Values never occur in isolation, they are always in relation to other values. In other words, in the disclosing of values one does not merely intuit an instantiation of a singular value, but rather a world of values that form a vertical transcendence of the person. However, the question arises, how are these values disclosed to persons? Here Scheler wants to hold a middle position, namely, holding together the noumenon with the phenomenon. In this regard, Scheler wants to reject both a Kantian nameless abstraction and a form of substantialism and instead offer up a phenomenological approach that accounts for subjectivity and the unity of act-essences. For this reason, he recognizes that part of the process of forming values is subjective, varies from culture to culture, and generation to generation, yet still, he argues, can present a normative experience that highlights a given reality which truly exists. In this way it is possible to describe various societies and cultures as holding different values, for example as being more hedonistic, or more utilitarian. But, nevertheless these subjective and culturally accepted social values are not enough for an ethics which intends to get beyond a nameless noumenon and instead offer up a positive approach to the human person. As Julius Bixler notes, for Scheler “We must first know what good and bad are in themselves, not in their social setting but in their nature…” Scheler writes, “For ethics does not try to make understandable what is considered good and evil according to social validity; rather, it seeks to make understandable what good and evil are.” In other words, it is not enough for ethics to merely present social validity based on a culture based system-program of values, but rather must be able to articulate a legitimate hierarchy, or order to values.
This interesting component of Scheler’s personalism, namely his commitment to a hierarchy of values, is the most difficult for him to prove given his sole commitment to phenomenology. Yet it is fundamental to his system as a whole. As Perrin writes, “The hierarchy of values is itself absolutely invariable, while the order of preference in history is itself variable.” Hence, Scheler does not wish to diminish historicality or the subjective role in values, but rather counterbalance it with an appeal to an a priori order. The hierarchy of values inherently implies an order of rank that is on the noumenon side, but is disclosed through the phenomenon. Scheler writes, “The most important and most fundamental a priori relations obtain as an order of ranks among the systems of qualities of non-formal values which we call value-modalities.” Hence, these value-modalities form an inherent hierarchy which enables value systems to be evaluated and determined as higher or lower. But, given that values are disclosed to persons, who as Scheler recognizes are subjective, what are the criteria in which to adjudicate the a priori order of values once they are instantiated into the social order?
Scheler argues that there are five criteria, or modalities, for determining the respective merits of competing values. The first criterion for determining the merit of a value is to test for its permanence, that is, for its value over time. Here Scheler gives us a typical scenario in which he believes the longevity of a value can be disclosed easily. “If, he asserts, I affirm my love for someone, I do not qualify my testament by saying ‘I love you now’ or otherwise indicate that this love is momentary. Rather, the notion of duration is conveyed in the affirmation itself. And if I find at some point that this love is gone, I must conclude that I misunderstood and misstated my original sentiment, that I never really loved this person.” In this criterion, Scheler is able to thematize the person as intrinsically tied to values that are transtemporal, as seeking values that do not remain on the level of the fleeting, but on the level of permanence. The second criterion for adjudicating competing values is the extent to which a value is diminished or consumed in its various expressions and manifestations. In this criterion, a value can be understood as higher the less it is able to be divisible among the individuals that participate in it. An example of this type of value would be beauty, as beauty is never lessened by the amount of individual things which participate in it.
The third criterion for adjudicating values is when the “value is higher the less it is dependent upon the existence of another value for its own worth.” Here the criterion is whether the value itself is universal enough that it is not isolated to particulars. An easy example would be a tool which only has value because it was designed to serve. In other words, just as a tool is used for a means to something else, a high value would be the end value itself, not merely a means to another value. The fourth criterion is the quality of satisfaction in the value. Here Scheler does not have in mind merely a utilitarian sense of pleasure versus pain, but a fulfillment of experience, a sense of purpose. It is this criterion, more than any other, that Scheler’s interpretation of values opens up to claims of subjectivism. What is a sense of fulfillment but a subjective experience that varies from person to person? Here Scheler seems to anticipate the subjectivist critiques by arguing that these criteria are merely the phenomenological intimations of a much deeper lying principle. However, it seems a legitimate critique to pose the question of what is the difference between Kant’s nameless X and Scheler’s ‘phenomenological intimations?’ We will explore Scheler’s Kantian problem in fuller detail below.
Finally, the fifth criterion for adjudicating between competing values is the higher the value is on the hierarchy, the less relative it is in value. It is important to note here that Scheler is not using the term relative is subjectivist meaning, but instead is using it as a term that expressing a dependence within some values. In other words, relative values rely in a subject for their meaning, as in the values of nobility, vulgarity, etc. In contrast to relative values, absolute values are not contingent upon a subject but instead completely valuable of its own merit.
