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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.3

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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.3
Figures:

  • Scheler
  • Uexkull (biosemiotics as an influence)
  • Aristotle (layered soul, essence as an influence)

Scheler:

  • early follower of Husserl
  • sees fragmented image of man
  • Descartes/Kant: body/mind division
  • new disciplines (psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology) furthered fragmentation of discourses
  • human nature is concealed in this web of discources
  • Scheler wants to unify man through his relationship to other living beings

Scheler & Uexkull:
[Scheler was influenced by Uexkull, having the following views]

  • the world must be understood as plural
  • the world is human, animals only have enviornments
  • the animal as a subject (anti-mechanical)
  • the environment as a result of perceptive selection
  • only humans have access to an open world, animals are closed in their enviornments (Heidegger-esque) [misreading of Uexkull]
    [for Uexkull the animal is not closed, harmoniously fitting in with its environment, this is just a later misreading of him]

The Inwardness of Life:

  • Scheler believes in an Aristotelian human essence
  • all life has a layered essential constitution
  • going beyond Aristotle: all life has interiority
  • in lower life inwardness is a limited self-awareness
  • Scheler accepts animal psychology
  • the primordial phenomenon of living beings is to have a soul, which means having a being-for-themselves and an inwardness
  • for plants inwardness is actually a kind of openness
  • plant growth and nourishment are often too slow for us to notice, and thus consider as inward

3 Layers of Inwardness:
[each displaying a different psychic force, prior levels are needed for proceeding levels]

1. SENSITIVE IMPULSION:

  • plants

  • the non-separation of feeling and drive, impulsion, pressure, steam towards growth and nourishment

  • growth, reproduction, no proper conscious sensation

  • vital energy open to the outside

  • an inward force, in as much as it is completely open to the wind, the soil, the sun

  • because of this there is beauty in the world, despite the lack of consciousness (outward-directed expression, i.e. beauty)

    1. INSTINCT

  • animals

  • tied to the central nervous system

  • emergence of feedback processes and motoric behaviour

  • the circulation of information across the animal’s body, allowing movement (responding to signs)

  • instinctive behaviour is meaningful and obeys an unbreakable biological rhythm

  • it serves the SPECIES, not the INDIVIDUAL

  • it has almost nothing to do with learning, requiring none, or just a little of it (flight of birds)

  • very similar to the BAUPLAN

  • animals do not have access to the higher goal their instincts are leading them towards

  • the animal only knows the next step of action within a series it is not consciously aware of (a kind of ‘feeling knowledge’)

  • the disintegration of instinct leads to intelligence in higher life

  • the gaps of instinct need to be filled with intelligence [similar to Protagoras]

  • purely instinctual animals are in harmony with their environment, ones with intelligence are disharmonious

  • access to sensations as sensations happens outside instinct

    1. ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

  • the outcome of disintegrated instinct

  • rudimentary intelligence, but not proper intelligence yet

  • Pavlov’s dog-esque, this is more-so learned (rather than the unlearned instinct)

  • essentially conditioned reflexes

  • a primitive version of proper memory is present in all life, but in humans it takes center stage (culture, language)

  • life itself gives us everything we need to explain culture

  • tradition, language and culture are merely a generational passages of learned reflexes, i.e. associative memory

  • but human recollection is much more free

    1. PRAXICAL INTELLIGENCE

  • productive, creative, spontaneous

  • relies on combining sensations to produce new outcomes (ape seeing the sensation of hunger, the sight of a banana, and the sight of a stick to do something creative - grabbing the banana with the stick)

  • anticipation without training

  • meaningful action, without prior attempts (not stumbling on the right solution through trial, but figuring it out so to say)

  • it is a kind of free-form figuring out of color-tones (Uexkull again)

Beyond Life: The Essence of Geist

  • more in the sense of spiritual insights
  • the 4 layers of life: tradition, memory, practical meaning, intelligence
  • these are shared by men and animals
  • Geist however introduces a new dimension
  • it is beyond life, Geist remains beyond life, after life, outside life
  • Scheler uses ‘reason’ itself to refer to the same thing as Geist
  • Geist is something all together different from life, separated from evolution, novel to humans
  • manifest in higher ideals, suicides, moral acts
  • only spirit can oppose life
  • in Geist are: intuition, reason, awe, kindness, love, repentance, wonder, bliss, despair, freedom of will
  • all this together is the full Geist
  • Geist requires a person
  • the subject-Umwelt dichotomy is broken by us, as Geist beings, spiritual beings, we float beyond this polarization
  • we are WORLD-OPEN, we have a Welt, not an Umwelt
  • we have access to objects (remember the X-chair from Uexkull)
  • animals only have access to praxically codified entities

3 forms of self-presence and 4 layers of life

  • sensitive drive (plants), instinct (animals), spirit (humans)

Special about men:

  • we can TRANSCEND life itself
  • concieve pure space, access objects
  • we can place our center, our core, beyond the here/now and beyond life (such as morals or higher goals)
  • Scheler sees man as fundementally different, its not a question of gradation or complexification

Scheler:

  • humanist
  • anthropocentrist
  • traditionalist
  • Western-centric in his logocentrism

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