Philanthro
Max Scheler
He died shortly after this essay. Sad. Heartattack. Smoker. 50-80 cigarettes per day.
Euken. He was Scheler’s phd doctor. Scheler read Husserl and began loving Husserl. This young beautiful spirit of philosophy, as the professor put it.
He wasn’t a student of Husserl but was always around when the students of Husserl met in Göttingen. He already promoted his own kind of phenomenology in the way of Husserl.
Max Scheler had several extra conjugal love affairs. He had a lot of trouble and couldn’t find a job. So he made a living by giving lectures and writing. During WW1 he was a staunch defender of German supremacy. Fucking reformist. He defended imperialistic war. After WW1 he had a slight switch in his political thinking and then he died. So not much came out of it.
The essay was written for a talk, and an inaugural monograph he wanted to write. We only have these traces of a thing he could never developed, so many of the ideas aren’t taken to their extreme.
The essay is very easy to read.
He takes a lot of inspiration from Uk but departs from him a lot.
Scheler defines the task of philosophical anthropology: to reunify the task of man in the very sociocultural situation that is his; that is as appearing as extremely fragmented; man is all over the play. Man is fragmented over all the different disciplines of the 19th century.
All these different sciences and discourses promote a certain incongruous answer to what a human is.
A biologist and a theologian may say very different things.
He wanted to provide an integrated transdisciplinary discourse on man, which is guided by philosophy. Philosophy is an overarching discourse that can provide an answer to this question and remedying the existential problem that man has in the beginning of the 20th century.
Another problem that still looms over Scheler is the old dichotomy between mind and body, substance dualism. How can we have the body and spirit together?
Man is always a problem to themself.
In what sense is Scheler inspired by Uk?
He says that it is necessary in biology to avoid hypostatising the enviornment of man and wrongly make it the world in itself. We have to reduce the complexity and start from scratch, and build up together with the sense organs in the animal. By bracketing the anthropocentric tendency of putting the human world in the center of all discussion, we come to understand that there is a plurality of different environemental worlds.
These Umwelten/Umgebung are holistically closed totalities. There is no residuum left.Scheler is also anti-mechanical and anti-reductionistic in conceptualising the environment. We try on the contrary to understand the very complexity of the concept of the animal’s environment itself.
The animal’s environment is essentially the result of a perceptive selection made by the subject. This gives us a clue about the structure of the Umwelt.
The idea is that if an animal is less open to the world, its behaviour is more efficient. There are less possibilities for diversity of responses. The animal’s behaviour will be evermore efficient if the stimuli it can receive and respond to are fever, or reduced to a minimum. The paramecium has only one action at hand. This is total efficiency. It is always successful. Never get a failed syscall.
But humans are not locked up inside their environment as happens with animals, but humans rather have Weltoffenheit. Humans are open to the world. Entirely so. The openness towards the world, is itself the world. So you cannot imagine the world as an obejct to which we are open, but it is rather directly being in the world. There is an unreachable gap between the animal and us. He reinstitutes the categorical difference between man and animal, whilst Uk tried to deconstruct it. For Uk we are all interpreters of signs. With no essential difference between animals and humans, just a question of complexity. In Scheler there is an essential and qualitative difference.
What is life for Scheler?
Life is inwardness.
He wants a Wesensbegriff of man, the essential concept of man. He follows Husserl in believing that there are essences, which we can see through a certain method, Wesensschau, or Eidetic intuition. From Greek eidos, or essentia. We can conduct a certain research in which we can see the essential structure that makes a thing be what it is.
Life’s essential configuration is structured by layers. This is inspired by Aristotle.
Scheler identifies the notion of life with soul. Still very Aristotelian.
This soul is itself complex, it has different degrees. He goes even beyond Aristotle’s pan-psychism, that everything living has a soul, by attributing to living beings an interiority. He says that to understand life is to understand the forms of interiority in the world. Every living being is interior to itself. This echoes Descartes. Descartes urges to turn our gaze from the world in-worldly. For Scheler this psychic interiority is only one version of the interior life. The task of this essay is to find these other ones.
