Max Scheler on Philosophical Anthropology and History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 22 August 2024 is the 150th 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 remembered as a co-founder of phenomenology, following Husserl but also taking his own position and his own place in the phenomenological tradition. Hans Meyerhoff wrote of Scheler:
“Next to Husserl himself, Scheler became the most powerful mind in launching the phenomenological movement and its increasingly influential philosophical journal. The two men divided, by inclination and temperament, the world for phenomenological analysis: Husserl’s chief contributions being in epistemology, logic, mathematics and the sciences in general; Scheler’s chief contributions being in ethics, religion, psychology and sociology — in other words, the human world in general.”
While Scheler is noted for his ethics and his philosophy of religion, John H. Nota says in his 1969 paper “Max Scheler’s Philosophy of History” that, in his later period, almost all of Scheler’s work was connected to philosophy of history in one way or another. While this is true, even though most of Scheler’s work was connected to philosophy of history, he only wrote one essay specifically about philosophy of history, but this one essay, “Man and History,” is remarkable.
Since Scheler died young, at fifty-four, what survives of his philosophy of history is fragmentary and must be reconstructed from the many books and fragments that remain. The one essay on philosophy of history is suggestive, but it raises more questions than it answers, and it’s easy to see how it might be interpreted in radically different ways. We can see this, for example, in Zachary Davis’ 2021 paper “Max Scheler’s Idea of History: A Juxtaposition of Phenomenology and Idealism,” which argues that Scheler tried to steer a middle course between Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of history: “From the very earliest of his writings to the end of his life, Scheler attempted to chart a middle course between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s historical materialism.”
This isn’t how I will characterize Scheler’s philosophy of history, but it is an illustration of the different ideas that one could take away from Scheler on history. I want to emphasize two themes of Scheler’s historical thought, and I will argue that these two themes are interrelated. The two themes are Scheler’s anti-naturalism and his interest in philosophical anthropology. One respect in which Scheler and Husserl closely agreed was their untimely non-naturalism or anti-naturalism, though the two express it in different ways. Marvin Farber, one the first Americans to study phenomenology, had this to say of Scheler’s anti-naturalism:
“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…”
Here Farber immediately connects Scheler’s anti-naturalism with his philosophical anthropology. Because of Scheler’s anti-naturalism, he needs to furnish a non-naturalistic philosophical anthropology in contradistinction to the familiar naturalistic and scientific philosophical anthropology of his time.
Philosophical anthropology hasn’t gotten much traction in Anglo-American philosophy. I think a lot of Anglo-American philosophers see this as an alien tradition, but it has been influential on the continent. Of course, philosophical anthropology has a history. Kant wrote a work on philosophical anthropology, and about the same time as Scheler was working on his philosophical anthropology Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner were working on philosophical anthropologies, Gehlen more from a scientific standpoint and Plessner more from a philosophical standpoint, but in both thinkers, and in Scheler too, all of these influences interpenetrate each other.
Scheler was working on what was to be a large book on philosophical anthropology when he died, and we have some fragments and essays that would have been a part of this larger project. The last book he wrote, published in 1928, the year he died, has been twice translated into English, as Man’s Place in Nature, by Hans Meyerhoff, who also edited an anthology on philosophy of history that I have mentioned in several episodes, and as The Human Place in the Cosmos by Manfred Frings, who is perhaps the most eminent of all Scheler scholars. The introduction to Frings’ translation by Eugene Kelly summarizes the work in four theses in which Scheler’s alternative to naturalism is apparent, even if not yet fully formed:
- The First Thesis: The Living Body and the Psyche Are a Unity, and Ascended Together in a Four-Step Evolutionary Process.
- The Second Thesis: Spirit is a Non-Emergent and Autonomous Phenomenon That Stands in Opposition to Impulsion.
- The Third Thesis: Spirit Pertains to the Very Foundation of the Universe.
- The Fourth Thesis: The Role of the Human Being in the Cosmos Is the Infusion of Life with Spirit.
Kelly devotes a couple of pages to the exposition of each of these theses, and it would be reasonable to devote an essay to each of them, both because of their intrinsic interest and because of their unfamiliarity. As I said earlier, Germanophone philosophical anthropology strikes the Anglo-American ear as alien, and it takes some getting used to. It takes time to get a sense of what’s going on. The reason I give this emphasis to Scheler’s non-naturalistic philosophical anthropology is because it is the key to his philosophy of history, or what we have, in fragments and in not-specifically-historical works, about Scheler’s philosophy of history. In this essay “Man and History” the connection between philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history is made explicit:
“The most important reason that so many and such different conceptions of history and sociology are in bitter struggle with each other today is that these conceptions of history are based on fundamentally different ideas of the nature, structure, and origin of man.”
