Max Scheler: The Constitution of the Human Being: From the Posthumous Works, Volumes 11 and 12.
Nicholas, Jeffery
Max Scheler
The Constitution of the Human Being: From the Posthumous Works,
Volumes 11 and 12.
Translated by John Cutting.
Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press 2008.
430 pages
US$39.00 (paper ISBN 978-0-87462-760-2)
Max Scheler was a German phenomenologist at the turn of the
twentieth century often considered the equal of Husserl and Heidegger.
Scheler, as the translator's introduction notes, considered himself
the only true metaphysician. The Constitution of the Human presents an
elaborate and developed metaphysics from a phenomenological point of
view that could rival any modern Thomistic account of metaphysics.
The Constitution of the Human Being comes from the posthumous works
saved by Scheler's widow and seems to consist of essays brought
together by the translator, British psychiatrist John Cutting. The book
consists of eight parts: two sections at the beginning which lay out
Scheler's phenomenology; a third section (the largest) on
philosophical anthropology; sections devoted to a metaphysics of the
human being, a metaphysics of cognition, a discussion of the
meta-sciences, and a 'theory of the causes of everything'; and
a concluding section of supplementary remarks.
Scheler begins by laying out the typology of metaphysical systems.
Knowledge is, he claims, participation of a knowing subject in a being
independent of the subject, which entails that metaphysics is the
attempt to 'participate in the absolute reality of things
themselves' (11). Scheler spends some time distinguishing
metaphysics from art, fantasy, and the natural sciences. He holds that
metaphysics must incorporate the findings of science and asks, 'How
is science possible?' He trenchantly applies the findings of
Einstein's special theory of relativity and relies heavily on
notions of quantum mechanics throughout the text--an approach that makes
his work still relevant today. Human beings take pride of place because
they in particular are the things 'in which all essences of the
world came together at the same time' (55), which is why
metaphysics is possible. The human experience of value proves
fundamental, because it drives cognition and makes the link to knowing
God, which is the coming-to-be of the world.
Human beings come to know reality through the mental act of love
which allows the essence of anything to come into the human being. This
move allows the subject 'to grasp the essential structure of the
world' (78). Reality makes itself known through resistance to the
human being. Any entity can be divided into its meaning content and its
image content, which helps reveal the ur-phenomenon. The ur-essence, in
contrast, comprises the meaning content combined with the ur-phenomenon.
Scheler claims that the ur-essence is an aspect of God's essence,
'making up part of the Supreme Being' (87), which is the
foundation of Scheler's panentheism. The upshot of Scheler's
phenomenology is his view of metaphysics as the reproduction of the
world as a totality from its divine ground. Where science examines
references and foundations, and phenomenology attempts to see the
intrinsic nature of matters by shutting off the lifedrives, metaphysics
encompasses both the natural world of science and the reduced world of
phenomenology. Accordingly, metaphysics leads to God, because the
reduction is directed toward absolute being, that is
'"being" whose essence and existence are one and the same
thing' (108). This God is not the Christian or Thomistic God,
however, but Being-itself which lies under everything.
Having established his basic metaphysical position, Scheler turns
to the human being, which is a microcosm of reality. Quickly dismissing
the different accounts of the soul in the history of Western philosophy,
Scheler contends that, rather than dividing the human being into body
and spirit/soul, we should consider a tri-partite division: body, soul,
and mind. Body and soul eventually disappear, but mind returns to God.