Aristotle’s psychology is a biology. Because the psyche is the principle of life of living organisms, not the kind of interiority in dialogue.
”First of all the psychic coincides with the boundary of life. In addition to objective phenomenal properties of things called ’alive’ such as self-motion, self-differentiation and self-limitation in both temporal and spatial regards, there is the fact that living beings are not only objects for outside observers but are also endowed with the mode of being-for-themselves, as well as with an inwardness through which they also are aware of themselves. This is an essential property of themm – a property of living beings which can be shown to have the closest ties with objective phenomena of life in terms of structure and forms of processes. It is the psychic aspect that represents the primordial phenomenon of living beings.
For Scheler, plants and so on are aware of themselves, despite not being necessarily conscious. Unfortunately he doesn’t say a lot about plants for example, but it seems that plants have a kind of non-conscious presence towards the outside. Sun-flowers change their head according to the sun, and other plants curve with the wind, or the weights they endure. Plants grow around obstacles. They adapt to the environment, which is a sign for Scheler of inwardness. They can only adapt insofar as they are open and have a glimpse of the things around them. The sunflower follows the sun, without consciousness, but this ability in and of itself requires some kind of self-awareness. There is only awareness of the outside insofar as you have awareness of your inside. Conscientia means ’with knowledge’, consciousness is that you know that you know. There is no knowledge which is not also knowledge of its own knowledge. There needs to be reflexivity.
Plessner thinks that organisms are what they are because they have a limit that protects the interiority from the environment. The plant has an exteriority, its ’skin’, which has no holes and is entirely open. The sun hits the plant on all its surface, and the metabolism of the plant takes place everywhere, not just on one spot. Animals are closed forms. This means that the exchange with the environment only occurs on very specific spots, called the sense organs. Animals ingest food through the mouth and see through their eyes. Plessner was accused of stealing Scheler.
These authors often take their positions against mechanism, but their structures are nothing else but ordered processes of mechanic procedures. Whilst mechanists also confess that if there is a mechanism there has to be a certain form or scheme along which the mechanism behaves.
Uk rejects mechanism, because it is English. He hates English people, and is literally only a racist.
The impression one has that plants are devoid of inwardness semfs from the slowness of their vital processes. If you put yourself in the viewpoint of a plant, then you would be able to create an empathy and share some experience with the plant that follows its own temporality. We tend to measure living processes according to our own temporality.
1st layer of life; sensitive impulsion.
”The lowest level of the psychic world – the steam, as it were, which pushes forward and up into the highest stages of spiritual activities and which provides energy to the most ender acts of lucid goodness is sensitive impulsion (Gefühlstrang) devoid of consciousnes, sensation and representation. In impulsion feeling and rives are not yet seperated. According to Scheler, the lower forms of life are presupposed by the higher forms. The sensitive impulsion is in all living organisms. Everything that lives has this.
It basically is responsible for growth and reproduction, but it is not sensation. It is the impetus that for example a plant has to grow. Something that pushes inward, which is a kind of force in nature. Look at the flower, the flower is a form with no interiority according to Plessner, whereas an animal protects its form inside. Life pushes through the forms and produces them.
There is no proprioception in plants there is no reporting back in plants – that is there is no nerve excitation – yet there is indeed inwardness, it is ecstatic impulsion. There is no centralisation in the plants, but there is a richness of form and color because the force of life is ecstatic and pushes everything to the outside and leaves nothing to not be revealed in it.
2nd layer of the living: instinct.
Animals have instinct. Instinct = comportment & behaviour. There are feedback processes. Not any behaviour is instinctual, but is so only under certain conditions.
Behaviour is instinctive when it is meaningful, it obeys a fixed and uncangable rhythm, it serves not the individual, but the species, it is not acquired in a process of learning, it is indiffferent to the quantity of trials, it is innate and completed in the individual from the beginning.
Behaviour of reproduction could be instinctive. It is regulated by rhythms and temporalities pertaining to the species and not to the individual. Instinctive behaviour does not serve the individual but the reproduction of the species. Reproduction is not in the interest of the individual, but the individual may realise the interest of the species. Instinctive behaviour is blindly realised by the individual. It is there from the beginning.