There a vague resemblance here to Henri Pirenne’s view of history. Pirenne wrote:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today.”
We could call this Pirenne’s Postulate. Pirenne makes human natural the center and the foundation of history, but for Pirenne this human nature is fixed and known. Pirenne is assuming a kind of uniformitarianism of the human sciences in the way he frames the reliance of history on a conception of human nature. For Scheler, human nature is a problem, it’s not a unity, it’s not fixed, and we need to work through it to understand what conceptions of history are based on what conceptions of man. We could say that Scheler problematizes human nature in a way that Pirenne did not. Scheler wrote of this problematization of human nature:
“The views concerning the essence and origin of man have, at no other time, been less sure, less determinate, and more varied, than in our own.”
In arguing that history must be based on the kind of philosophical anthropology that Scheler pursued in Man’s Place in Nature, he gives a phenomenological justification for this. Scheler’s philosophical anthropology would be, “a basic science which investigates the essence and essential constitution of man,” and here we have to recall that “essence” and “essential constitution” are terms of art in phenomenology. Thus philosophical anthropology is the foundation of any conception of history. Therefore, a philosophy of history is derived from a philosophy of man. Scheler systematically follows up on this idea in his essay, “Man and History,” but, since it’s rather short, it suggests more than it says, and some of the subsequent discussion in the essay more explicitly lays out of the relationship between a conception of man and a conception of history.
Scheler distinguishes five fundamentally different conceptions of man. The first of these is the Christian-theological conception of man, and here we are well familiar with the philosophies of history that correspond to the Christian-theological conception of man. These are the philosophies of history of St. Augustine, of Jaochim of Fiore, Otto of Freising, and given a modern form by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and others. In many episodes I have called these the providential philosophies of history, since they are predicated on the role of divine providence in human history.
The second conception of man is that of classical Greece, and ancient conception of man that corresponds in many ways to what Oswald Spengler called Apollonian civilization. We could call it the Apollonian conception of man, but Scheler calls this the rationalist-humanistic conception of man as homo sapiens. He gives an explicit formulation of the characteristics of this conception of man:
“Let us attach special significance to four particular qualifications. (1) Man possesses in himself a divine agent which none of nature, as such, contains. (2) Nevertheless, this agent and the force which eternally shapes and forms the world into a world… are identical ontologically and in principle and, therefore, are truly adequate for knowledge of the world. (3) As logos… and as human reason, this agent is potent and able to realize its ideal content… even without the drives and senses… common to man and animal. (4) This agent is absolutely constant, regardless of the position of the individual in history, nation, and society.”
Scheler cites Hegel as an exemplar of this view, but even as he cites Hegel he says that Hegel abandoned the fourth of the four conditions that Scheler stipulated for the rationalistic-humanistic conception of man, i.e., he abandoned Pirenne’s postulate, so Scheler doesn’t provide an example of a philosophy of history that perfectly reproduces the rationalistic-humanistic conception of man. We could speculate that something like this conception is embodied, if only in a nascent form, in ancient Greek historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, and I think this would be more-or-less accurate.
The third conception of man is the naturalistic, which Scheler also calls Homo faber, or man the maker, man the fabricator. Scheler cites many names as representative of this naturalistic conception of man, including Hobbes and Machiavelli, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Freud and Adler, among others. Then Scheler explicitly recognizes something that is rarely recognized in philosophy of history, and that is the possibility of a naturalistic philosophy of history based on a naturalistic conception of man. Scheler distinguishes three naturalistic philosophies of history:
- An economic philosophy of history that he identifies with Marxism;
- An ethnic philosophy of history he identifies with Gobineau and Ratzenhofer, and
- The ideology of power politics that he identifies with Hobbes and Machiavelli.
I think that there are other naturalistic philosophies of history, including naturalistic philosophies of history not yet formulated, but I will not elaborate on this at the moment.
The fourth conception of man is that man is not to be celebrated because of his reason, but rather than man is a sick animal precisely because he is a rational animal. Scheler calls this pan-romanticism and pathogenic. Humanity, under this pessimistic conception, is intrinsically decadent and will inevitably destroy itself due to its inescapable essential nature. Here the intellect is fundamentally at odds with life, and so must eventually come into conflict with life:
“According to this terrifying pan-romanticism of a radically vitalistic theory of values, the ten thousand years of our so-called world history themselves are identical with this gradual process of destruction. Accordingly, the history of man is only the necessary decline of a species which was deathly sick from the start and was born deathly sick, a species which in its very origins, at least in the form of homo sapiens, of typical Occidental man, was a faux pas of life. The fact that this pathogenic (‘spirit born to suffer pain’) process, leading to certain death, has already lasted ten thousand years, does not disprove this theory! In comparing the history of a species with that of an individual, ten thousand years are indeed less than the week it takes a patient to die peacefully from disease! The phases of this declining way of life, of this dead-end road, of this disease of life, called man, are structurally identical with the normal stages of aging and death.”
