The individuality of human persons: A study in the ethical personalism of Max Scheler

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 21-50

  Crosby, John F ^a  

^a FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY OF STEUBENVILLE   (United States)

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EID: 0032164269     PISSN: 00346632     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (78)

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apocalypse der deutschen Seele (Salzburg: Anton Pustet Verlag, 1937), 3:152; the translation here and the translations in the subsequent citations from this work are my own. The study that von Balthasar gives here of Scheler (84-193) seems to be little known among students and critics of Scheler, even among those writing in German: and yet it is in my opinion the deepest critical study of Scheler that we possess. It is a particularly important study of Scheler's relation to Christianity.
2. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), xxiv. For the German see: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1966), 16. I will cite this and other works of Scheler according to the English translation but will always give in parentheses the corresponding pages in the German text as found in Scheler's Gesammelte Werke. One can see already in this citation that Scheler makes abundant use of italics. Unless otherwise indicated the reader should take the italics in the Scheler quotes as Scheler's own.
3. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), xxiv. For the German see: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1966), 16. I will cite this and other works of Scheler according to the English translation but will always give in parentheses the corresponding pages in the German text as found in Scheler's Gesammelte Werke. One can see already in this citation that Scheler makes abundant use of italics. Unless otherwise indicated the reader should take the italics in the Scheler quotes as Scheler's own.
4. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 508 (499).
5. To give the reader a general orientation in the texts of Scheler let me indicate the ones that I have found to be the most revealing sources of his thought on personal individuality. In his Formalism chapter 6A see section 1, "Person and Reason" and in chapter 6B see section 2, "Person and Individual," and in chapter 6B section 4 see the subsection also entitled "Person and Individual." In part I of his The Nature of Sympathy see Chapter 4, "Metaphysical Theories" and Chapter 7, "The Interaction of the Sympathetic Functions," especially the last ten pages. See also his essay, "Ordo Amoris," in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10.
6. Von Balthasar, Apocalypse, 85.
7. Scheler, Formalism, 372-3 (372).
8. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), 51. For the German see: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), 61-2.
9. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), 51. For the German see: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), 61-2.
10. I refer above all to Jorge Gracia, Individuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), especially chapter 1.
11. Scheler, Formalism, 489 (481).
12. Scheler, Formalism, 489 (481).
13. Of course it has some meaning in light of the fact that each human person once did not exist, which implies that the concrete essence of any person "preceded" the coming into being of that person. One might therefore say that on coming into existence a person "instantiates" his or her concrete essence. One should really not say "instantiate" here, however, because an "instance" of a kind is always one of many possible instances, whereas a given person is the only possible one who can realize his or her concrete essence.
14. In chapter 2 of my book, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), I defend an account of personal individuality that is very close to Scheler's. There is a terminological difference between me and Scheler: where he says "individuality" I say "incommunicability."
15. For all the different questions about individuality that Gracia recognizes and distinguishes, he does not take notice of the fundamental metaphysical question as to degrees, kinds, levels of individuality. One can pose this question with regard to the different kinds of individuality found in different beings, or with regard to the different levels of individuality found in one and the same being. It is above all this latter question that Scheler addresses in the following.
16. Scheler, Formalism, 561 (548). See also Scheler, Sympathy, 121 (130): "Das heisst ein Mensch ist umso mehr Individuum, je mehr er intime Person ist, je mehr er zugleich schweigendes Erleben ist. . . ."
17. Scheler, Formalism, 561 (548). See also Scheler, Sympathy, 121 (130): "Das heisst ein Mensch ist umso mehr Individuum, je mehr er intime Person ist, je mehr er zugleich schweigendes Erleben ist. . . ."
18. Scheler, Sympathy, 121 (129).
19. Scheler, Sympathy, 166 (167).
