Summary

That brings this overview of Max Scheler's ethical philosophy to an end. Before I move on I am going to briefly summarise what I see to be its main points. Then in the next chapter I look in further detail at Scheler’s ethical epistemology, with reference to current discussion of affective intuitionism, and demonstrating a framework of ethical knowledge. In the two chapters after that I look at some of the main normative issues raised in Scheler’s theory of values and ethical choice, particularly in chapter six his idea of ‘Persons’. For brevity's sake I have restricted myself in this chapter to what I believe are the fundamental features of Scheler's ethics, ignoring particularly his extensive non-ethical analysis of the phenomenological concept of the Person in the Formalismus.

The most well known and important part of Scheler's philosophy is its focus on values: for Scheler material values essences are the basic facts of all our practical reason in the same way that physical facts are the basis of all our theoretical reason. Values ultimately inform all our ethical thinking. They are not in any way mysterious entities. For Scheler they are a fundamental part of all practical reason, even that of animals, and he considers them to be a near constant part of all our experiences and accessed in ways that are intensely familiar: through object directed feeling and conation. It is only the attempt to clarify them phenomenologically as pure values, abstracted from the goods in which they are instantiated, that they become something that may seem unfamiliar. But Scheler's theory places moral and ethical thinking fluidly within the entirety of human practical experience and motivation. Scheler is aware that his theory is radical but he argues that actually ethical thinking has always taken place in terms of values. This fact has just never before been presented clearly due to, what he calls, historical philosophical prejudice against the idea of an emotional a priori, and the lack of the phenomenological method, the vital means to clear away the fog of confusion that has surrounded philosophical ethics.

Scheler's philosophy is generous in the detail and richness with which it paints human ethical life, particularly in the sheer quantity of essences and essential relations it describes. This stands in stark contrast with many historical ethical philosophies that have attempted to reduce ethical life to as few principles or mechanisms as possible. For Scheler these efforts substantially miss the point. Human ethical life is richly complex and interconnected and so attempts to render it in any one simple term will inevitably be not just simple but simplistic. Scheler believes that all such over-simplified theories will inevitably end in paradoxes they cannot explain when they come up against actual human ethical experience, such as utilitarianism suggesting the murder of innocents if sufficient pleasure should be derived from it, or Kant demanding one tells the truth to murderers. There is always the risk that any complex ethical theory will merely end up losing clarity and philosophical rigour through its complexity. But Scheler's philosophy is not

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just arbitrarily complicated but intensely detailed in each of its analyses, a mark of his phenomenological background, and this helps maintain the rigour of his theory at both the broad level and that of individual features.

Scheler supports this richness of description with his focus on the importance of direct ethical insight. He argues that a priori ethical intuition is as significant a part of human experience as theoretical perception. Ethical knowledge is not based in judgement or acts of the will but in direct ethical perception and cognition that exists prior to any ethical action, to the extent of shaping our possible experience of obligation. This opens the possibility of accurate ethical knowledge being a part of everyday ethical life while separating this individual normative ethical knowledge qualitatively from that which forms the content of philosophical ethics and from that of social moral norms and rules. It allows him to explain a wide range of value statements within the same ethical framework, while separating out their distinct features in detailed phenomenological analysis: such as that between ideal and normative oughts, between the personal value essence and the moral tenor, among many other examples.

This focus on insight leads to Scheler's emphasis on the individuality of ethical obligation and the central role of persons in ethics. For Scheler this is both itself a matter of direct ethical intuition and a natural corollary of the richness and complexity that he finds in the entirety of human ethical experience. Just as different elements of ethical cognition and motivation bear qualitative differences, so do different levels of pure values, and so do different individual ethical calls. The qualitative uniqueness of the ethical call goes hand-in-hand with the uniqueness and importance of persons within his ethical framework. The highest levels of values are accessible only to individual persons and because insight is a function of individual persons they always have the potential to override the ethical knowledge of their society with deeper ethical knowledge.

Finally, Scheler combines a belief in the diversity and individuality of ethics with a constant commitment to the objectivity of individual ethical insight and philosophical ethical knowledge. He argues that "material a priorism" can give both the rigorous knowledge offered by rationalist ethical philosophies and the connection to the complicated nature of emotional life offered by empiricist or sentimentalist theories. His unique ethical epistemology combines the objectivity of values but the relative subjectivity or goods and norms. The very pluralism and diversity of his analyses would seem to suggest a subjective ethics but the detail he displays counters this interpretation, as he attempts to ground that pluralism in the objective phenomenology of actual ethical experience. The epistemological claim that underlies this objectivity is that Scheler alone has isolated the true ethical facts of experience in material values essences that alone can ground a truly, accurately, objective and complete theory of human ethical experience in all its rich complexity.

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