This view of humanity is common among ideologically motivated environmentalists. I have often said that the only novel political ideology to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century was environmentalism, and the strength and influence of the environmentalist movement testifies to the power of its associated conception of man. We also have a cinematic dramatization of this conception of man in the film The Matrix, in the scene where Agent Smith is interrogating Morpheus, and Agent Smith takes out his earpiece and delivers to Morpheus an extemporaneous and vividly malicious portrait of humanity as a virus.
We can also find this view in much more subtle forms, as when Stephen J. Gould argued that our intelligence is like as not to lead to our extinction, a theme that also recurs repeatedly in the writings of Carl Sagan. The conjunction of the apocalypticism that followed the scope of the planetary-scale industrialized wars of the twentieth century, and the rise of environmental alarmism in the second half of the twentieth century, pushed many in this direction, which is more common than we might suppose.
The fifth conception is recent, and Scheler identifies it with Nietzsche’s figure of Zarathustra and the idea of the overman or superman. This is in part a reaction against the previous idea that man is the animal that is sick in spirit. If this sickness of spirit propels us to formulate a new conception of man that overcomes this humiliation, then we have something new in history. A former friend of mine once gave a one sentence summary of Nietzsche: The overman is the man who has overcome the human, all-too-human. This is as good of a summary of Nietzsche as I have ever heard.
Scheler argues that this Nietzschean conception of man has been further developed in the value ethics of Dietrich Heinrich Kerler and Nicolai Hartmann. Hartmann’s book on ethics has been translated into English, but it’s not widely known, and like the tradition of philosophical anthropology, it often strikes Anglo-American readers as an alien tradition. Scheler identifies Kurt Breysig and the circle around Stephan George as working out the historical consequences of this conception of man for history, but he doesn’t give us an example of a philosophy of history that follows from this conception of man, but he does say:
“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.”
Scheler explicitly tells us that none of these five conceptions of man, or there associated conceptions of history, correspond to his own view. He was only trying to sort things out, and he was still to write his own definite philosophical anthropology, and, by the principles of his own thought, a distinct conception of history would follow from his philosophical anthropology.
In some ways the last of the five seems closest to Scheler, but this conception of man is deeply Nietzschean, and, as I will discuss in a moment, there are important differences between Nietzsche and Scheler, so that, despite the obvious influence of Nietzsche upon Scheler, in some respects the two are opposite numbers. Of this last of the five conceptions of man, Scheler mentions in passing its “historical and categorical personalism of being and values,” and this, I think, typifies Scheler’s view, even if the rest of this conception does not. If I had to put a label on Scheler’s philosophy of history I might call it personalistic Hegelianism, but even as I say that I know it’s wrong and it would be taken in the wrong way. There are some senses in which the overall structure of Scheler’s philosophy of history is similar to Hegel, but instead of history converging on absolute knowledge and absolute spirit, as in Hegel, history is converging on Scheler’s conception of humanity.
But Scheler’s conception of humanity isn’t descriptive, but rather prescriptive. Scheler sees what he believes humanity can become, and it is this that is the end and aim of history for Scheler. Some of what Scheler sees as the possibilities for humanity are discussed in his essay “Man in the Era of Adjustment,” which is worth reading for the light is sheds on Scheler’s conception of man, but I’m not going to discuss this today.
Much of this also resembles some of the themes in Husserl’s philosophy of history, and I mentioned earlier the relationship between Husserl and Scheler, both in terms of the origins and development of phenomenology and their shared anti-naturalism. Husserl, near the end of his life, gave two talks are now commonly known as the Vienna lecture and the Prague lecture. He gave a talk in Vienna in 1935 titled “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.” Later that year gave a talk in Prague titled “The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology.” The material of these lectures was worked into a longer book, published posthumously under the title The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. It is this book, and the talks it was based upon, that constitutes Husserl’s philosophy of history.
These essays were conceived and presented on the eve of the Second World War, in the late 1930s, which the poet W. H. Auden had called a “low dishonest decade.” Husserl still had hope for the future, but he saw the storm clouds on the horizon, and he argued forcefully for the renewal of European humanity in spite of the storm clouds. Scheler also gives us two essays on the crisis of European humanity. The last section of his book on philosophy of religion, On the Eternal in Man, is titled “The Reconstruction of European Culture” and it consists of two parts, “The Political Framework and Moral Conditions of Cultural Reconstruction in Europe” and “The Formative Powers Available for the Spiritual Renewal of Europe.” There is a note on the first of these two that it was delivered as a lecture in the fall of 1917, and both of these essays of Scheler read like lectures.