His position rests on two points. First, Scheler dismisses the idea that
human beings have something over and above non-human animals. Rather,
human beings exhibit a supra-vital interest when mind or consciousness,
which in non-human animals serves life, in human beings becomes the
master of life. The coming-to-be of a human being is a
'meta-cosmic' event, in which everything comes to serve the
goals of mind. Scheler adopts, then, the Hegelian thesis of evolving
consciousness in the same manner as Bergson (whom he dismisses) or
Tielhard de Chardin. Second, Scheler relies heavily on quantum mechanics
to suggest that even matter is not fully real or known, and is in some
sense an expression of mind. The argument is interesting and is not
fully developed, but it does paint an interesting picture to support
Scheler's broader metaphysical claims about mind and God as the
conglomerate of ur-essences. Within this discussion, Scheler makes
important claims about how the life-drives direct perception, an insight
which is often ignored in discussions of philosophical anthropology and
which, according to Honneth and Joas, makes an important contribution to
the Marxist development in this field. (See, e.g., Honneth and Joas,
Social Action and Human Nature, Cambridge University Press 1988,
commenting on Scheler's Man's Place in Nature)
The human being's existence is rooted profoundly in the divine
being, a being which, as much as the idea of the self, belongs to the
world-consciousness of the human being." Yet the human being is not
a child of, but rather a co-collaborator with, God. In the human being,
as throughout the universe, mind and life-force work together to work
out the original conflict of Being-itself. The human being is free to
realize itself at the expense of the physical organism and lacks any
individual immortality. Rather, the mind of the human being is
sublimated into the mental and spiritual energy. Whence our knowledge of
the Supreme Being? From the fact that mental and spiritual life force
cannot be derived from any evolutionary aspect of nature. The human
being, then, is 'an extra-temporal coming-to-be of the very
eternally self-positing substance' (222). Scheler's working
out of the coming-to-be of the self-positing substance--or Reality or
Being itself--which is prior to the Supreme Being or God, rests on his
notion of eros, as a disinterested drive that brings the human being to
objectivity. Perhaps because of the structure of the book, which I will
comment on later, the discussion of eros seems the least clear or
developed within Scheler's system.
In the last third of the book, Scheler discusses space and time and
the evolution of Substance or Being-itself. In our striving for
something in life we meet resistance which reveals being, the being of
which is independent of us. Thus, Nature must be the 'unique
supra-singular, image creating' attribute of Being-itself that
presents real being as images. Scheler concludes that 'all real
being is therefore a coming forth from something that is a real
coming-to-be, and therefore from something that is pre-real and with an
unobjectifiable nature' (265). Though Scheler's discussion of
space and time is informed by the theory of relativity, it remains
unclear whether Scheler has grasped the idea that relativity shows that
space-time is one reality, because he writes of them separately and
gives them separate qualities. In his discussion of the coming-to-be of
Substance, Scheler argues that the human being, as a microcosm, is that
'entity in whom Being-itself becomes aware of its two
attributes', which allows the coming-to-be of God to occur (365).
Scheler's focus on eros, on the life drives, on Being-itself,
and his panentheism make for a rich and unique phenomenological approach
to metaphysics. As such, it presents a stronger challenge to traditional
Thomistic metaphysics than has been recognized in the literature. Part
of this challenge arises from Scheler's interpretation of the
theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which, for Scheler, means
that real beings are not subsistent, and reveal the nature of
Being-itself as something beyond God. Substance becomes the foundation
of everything, and his metaphysics fits well with Hinduism and Buddhism
or with the work of Bergson, as mentioned before. While W. Norris Clarke
(The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, University
of Notre Dame Press 2001) and Oliva Blanchette (Philosophy of Being: A
Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics, The Catholic University of America
Press 2003) appropriate the findings of science and phenomenology into
their reconstructions of Thomistic metaphysics, they assert the unity of
beings despite what quantum mechanics reveals. While I think Thomistic
metaphysics proves stronger, people working in the field would do well
to address the challenges put forth by Scheler in his work.
The text is a worthwhile read, though not for someone new to
Scheler. The Constitution of the Human Being is a magnum opus that
brings together the mature thought of a significant and brilliant
thinker. The translator could make the reading easier here. In fact, my
main complaint about the work is that the translator leaves too much
guesswork to the reader. The short introduction to Scheler, at two
pages, says nothing about the content of the work. Further, the
structure of the work remains an enigma. Why are these different
chapters put together in the way they are, or as a whole at all? The
book's cover notes that this work brings together the writings of
Scheler on metaphysics and anthropology, but it does not--and the
translator does not--say whether this was written as a complete whole.
It is unclear why some sections have dates and some do not. Do we not
know when other sections were written? Does this not suggest that these
parts might have been intended to be somewhere else? Most importantly,
some of the ideas themselves do not seem fully developed where they
occur in the manuscript.
In general, while Scheler's book proves a major contribution
to the field and having an English translation is invaluable, I caution
the reader to be prepared to invest some significant time in working
through Scheler's ideas.
Jeffery Nicholas
Mount Angel Seminary
