Max Scheler
Characteristics of Higher Values
A' Priori Hierarchy of Value Modalities
Religious Values (saint vs sinner)
- It is the values of the Holy and Unholy.
- Appear on objects given as “absolute objects”.
- The derivative values are sacraments and forms of worship.
- The feeling-states are states of bliss and despair.
- The feeling-responses are belief, unbelief, awe, worship, etc.
- Ability to Endure
- Indivisibility
- Generates other values
- Gives deeper satisfaction
A' Priori Hierarchy of Value Modalities
Vital Values (healthy vs sick)
Spiritual Values (beautiful and just vs ugly and false)
- Values connected with general well-being.
- Corresponding feeling-states are health, sickness, aging, exhaustion, vitality, etc.
- It also includes the feeling-toned responses: being pleased, anger, courage, anxiety, etc.
- Justice/Injustice; truth, of which scientific and culture values are derivative; aesthetic values of beautiful and ugly.
- The feeling-states are joy and sorrow.
- The feeling responses are delight, dislike, approval, disapproval, reverence, contempt, retaliation, sympathy.
- For Scheler, “value” is essence itself insofar as it is worthy of being desired and possessed. “Good is an existing thing holding a “value”. “End” is the motivation that exists in each human action actively pursuing something that might or might not have the value pursued.
- Moral values of good and evil are personal not only in the superficial sense of coming from the person who acts but in deeper sense of contributing to formation of our person.
- Doing good makes us more of a person while doing evil makes us less of a person.
A' Priori Hierarchy of Value Modalities
Sense Values (pleasant vs. unpleasant)
Values of Utility
- Objects of sensory feelings, and corresponding subjective states are delight and pain.
- We always prefer the pleasant, although carriers vary.
- Connecting Point with Vital Urge
- Economics, Politics, Productivity
- It is not included in Analysis of Feelings States
Values of Good and Evil
Material Value-Ethics
- Positive: Good Negative: Evil
- Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing.
- Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing.
- Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher value in the sphere of willing.
- Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower value (at the expense of a higher one) in the sphere of willing.
- Good and evil “ride on the back of the deed”.
- Two basic emotional acts:
- Act of love- the value of an object or person is deepened, revealing its highest or most profound significance.
- Act of Hate- a movement of destruction, a movement wherein the value of an object or person is demeaned or degraded.
- The feelings of love and hate are the acts in which the world first comes to have meaning for us and inherent to these movements is a preference.
- We tend toward or are attracted to which is of greater or positive value, and tend away or are repelled by lesser or negative value.
- In every experience, there is a present ranking of values, a preference of certain values to others.
- This work was motivated in part by a critique of the highly scientific or formalistic approaches to ethics introduced by Kant and later developed by the Neo-Kantians during the late 19th-2oth century.
- Scheler rejects both utilitarianism and eudiamonism, and holds that ethics rest upon an a priori, an obligation non-relative to future consequences or happiness.
“An essence is not an empty abstraction nor a concept of the mind. Essence is the most real and concrete nucleus of each thing. Essence is a priori, if a priori means anything that exists independently of any knowing mind; and essence is material, if material means concrete existence”.
- Scheler argues that a material or non-formal a priori arises in experience, specifically in the experience of value.
- All experience is already value latent.
- "It is the world that entices us to perceive it and to know it."
- Things of positive value come to the foreground of our attention, while things of negative value recede into the background.
- Valuing is an act of meaning, giving, or creation and is therefore an intentional act. These acts are not committed by the intellect or reason, but are acts of the “heart”.
Background of Max Scheler
- Born on August 27, 1874 in Munich, Germany.
- A German social and ethical philosopher.
- Studied philosophy at the
University of Jena under Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926).
His major works are Phenomenology and Theory of the Feeling and of Love and Hate (1913), Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (Part 1 1913, Part 2 1916), The Genius of War and the German War (1915).
- Received his doctoral degree in 1897.
- He became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne.
- One of the “founding fathers” of modern phenomenology.
- It was during his time in Jena that he took a trip in Heidelberg in 1898 and met Max Weber.
- He met Edmund Husserl in 1901 at a party then a year later read Husserl’s Logical Investigations