Although Husserl and Scheler each wrote two essays on the spiritual renewal of Europe, Husserl’s were presented on the eve of the Second World War, while Scheler’s were presented as the First World War was still being fought. And these two pair of essays perfectly reflect the earlier quote from Hans Meyerhoff about how Husserl and Scheler divided the world between them for phenomenological analysis. Husserl’s vision of the renewal of humanity was informed by an ideal of science and the infinitistic pursuit of knowledge that vaguely resembles Hegel’s pursuit of absolute knowledge. This is an epistemological vision of ideal humanity.
Scheler’s vision of the renewal of humanity was more political, social, and cultural. For lack of a better way of describing it, I could call it a human vision of the renewal of humanity, and I expect that Scheler’s vision is much more approachable than that of Husserl. I could also invoke Nietzsche and say that it is a human, all-too-human vision of humanity. Nietzsche was a significant influence on Scheler, and in fact Scheler wrote a book on Nietzsche’s conception of ressentiment, which is a key concept in Nietzsche’s ethics. Scheler tries to turn the table on Nietzsche. He argues that Nietzsche himself, in particular in regard to Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, was motivated by ressentiment, that is to say, motivated by repressed hatred, envy, resentment, and desire for revenge.
Nietzsche had argued that, with ressentiment, the negative emotions reach such a pitch of development that they create new values, and he said that Christian love was the finest flower of ressentiment. Scheler accepted much of Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment, and even said of it:
“Among the scanty discoveries which have been made in recent times about the origin of moral judgments, Friedrich Nietzsche’s discovery that ressentiment can be the source of such value judgments is the most profound.”
But for Scheler, Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity and Christian love was a result of Nietzsche’s repressed hatred, envy, and resentment toward Christianity. Scheler’s Christianity and his conception of love were important aspects of his life and philosophy. In Scheler’s “Ordo Amoris,” which could be translated as “The Order of Love,” 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.”
When Scheler wrote this the idea of an ethical history might have seemed a bit strange, but retrospectively we can understand Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as a moral history, perhaps the first moral history, though there are hints of a moral history to be found in Gobineau. Since that time we have Foucault’s genealogies, and although Foucault’s genealogies aren’t explicitly ethical, they can’t avoid touching on ethical themes. In this passage Scheler says that there are objects of love of unequal value, and this is of course implied by the very idea of an order of love, which we could also call a hierarchy of love, or rather a hierarchy of loves. Scheler continued about love:
“…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.”
If you’re getting religious vibes off this quote you’re not alone. The third of the theological virtues, after faith and hope, is, after all, charity, which is also identified as love. So Scheler’s essay on love could also be understood as an exposition and an analysis of one of the classic theological virtues, but he contextualizes this exposition of a traditional theological virtue in a phenomenological inquiry into an ethics of values.
In addition to his book on philosophy of religion, On the Eternal in Man, mentioned earlier, Scheler wrote a book on ethics, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Scheler was one of the most important figures in bringing value ethics, or axiology, to philosophical prominence. Today even corporations publish explicit statements of their corporate values, but this is a very recent historical development that we can trace to the 19th century. Nietzsche was the first major philosopher or explicitly frame ethical problems in terms of values, and this tradition has only grown since his time. Scheler was one of the agents of the growth of axiology and value ethics. This is the aspect of Scheler’s thought that has been most influential on me personally. Near the beginning of Formalism in Ethics Scheler wrote: “There is a genuine increase of value in the real world with any new good.” This is one of the guiding ideas of Scheler’s thought, and of mine as well. Nietzsche’s idea that ressentiment creates new values gives us the other side of the coin, and it shows us that the value of the world doesn’t always increase as a consequence of axiological innovation.
We can see that although Scheler located the source of philosophies of history in philosophies of man, his conception of a philosophy of man is pervasively religious and moral. I can’t remember where I read this, it may have been in Walter Kaufmann, but it has been argued that Scheler was the ultimate source of the familiar idea that human beings don’t have a choice of whether or not they will be religious, but only whether they will worship God or an idol. This idea was popularized by Paul Tillich but it can already be found in Scheler.
I suspect that Nietzsche would have ridiculed this argument, as he would have ridiculed Scheler’s attempt to turn the table on him, or he would have turned the table again on Scheler and repurposed Scheler’s criticisms to further his own project. In this way, Nietzsche and Scheler represent fundamentally different temperaments and fundamentally different approaches both to man and to history. Nietzsche didn’t write a philosophical anthropology, but, if he had, it would have been very nearly antithetical to Scheler’s philosophical anthropology.
