scheler did not live to an old age) almost all of his work was connected to philosophy of history in one way or another. Zachary Davis, in his paper “Max Scheler’s Idea of History: A Juxtaposition of Phenomenology and Idealism” (in Coe, 2021), says that Scheler tried to steer a middle course between Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of history (this is one way to interpret Scheler’s anti-naturalism). More of this tension is on display in the following passage form Davis in his paper:
“According to Scheler, there is an essential difference between how natural science and historical science regard both the meaning of the past and the meaning of a historical development. Natural science views the past events in respect to their general character and laws of development. This is what makes it possible to describe the development or evolution of a species over time. By contrast, historical science is idiographic and concerned with the concrete individual. For the natural scientist, past events are used to make sense of the present in the respect that this sense-making clarifies the natural laws governing the development. The purpose of describing these laws is to have a better understanding of why things happen the way that they do in order to then better control future events. For the natural scientist, there is no history, only laws of natural development. ‘The primary aim of historical science,’ writes Scheler, ‘is to bring to intuition and understanding the particular sense-content of past events’.”
Here we have the familiar contrast of the idiographic and the nomothetic, but instead of saying that history is nomothetic, there is an implied contrast between a nomothetic conception of history that belongs to natural science and an idiographic conception of history that does not.
One could take the embedded Scheler quote in the above paragraph regarding the aim of historical science being the bringing of past events to intuition as a reference to the phenomenological conception of intuition. (in Husserl the idea of the “intuition of essences” was a technical feature — or, if you like, a bug — of phenomenological practice). In the following passage from Scheler’s paper “The Idols of Self-Knowledge” we find just such a phenomenological conception of history:
“An ideal construction of the content of consciousness, on the model of the analysis of its physical causes which has decomposed this content into moments corresponding to these physical causes, is here made into an actual derivation, a history. Constitutive elements of every perception, the simplest as well as the most complicated, are seen as genetic formations which follow one another in sequence. In actuality, the development of consciousness is carried out simultaneously with the formation of sensory representations; the two reciprocally influence one another. The same is true of perception and memory. If we are looking for the bodily processes corresponding to a given perception, then we should let only the whole of the centripetal process correspond to the whole of the perception; not single components of this process to components of the perception. Only the two different directions of possible variation, one taken by such and such a nerve process in its unity, the other taken by such and such a perception, may lead to knowledge of additional and more specialized dependencies among the elements of these two series.”
This way of viewing history might be taken in the sense of microhistory, and the Husserlian sense of genetic phenomenology, but it can also be construed to apply to history in the large, i.e., history as we usually understand it. For example, acts of perception are constituted, but periods of history are also constituted in this phenomenological sense. There is much here that could be developed that suggests a phenomenological philosophy of history quite different from that of Husserl, Ludwig Landgrebe, or David Carr.
In a more explicitly historical vein, Scheler’s “Idealism and Realism” directly addresses history as we usually understand it, but, again, there is a tension here expressed as the difference between time as studied by science and time as experienced by human beings:
“Since we cannot compare the succession of events with the successive parts of time in such a way that we could establish in what ‘part of time’ an event falls, all the temporal determinations of events are relative to one another. Any occurrence which seems to come close to uniform movement can be arbitrarily established as the standard of comparison; then we count the number of the units of this standard which are contained in other events. This time is always immediately measured by spatial determinations, by dividing the path of the chosen standard into certain segments. It is only this physical time which is, by the law of its essence, ineffective and thus strictly homogeneous as well. In vital processes, physiological as well as mental, another time always necessarily means a different nature or character. Duration is here assumed from the start to be something merely specious, while in the physical sphere one always tries to reduce all events to the conjunction, mixture, and unmixing of enduring units. Thus, while in vital time content and position can never be purely separated from one another (and so every happening is only a consequence of the whole preceding stream of life), in physical time one and the same event can, in principle, ‘recur.’ Finally, physical time is a time which has arisen because the spheres of the past and the future have been completely erased. Not so the ‘present.’ Physical time is rather a continual sequence of nows independent of any peculiarity of the creature whose ‘now’ these points are. There can be ‘happenings’ in physical time, but no ‘history.’ It belongs to the nature of ‘history’ that a past is at every moment still active and living, and that the contents of this past are variously brought into relief by the tasks belonging to the future. In physical time cause and effect are thus always touching one another in time and ‘follow’ one another in the line of before and after. Since the arrangement of physical time depends wholly on the arrangement of events, when the same state of the world recurs, time itself runs back into itself. That there is something like time, that is, that the process of inanimate nature too has a certain direction, is first genuinely proved by the second law of thermodynamics. It is on account of this law that there are something like ‘traces’ in the inanimate world which not only sanction inferences to preceding states but also symbolically point to these states.”
In Scheler’s “Ordo Amoris” we find the intersection of his ethical and historical interests expressed:
“…it belongs to the essence of that objective realm of values that the realm of that which is worthy of love can be mentally represented only in a limitless profusion of different types of spiritual individuals and, within the domain of human spirits, only through different singular and collective individuals, families, peoples, nations, and cultural circles of unequal value. Only because we represent that realm in this way can we know the things and events which are bearers of what is worthy of love and put them into effect. Similarly, it is of the essence of this realm that it is exhibited over the course of time in the form of a unique ethical history. This entails that the unique collective destiny of the individual ‘mankind’ can be fulfilled only when this exhibition reaches completion in a simultaneous (social) and successive (historical) conjunction, bringing together love within the various regions of value ordered in accordance with the ordo amoris. It is only when loving is restricted to one part of what the subject is essentially capable of attaining that we have a case of confusion. The ultimate cause of confusion here is one of types of infatuation. To this extent there is a guilty emptiness of love in the human heart. This can be an individually assumed as well as ancestrally and communally assumed guilt; it can be as much tragically and fatefully assumed as, in the common sense of the word, ‘freely’ assumed guilt.”
I’m not sure that I understand all that Scheler is getting at in the above — it requires more study and a deeper knowledge of its context — but it sounds to be like Scheler is starting out with highly specific objects of love which have to be individually embodied in history (individuals, families, peoples, nations, and cultural circles), but then shifts to the idea of mankind as an historical individual, and anything less than loving the whole of humanity is a form of infatuation. This immediately calls to mind James Fitzjames Stephen’s criticisms of Rousseau and Mill on their diffuse love of mankind.
In Scheler’s “Man and History” he argues that history must be based on the kind of philosophical anthropology that he was pursuing in Man’s Place in Nature, and he gives a phenomenological justification for this: his philosophical anthropology would be “a basic science which investigates the essence and essential constitution of man,” and recall that “essence” and “essential constitution” are terms of art in phenomenology. Yet Scheler ends this essay with this comment:
“History, based on this anthropology, becomes a monumental presentation of the ‘spiritual figure’ of heroes and geniuses, or, to adopt Nietzsche’s terms, of the ‘highest examples’ of the human species.”
How Scheler squared this with his conception of love I don’t know, since spiritual heroes and highest examples of humanity imply confused love and infatuation.
Further Resources
_________________________________________________________________
Nota, J. H. (1969). Max Scheler’s Philosophy of History. Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses für Philosophie, 4, 572–580.
Farber, M. (1954). Max Scheler on the Place of Man in the Cosmos. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14(3), 393–399.
Coe, C. D. (Ed.). (2021). The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. doi:10.1007/978–3–030–66857–0
