An Examination of Max Scheler's Phenomenological Ethics (PhD Thesis) (original) (raw)

An Examination of Max Scheler's Phenomenological Ethics

Thanks to my friend and colleague, Dr Will Jones, for many months of fascinating conversations on politics, philosophy and theology, sometimes relevant to my thesis, and for reading drafts of this thesis and providing detailed, wise, comments and queries that have made it considerably better. The outside perspective was deeply valuable. My thanks to Dr Kelley Ross for first getting me interested in philosophy at all as a teenager, when I was looking for information on the Byzantine Empire, and for the breadth and dedication of his writing on so many subjects. Following this, chapter six analyses Scheler's theory of 'persons', particularly with reference to Emmanuel Levinas. An entire chapter is dedicated to the ethical significance of persons because Scheler considered his whole theory a 'personalism': his distinctive ideas about persons are at the core of his ethical vision. But, this can easily get submerged in the focus on the ideas about 'material values' for which Scheler is best known. This thesis argues that ethical intuitionism can be strengthened not just by adopting and grafting on Scheler's theory, but by applying ideas from other complementary 19 th and 20 th century philosophers to Scheler's theory to enhance it further. It presents this as a positive theory of how the fundamental features of ethical experience may be epistemologically and phenomenologically justified based on objective values as the object-correlates of acts of intentional feeling and conation. It presents this theory as a superior theory of ethical 1 Scheler, M. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Translated by Manfred S. Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1913-1916], p.xxiii 2 Ibid, p.xv 3 Scheler's core concept of material values, is hence contrasted explicitly with Kant's focus on the connection between the a priori and form of cognition of judgement. The degree to which Scheler's accusations of 'formalism' against Kant are entirely justified is beyond the scope of this thesis, which largely focuses on Scheler's positive theory of ethics. The relationship between the two philosophers is considered in more detail in chapter three, section eight 'The Relation to Kant's Ethics'.

Scheler' s Phenomenological Ontology of Value: Implications and Reflections for Ethical Theory

attempt to invent a new ontological language to describe value experience clearly as Heidegger invented for his fundamental ontology of Dasein. In so doing, Scheler's phenomenological descriptions often use metaphysically rich language and in so doing, Scheler generates ambiguity surrounding what he most sought to make clear, value. To remedy this confusion, I argue that Scheler's concept of Aktsein can supply an ontological understanding of value given the dearth of a clear ontological explanation of value in his phenomenological period culminating in the Formalism. This inquiry is divided into three chapters. In Chapter 1, I explain the central concepts in his phenomenology of value at root in the Formalism. I both explain and reveal the central ambiguities in the Formalism. For the most part, Chapter 1 is expository and develops an interpretation of the central ambiguities in Scheler's phenomenology of value. In Chapter 2, I problematize these central ambiguities and take note of when and where phenomenology collapses into ontology. This transition can best be made clear in his Idealismus und Realismus essays where Scheler explicates the structure of being--in--an--act at the very moment he "ontologizes" phenomenology. In addition to that moment in this ii work, I make analogies to Heidegger's phenomenology as a way into ontology. By making specific analogies to being--in--an--act and being--in--the--world, I show how the similar ontological tendencies in Heidegger provide us with a way to regard Scheler's Aktsein. In making this analogy, I do not reduce Scheler's phenomenological ontology to Heidegger, but instead put them into dialogue with each other revealing the solution of Scheler's ontology of value is realized in the act--intentionality of love. When I draw my conclusions both from the analysis of the Idealismus und Realismus essays and Heidegger, I label Scheler's ontological account of value: participatory realism. In Chapter 3, participatory realism is, then, put into contact with philosophers from the emotivist tradition. I define the emotivist tradition to include a noncognitivist interpretation of David Hume, A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson. While I could have been content to seek out a solution to this ambiguity in Scheler's work and conclude the merits of my interpretation, I am a firm believer in Scheler's position as a solution to the problem of value ontology. As such, participatory realism's uniqueness and merit are better served by putting it into contact with another decided alternative. Given that the analytic tradition had supplied emotivism as a view that connects the emotions with value--experience, it seemed only fitting that Scheler could call into question a dominant answer to value ontology and further clarify the resources Scheler brings to bear on the problem itself.

Phenomenology and Ethics: From Value Theory to an Ethics of Responsibility

Studia Phaenomenologica, 2014

Th ere seems to be a shift in phenomenology in the 20 th century from an ethics based on value theory to an ethics based on responsibility. Th is essay attempts to show the path marks of this transition. It begins with the historical development that led Husserl to address the question of ethical objectivity in terms of value theory, with a focus on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. It then explains Husserl's phenomenology of ethics as grounded in value theory, and takes into account Heidegger's objections to it. Finally, it considers Sartre as a transitional fi gure between value theory and an ethics of responsibility and attempts to show in what sense, if at all, Levinas' phenomenology of ethics could be an absolute break with a phenomenological ethics based on values.

The "Cape Horn" of Scheler's Ethics

This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral and the Simply Normative” at the Max Scheler Society of North America at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Pasadena, California, on March 25, 2004, and subsequently published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 121-143. Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved. This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question. Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good. Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.