Abstract
We first distinguish, following Hartmann, between personality and personhood. The person executes itself morally by carrying out its intentions. It can discern a good-in-itself for itself that trumps all other moral considerations. From the peculiar moral position of the person, material value-ethics derives a variety of normative implications (1) concerning the individual and his social milieu; (2) concerning the nature of solidarity and the highest form of human society; (3) concerning the importance of value-persons in pedagogy; (4) concerning the solidarian love between persons as morally edifying. Hartmann’s personalism, while in fundamental agreement with Scheler’s, sees the moral person as a unique individual achievement of virtue as a balance-in-tension of vices and virtue on the model of the Aristotelian mean. As ethics seeks a synthetic unity of values, so must each individual seek a synthesis of the moral values to which he is drawn by his fundamental ethos or Ordo amoris, but which make competing demands upon him. Given the difficulty of discovering any unity in the realm of moral values, this idea of achieving a personal balance among those virtues and vices to which a person is drawn by his most fundamental orientation towards value is useful for its normative content. It describes the highest moral achievement possible for an individual. The chapter concludes with a listing of normative principles common to Hartmann and Scheler’s material value-ethics. No final synthesis of values is possible at this time; the moral life is a process to be undertaken, not a problem to be solved.
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Notes
- 1.
Hartmann notes here that a person falls short of his ideal personhood to “the exact extent to which he falls short of the claim of the general moral values which the Ought makes.” But how is it then possible that a person’s ideal can ever come in conflict with the ethos of his community? If it cannot, the moral ideal of every person is identical with that of every other person in his community or with that of Kant’s pure practical reason. Hartmann does not seem to have thought through the implications of this claim.
- 2.
One is reminded of the Hasidic tale of the dying Zaddik. He expresses his fear at meeting God, and his disciples comfort him: “Zaddik, you are as holy as Moses, as wise as Solomon, as learned as Hillel – how can you be afraid to meet God?” “Yes,” came the answer, “but even if that is so, God did not ask me to be Moses, or Solomon, or Hillel: he asked me to be me.” What saves this tale from being an ironic joke is the assumed separation and dialectical interaction between the empirical and the ideal person, between what one is and what one ought to become. We are both a specific moral potency and a specific reality; one conditions the other.
- 3.
A concept we noted earlier in Philip Blosser’s “Is Scheler’s Ethic an Ethic of Virtue?” (In: Blosser et al., op. cit.). Blosser’s genial analysis does not do justice to the normative value of the personalist element that the present work attributes to material value-ethics. Neither did this author’s previous work on Scheler’s ethics.
- 4.
This phenomenology was later significantly developed and modified by Scheler in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Gesammelte Werke, Band 8, 510 ff.
- 5.
Such is the interpretation of Maurice Dupuy. Cf. his La philosophie de Max Scheler, op. cit., 551 ff.
- 6.
A similar idea appears in Hartmann: “The axiological individuality and uniqueness of the ethos in each person are, as such, of value; in these is rooted all moral diversity” (Ethics II, Ch 9 a, 100).
- 7.
An interesting imaginative reconstruction of the consciousness of one of these young men is given in a passage in Sartre’s novel Le sursis. The intimate person is submerged but not invisible in the wild enthusiasm of one man for the being of another.
- 8.
- 9.
“Vorbilder und Führer,” op. cit., 142.
- 10.
Cf. for example, The Human Place in the Cosmos, op. cit., 40.
- 11.
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Gesammelte Werke, Band 7. Translation by the present author.
- 12.
As truthfulness is the virtue complementary to the value of truth, so personal love is a virtue complementary to the person, whom it exalts.
- 13.
Here is Hartmann’s answer to the question posed by first by Aristotle and then by Scheler and von Hildebrand as to how a vicious circle can be avoided: knowledge of virtue presupposes a disposition to virtue, and yet a disposition to virtue presupposes knowledge of virtue’s value. The state of being loved awakens a person to his self-value, and with that, to all being and value.
- 14.
“Ordo Amoris,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 359.
- 15.
“Ordo Amoris,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 359.
- 16.
