Max Scheler
Logical Investigations Husserl - after talking to him, Scheler was immediately under his spell (doomed yaoi).
Scheler started working a lot in the surroundings of that philosophy, was already a Ph.D at the time, so not really a “student” of Husserl, but did hang out with that whole circle.
Scheler was already pushing his own form of phenomenology.
In WW1, he was a staunch defender of German supremacism. Was convinced the blood of the germans was much more worthy. Defended imperialistic war, after WW1 he switched around in his political and religious thinking. And then died (1928).
The essay was written for a talk, which is why a lot of the ideas are not quite so thoroughly developed.
Due to Man’s Place in the Cosmos because a leading figure in …
His task is to reunify the image of man in a sociocultural situation (early 1900s) where man appears as extremely fragmented.
He reframes the dichotomy between mind and body, and overcomes the fragmentation of the study of man into various disciplines: from philosophy to psychoanalysis, from ethnology to sociology, from history to cultural anthropology.
Is there a through-line in the problematization of Simmel, Scheler, and Latour?
Uexkull influences →
- Scheler tries to get rid of the anthropocentric perspective of the environment of man being the world in itself.
- All environments (Umwelten) are holistically closed totalities
- Anti-mechanistic and anti-reductionist concept of environment
- The animal’s environment is the result of a reduction by means of perceptive selection
- Less info means less processing → animal is more efficient
- BUT: unlike in Uexkull (where this is a weaker notion, but still present), humans are not locked up inside their environment.
- Weltoffenheit
Umwelt / Umgebung are philosophically interchangeable.
For Scheler, life is ‘inwardness.’
Scheler (being kinda under Husserl) also believed in essences. All living beings have a soul (aristotle basically), but Scheler also attributes interiority similar to Cartesian subjectivity.
The boundary of life is the boundary of the psyche. This seems to be an internalist approach.
Animals are closed forms. The exchange with the environment does not occur on their entire surface. Only the sense-organs are open to the environment.