20. Scheler finds that these different "levels" of individuality in man are reflected in our knowledge of man; as this knowledge "progresses from the associative level of the soul to the vital, and thence to the existence of the spiritual person, the impression of individual quality grows, increasing by leaps as each new level is reached, until full individuality is attained"; ibid., 123 (131).
21. Gracia, 16-21.
22. Scheler, Formalism, 510 (501).
23. Scheler, Formalism, 510 (501).
24. Scheler, Sympathy, 65 (76).
25. Scheler, Sympathy, 123 (131). It comes as a surprise - a pleasant surprise for me - to find Scheler using the category of substance in explaining personal individuality; in the Formalism and elsewhere he sharply criticizes all attempts to think of persons in terms of substance.
26. Scheler, Sympathy, 65 (76).
27. It is remarkable that, though the question what individuality is (Gracia calls it the intensional question) and the question what individuates a being are two different questions, and though they sometimes receive two different answers, in the present case of the human person they receive a very similar answer, namely an answer in terms of the unique personal essence of each human being.
28. Scheler, Sympathy, 75 (86).
29. Gracia, 170-8.
30. Gracia would be quick to point out, and would be right in pointing out, that this divergence of Scheler from his position rests on the underlying divergence of Scheler from him concerning what individuality is at all. As we saw, Scheler includes in his understanding of individuality that in virtue of which a being is itself and no other. Gracia excludes all such "distinction from others" in his determination of the intension of individuality. Thus Scheler is working with a somewhat different explanandum when he takes up the question of the principle of personal individuation.
31. Scheler, Sympathy, 123 (131). I have amended the English translation in a few places to bring it closer to the German.
32. Scheler, Sympathy, (85).
33. Scheler, Sympathy, 127 (135).
34. Von Balthasar, 191-2. He thinks that Scheler glimpses for a moment the unity of the vital and the personal in man in the course of discussing the spiritual achievement of St. Francis of Assisi (Sympathy, Part I, Chapter 5).
35. Scheler, Sympathy, 76 (86).
36. See von Balthasar's discussion of Scheler's essay "Zur Idee des Menschen" (1911): Von Balthasar, 162-3. He argues that Scheler here tends to identify the essence of man with the mystery of grace.
37. Quoted by Von Balthasar, 164. It is not surprising when Von Balthasar says the radical sundering of spirit and instinct in the late philosophy of Scheler was already latent in the earlier and best works of Scheler.
38. Scheler, Sympathy, 18-23 (29-33), 42-5 (53-6).
39. Scheler, Sympathy, 18-23 (29-33), 42-5 (53-6).
40. Scheler, Formalism, xxiv (15).
41. John F. Crosby, "Max Scheler's Principle of Moral and Religious Solidarity," Communio 24, no. 1 (1997): 111-27.
42. Scheler, Sympathy, 160 (163).
43. See also the kindred teaching of Scheler's essay, "The Nature of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge," in his On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972). German: Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1968). In this essay Scheler argues that philosophical knowledge is grounded in a certain love of absolute value and being.
44. See also the kindred teaching of Scheler's essay, "The Nature of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge," in his On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972). German: Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1968). In this essay Scheler argues that philosophical knowledge is grounded in a certain love of absolute value and being.
45. Scheler, Sympathy, 101 (109).
46. Scheler, Sympathy, 101 (109). Scheler is here trying to establish the principle, "love of humanity [Menschenliebe] underlies acosmic personal love and the love of God." He explains himself by saying that I lose the chance of recognizing certain persons in all their uniqueness when I erroneously think that they are not even human beings. When, for instance, Aristotle divides human beings into free men and slaves, so that only the free men are really human beings, I can no longer encounter the slaves as persons. As I say, however, this love only disposes me favorably towards personal love for another, it is not that love whereby I apprehend them in all their personal individuality.
47. Scheler, Formalism, 488 (480).
48. Max Scheler, "Ordo Amoris," in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 (Bonn: Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1986), 352 (all translations from this essay are my own).
49. Scheler, Sympathy, 157 (160).
50. See especially Scheler, Sympathy, 156-9 (159-62).
51. See Scheler, Formalism, xxiii-xxiv (15).