“Ordo Amoris,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 354.
- 17.
Hartmann says this concept of an intelligible character or personhood is what is left when the “thought of God” in man, i.e., the divine image of the highest fulfillment of the individual personality, falls away (Ethics II, Ch 32 b, 344fn). With this theological disclaimer, Hartmann is in clear agreement with Scheler regarding the moral telos of the individual person.
- 18.
One wonders whether the personal love of the judge brings to his wife and children approaches the fraudulent but spiritually elevated love that Johannes created for his beloved from smoke and mirrors. While she thinks she is loved by Johannes, she is elevated; she grows into adulthood and glimpses her ideal personhood as reflected in what she foolishly takes to be Johannes’ love for her. The judge, perhaps, interprets his love to his family as the obligation to provide for them and their reciprocal obligation to obey him.
- 19.
Oddly, Hartmann, after formulating this principle twice, then attempts to remove the Kantian conflict between the universal and the personal values by arguing – unconvincingly – that Kant’s Categorical Imperative in fact contains an antinomic within itself, insofar as each situation is absolutely different from all others. One cannot say that one should will as all others in that situation ought to will, for no one else will ever be in just that situation.
- 20.
One thinks of Socrates’ example of the man who “gets what he wants in life without regard for what others think” – Callicles’ definition of the Good Life – by scratching himself all day long in the marketplace (Gorgias, 494 c). Perhaps, Socrates suggests by means of this example, we have not even begun to examine what we want and ought to want: that kind of life that is morally the highest for a person. To exhibit what the human heart in all its forms may in fact desire and yet what values it ought to desire and prefer in all their myriad forms is the intent of material value-ethics.
- 21.
For a thorough and insightful analysis of Scheler’s theory of the person in the state, cf. Stephen Frederick Schneck, Person and Polis: Max Scheler’s Personalism as Political Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
- 22.
For criticism of this idea of Scheler’s, cf. Eugene Kelly, Structure and Diversity, op. cit., 216 ff.
- 23.
Cf. Scheler’s criticism of Kant and the “German spirit” for its “betrayal of joy” in a yet untranslated essay, “Vom Verrat der Freude,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 6.
- 24.
One thinks of the sad character Tarrou in Albert Camus’ The Plague, who wishes to learn how to become a saint.
- 25.
Cf. Max Scheler “Der Bourgeois,” and “Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus,” both in Gesammelte Werke, Band 3. M.F. Frings’ commentary on Scheler’s hostility toward capitalism is very useful. Cf. The Mind of Max Scheler, op. cit., 167–80.
- 26.
Nicomachean Ethics, IX 4 1166 a 18–35, where the relation of a good man to himself is discussed. “He has, so to speak, nothing to repent of.”
- 27.
George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910).
- 28.
Scheler complained that he could not find “die lösende und erlösende Kraft der Synthese” (Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 11).
- 29.
The ancient Athenians, according to Thucydides’ representation of them, were proud of their virtues as warriors and men of action, and as thinkers and artists. They would have praised neither their saintliness nor their being masters of the practical; they produced neither a man like St. Francis nor a man like Edison.
References
Santayana, George. 1910. Three philosophical poets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schneck, Stephen Frederick. 1987a. Person and polis: Max Scheler’s personalism as political theory. Albany: SUNY Press.
Band 1: Frühe Schriften (1971). Edited M.S. Frings.
Band 3: Vom Umsturz der Werte (1955, 1972). Edited by M. Scheler
Band 6: Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre (1963, 1986). Edited by M. Scheler and M.S Frings.
Band 7: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart (1973). Edited by M.S. Frings.
Band 8: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1960, 1980). Edited by M. Scheler and M.S. Frings.
Band 10: Schriften aus dem Nachlaß. Band 1, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre (1957). Edited by M. Scheler.
Kelly, Eugene. 2007. Bildung und Demokratie. Pragmatismus und Bildungspolitik. In Die Bildung der Gesellschaft, ed. Ralf Becker et al. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann.
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Kelly, E. (2011). Ethical Personalism. In: Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. Phaenomenologica, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_10
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