After articulating the criteria in which the hierarchy of values can be adjudicated, Scheler separates values into two levels. On the lowest level of values are those which are sensible, namely, pleasure, pain, enjoyment, and suffering. “These values appear in sensuous feeling. The entire class of values is ‘relative’ to beings of a sensuous nature.” Just above the modality of the sensible, Scheler places the modality of life, namely, health, disease, vigor, joy, grievances, etc. Moreover, by separating these two levels of values Scheler directly rejects hedonism and utilitarianism. By placing a higher value on life, as opposed to the sensuous feelings that are derived from that life, Scheler rejects a value system which prioritizes usefulness. For Scheler, the error that utilitarianism commits is the conflation of life values to sensible values. In other words, life is more than the sum of preferences and desires toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain and suffering. Here we can see an important feature of Scheler’s personalism, namely that the lower values, that is, pleasure, pain and suffering are only a derivative of the person. Nevertheless, both modalities are values that are still correlates to a person and hence are not absolute.
In explicating the absolute and highest values on the hierarchy, Scheler presents the modalities of the spiritual and the holy. Spiritual values do not necessarily require an ego or a body. Nevertheless, in spiritual feelings there must be a recipient, some subject in which the spiritual values are disclosed. It is here where the person is disclosed, a person who is psycho-physically indifferent and hence opposed to any form of reduction of the person to an ego and the corresponding Cartesian dualism. Furthermore, it is here in these higher values that the person will be disclosed as receiving values which transcend time, place and context, and instead reach into the very pure and absolute hierarchy of values itself.
After presenting the value hierarchy, Scheler is able to then formulate the person, as one who is neither a noumenon nor a subjectivist phenomenon. For Scheler this was the biggest error of Kant. In Kant, the person-in-itself falls into the noumenon and only the intelligibility of the phenomenon remained as cognitively available for appreciation. Hence, for Kant, the person functioned merely as a logical tool, as a postulation of something which has been reduced to a homo logos or homo noumenon. Instead, for Scheler, to “locate the person, we must look beyond every experience which is manifest or apparent to us towards the being which is having that experience.” Nevertheless, this understanding of person reveals a major problem in Scheler’s phenomenological articulation of the human person. As Perrin puts it, “by locating the person at the centre of all acts of valuation, Scheler honours Kant’s dictum that, as neither substance nor thing, the Person can never be treated as an object without doing violence to its elemental nature.” Here we can reveal the problem that Scheler leaves unaddressed, namely the requirement of an ‘elemental nature,’ and a unity of experience, yet no ontological framework in which to ground that phenomenological insight into reality. In other words, Scheler is unable to escape his own critique of Kant, as without engaging in any ontological commitments, and outright rejecting ‘substantialism,’ the outcome of Scheler’s personalism slides into a Kantian noumenological namelessness of the X, or a subjectivist bundle of experience-acts which have no suppositum in which to be grounded.
Scheler does have a role for essences, but they are always limited to individuals. Scheler writes,
Essence, as we mentioned earlier, has nothing
to do with universality. An essence
of an intuitive nature is the foundation of both general concepts and
intentions directed to particulars.
It is only when we refer an essence to an object of observation (“the essence
of something”) and inductive experience that the intention through which this
reference occurs because something that pertains to either a universal or a
particular. Therefore there are essences that are only given in one particular
individual. And, for this very reason it makes good sense to speak of an
individual essence and also the individual value-essence of a person.
However, as demonstrated above, Scheler does not believe
that the person is merely the sum total of one’s acts. The individual essence
of a person is necessarily an ontological statement about the qualitative
necessity of a being in whose experiences are realized. Hence, Scheler writes,
“It is that love which incorporates these qualities, activities, and gifts into
its object, because they belong to
that individual person.”
Note that for Scheler it is not the acts of the person which substantiate the
person, but that they belong to a person. Nevertheless there remains a major problem: how can Scheler appeal to an
ontological status of a being in which such a value-essence is grounded?The argument we began with was that Max Scheler presents a phenomenological appreciation of the human person, yet in so doing cannot escape his own criticism of a Kantian subjectivism where the person is eradicated into a homo noumenon. The personalism of Scheler has no room for ontology and metaphysics, yet requires it for his own postulations. However, this is not to say that a preliminary and foundational theory of ontology is not already embedded into the presuppositions of Scheler’s own philosophy. Rather, much of his own work is threaded with ontological and metaphysical presuppositions that are either unrecognized or minimized in attempt to thematize and prioritize the phenomenological.
Nevertheless, Without an appreciation for the ontological grounding of reality, there will be no escape from Kant. Hence, Scheler’s personalism necessitates an exploration into the existential component of the human person, not merely the phenomenological. And this can be accomplished with the work of Martin Heidegger.