52. It would be interesting to consider how Scheler's thought on personal individuality is limited and qualified by his thought on the important place of exemplary moral persons (Vorbilder) in the moral life (see Scheler, Formalism, 572-95 [558-80]). If his affirmation of personal individuality were simply unqualified, then persons would be too different from one another for any one of them to be exemplary for the others.
53. Scheler, Formalism, 493 (485).
54. Dietrich von Hildebrand: Memoiren und Aufsaetze gegen den Nationalsozialismus, 1933-1938, ed. Ernst Wenisch (Mainz: Matthias Gruenewald Verlag, 1994). (By the way, von Hildebrand was for years an intimate friend of Scheler and was deeply influenced by his philosophy.)
55. Scheler, "Ordo Amoris," 351.
56. Scheler, Eternal, 25 (19).
57. Scheler, Eternal, 23 (18).
58. Scheler, Eternal, 23 (18).
59. The difficulties that we feel even with a suitably qualified concept of "individually valid truth" are placed in historical context by von Balthasar when he writes: "Still at work [today] in the background is the mathematical and natural science ideal of a truth whose criterion is general availability and obviousness. The positive value, indeed the very possibility of something that exists in itself also existing as such for me, seems to be a hidden contradiction. . . . The philosophy of personality that draws its ideal of objectivity from Greek thought is here at the end of its resources"; Von Balthasar, 153.
60. Scheler, Eternal, 25 (19).
61. The theme of dialogue in Scheler has been developed by Michael Barber in his Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler's Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy of Love (London: Associated University Presses, 1993).
62. Scheler, "Ordo Amoris," 354. The first section of this essay, entitled "Umwelt, Schicksal, 'individuelle Bestimmung' und der Ordo Amoris," is one of the main texts in Scheler on the individual vocation of each person. Among other things Scheler makes an important distinction between the Schicksal and the Bestimmung of each person, arguing that it is really only the latter that fully expresses the person as person.
63. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28-9.
64. I refer again to my 1997 Communio study of this principle.
65. It would be interesting to inquire whether Scheler, with his teaching about the individual value-essence and the individual vocation of each person, does not look towards post-modernist ideas about the "face" of the "other" (Levinas). Certainly the other would be weaker in his otherness if he just instantiated kinds and types, and is that much stronger in his otherness as a result of having something unrepeatably his or her own.
66. Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald Phelan (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1956), 64.
67. Karl Rahner, "On the Question of a Formal Existential Ethics," in Theological Investigations, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 2:222. German: "Ueber die Frage einer formalen Existentialethik," in Schriften zur Theologie II (Einsiedeln: Benzinger Verlag, 1955), 232.
68. Karl Rahner, "On the Question of a Formal Existential Ethics," in Theological Investigations, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 2:222. German: "Ueber die Frage einer formalen Existentialethik," in Schriften zur Theologie II (Einsiedeln: Benzinger Verlag, 1955), 232.
69. While at the beginning of his essay Rahner rejects situation ethics, he is at pains to preserve its core of truth in his existential ethics. Rahner rejects, just like Scheler does, the nominalism of situation ethics.
70. Scheler too sometimes speaks of "conscience" in this connection, as in Formalism, 494 (486) and 509 (499). Indeed, he seems to think that this deliberation about my most personal moral tasks is the most proper function of conscience.
71. Scheler too sometimes speaks of "conscience" in this connection, as in Formalism, 494 (486) and 509 (499). Indeed, he seems to think that this deliberation about my most personal moral tasks is the most proper function of conscience.
72. Rahner, "On the Question," 225 (236).
73. Rahner, "On the Question," 226 (236-7).
74. Rahner, "On the Question," 226-7 (237). Cf. also this: "God is interested in history not only in so far as it is the carrying out of norms, but in so far as it is a history which consists in the harmony of unique events and which precisely in this way has a meaning for eternity"; Rahner, "On the Question," 228 (239).
75. Rahner, "On the Question," 226-7 (237). Cf. also this: "God is interested in history not only in so far as it is the carrying out of norms, but in so far as it is a history which consists in the harmony of unique events and which precisely in this way has a meaning for eternity"; Rahner, "On the Question," 228 (239).
76. An ethics that works only with general norms is for him an essential ethics, thus it is only natural for him to call the ethics that also recognizes strictly personal tasks an existential ethics.
77. Rahner, "On the Question," 232 (243).
78. My thanks to John White, Robert Miller, and Jorge Gracia for their critical reactions to earlier drafts of this study.