The instinct is a closed compartment, the realisation of the instinct is closed from the beginning.
”Whatever an animal can represent and sense is a priori governed and determined by the relation its instincts have to their environment”.
The instinct would be the gate-keeper that determines the scope of things to which the animal can relate to, as well as the form in which this happens.
As the species become more complex, the openness is still there, whilst there are now multiple compartments according to which they can choose.
When animals engage in behaviour, there is a finality to it. In the instinct there is an indivisible unity between the action and the fore-knowledge. This is the knowledge of why the action is there, and they are indistinct.
Instinctive knowledge is neither knowledge of representations, but is rather mere feeling knowledge. It is knowledge of attracting and repelling moments of resistance. Scheler wanted to decipher non-verbal knowledge. It is an awareness of what is going on, but it is an instinctual behaviour.
There are values and value-impressions.
Instinct disintegrates as we climb to higher forms of life. It goes hand in hand with the appearance of association and intelligence. For Scheler, the most basic forms of life are entirely governed and determined by instinct. There is no behaviour that is not analysable in terms of instinct, for the most basic forms of life. But the more autnomy the individual gets, the more freedom an individual has in determining its actions according to its instinct. A dog has instinct, but there are a lot of actions that cannot be reduced to instinct.
It determines its actions by association and rudimentary memory.
There is then a co-dependance between the emergance of single sensations and representations & their associative connective. Independence of singular drives out of the instinctive whole. The web of instinct is not anymore tightly connected but is loosened. Atomic configurations then pop up of single experiences which have to be connected by the animal itself, through the practice of association.
Singular drives appear, like a drive for specific actions; sleeping, reproducing, eating etc. These are always determining a certain segment of the behaviour of the animal like Uk’s Funktionskreise. In Scheler there is a genetic explanation of how several functional circles emerge, that is by instincts loosening.
This also creates the beginning of intellgience & learning how to treat certain objects, like using tools. You can name things etc etc.
And, most importantly, the individual appears and distinguishes itself from the species. They all have their own kind of way of being. Whilst the individual ant may not stick out from the whole of its species. There is a pre-given unity, an instinctive whole, in which the behaviour is entirely determined. But out of this some parts stop being determined, and this is to make up the coherence of the whole with the loss of instinct.
Against atomists in biology, who split up the whole of the universe into different fragments, and reflect on how they have to associate to form the coherencies of individuals etc. Scheler goes the opposite way and says that first we have the totality, and from there things are atomised. It is not the fragments that build the whole, but the whole in the recession of its whole gives way to singular features. This is called holism. It presupposes the unity of life-forms etc. and then explains the singular occurances in it.
In higher animals, sexuality is freed from rhythm of reproduciton and becomes a source of auto and heteroproduced pleasure and excitemenet.
3rd level of life: associative memory, mneme.
Further disintegration of instinct allows for associative memory and rudimentary intelligence. Association & memory reconstruct instinct synthetically. It is because of a loss that some animals invented intelligence, it is a mark of inferiority, at least if you interpret this like Nietzsche.
Scheler says that the loss of association is only a psychic analogy to a conditioned reflex. According to these laws of association, a complex of representations tends to reproduce itself and to complement missing components when a part of the complex, say a part related to the environment, is relieved in a sense or motor function.
It is making up something synthetically out of what comes out of the whole.
Heidegger calls this the Ring. The ring around which all comportment unfolds.
Associative reproduction or memory is present in every form of life.
In humans it takes a pervasive role in culture & tradition. He is trying to reduce features of human superiority in structures already present in animality, whilst arguing that there is a qualitative leap in the way in which we have culture, something different from nature. Culture and tradition is nothing else but memory of comportment from one generation to another. There is no Anamnesis in the platonic sense, because there is no self-production of knowledge, but just bear repetition. Everything Scheler says seems like he is showing that everything we call properly human is already presupposed in the structure of the behaviour of animals. There is no essential difference. All cultural achievements of man can be explained from what happens in the animal.
Historical progress in humanity requires the disintegration of tradition, just like the emergence of singular experiences requires the disappearance of instinct.