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Environmental Knowledge, Technology, and Values: Reconstructing Max Scheler’s Phenomenological Environmental Sociology

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Abstract

In light of research showing that climate change policy opinions and perceptions of climate change are conditioned by pre-held values, Max Scheler’s axiology, conception of ethos, and sociology of knowledge are revisited. Scheler provides a critical analysis of the values surrounding modern technology’s relation to nature, especially in his assessment of the subordination of life to utility, or, the “ethos of industrialism”. The ethos of industrialism is said to influence the modern understanding of the environment as a machine to be controlled for human aims. Scheler’s phenomenological proto-environmental sociology can contribute to the environmental social sciences in three ways: (1) articulating the axiological basis of human knowledge of the environment; (2) offering new values to consider in future research on the social dimensions of human-nature relations; and (3) a framework for connecting socio-ecological analysis with evaluation, specifically for evaluating different types of technologies based on their relation to the environment.

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Notes

  1. Similarly, Scheler’s views seem to be largely absent from the phenomenology of technology and contemporary sociology as a whole. The phenomenology of technology also draws heavily from both Heidegger as well as Merleau-Ponty (e.g., Ihde 1990; Dreyfus 1992). Yet Heidegger’s (e.g., 1953/1977) views on technology were deeply influenced by Scheler’s (Landgrebe 1966: 156; Leiss 1974: 104f.). Further, as one of the earliest critics of modern technology (Skrbina 2015: 142f.; Gunderson 2017), Scheler provided an early examination of technology from the perspective of values (Tierney 1993: 4f.). Although Scheler is now largely considered a minor figure in the history of sociological thought (Vandenberghe 2008), his work received attention from major figures in sociology (e.g., Becker and Dahlke 1942; Schutz 1942; Coser 1961; Berger and Luckmann 1966: 7f.; see also Frings 2001: 14f.).

  2. Scheler’s second period is characterized by a shift in focus toward a metaphysical analysis of the relation between the vitalistic “impulsion” or “urge” that conditions drives underlying reality (Drang) and spirit (Geist) (Frings 2001: 193ff.).

  3. Scheler rejects Husserl’s phenomenological methods in favor of a more intuitive approach, arguing that the essence of a phenomenon is to be grasped at the start of an experience in immediate, emotive intuition, as opposed to the end through a series of reductions (Scheler 1957a/1973; Frings 2001: 124, Ch. 7). In Scheler (1957a/1973; see also 1913, 1916/1973: 47f.), phenomenology is an attitude that allows for the access of a new kind of experience of a priori “facts,” or immediate intuitions of what is directly and fully given in experience (see also Spader 2002, 51f.).

  4. Scheler’s rankings of the value modalities are inconsistent. Utility values are ranked higher than sensible values in “Exemplars of Person and Leaders” (Scheler 1914/1987: 141)—the ranking Frings (2001: Ch. 1) retains—; utility values are demoted below sensible values as “derived values” (means), whereas the other value modalities are “basic values” (ends) in Ressentiment (Scheler 1912, 1915/1961: 152); and utility values are not listed in his most systematic treatment of the value hierarchy in Formalism in Ethics (Scheler 1913, 1916/1973: 104–110). I keep Ressentiment’s rankings because the work persuasively argues that it is “absurd” to subordinate enjoyment (or any other end) to utility (means).

  5. “Noble” is an umbrella word that refers to all of the qualities “that constitute the value of life in living organisms” (Scheler 1912, 1915/1961: 155).

  6. Feelings of ressentiment initially grow from a conflict between impotency and desire, or, an inability to attain positive values in comparison to a specific individual or amorphous social group who embody, or are seen to embody, these positive values (Scheler 1912, 1915/1961: 45ff.; Frings 2001: 147f.; Spader 2002: 97f.). This tension, if not acted upon, leads to revenge, envy, spite, and, finally a ressentiment where one simultaneously displaces the inaccessible positive value with a disvalue (delusive value-elevation) and devalues and demeans the positive value (delusive value-detraction).

  7. Later, Scheler’s formulation takes on a more physiological and biological dimension, discussed in the sections,"Knowledge of Control: Values, Technology, and Environmental Knowledge" and "The Limits of Scheler for the Environmental Social Sciences".

  8. Scheler’s time was said to be the predominance of the power drive, the age of wars and state-formation, and entering an “age of economics” with the predominance of the survival-nutritive drive stage (Hamilton 1974: 81f.; Frings 2001: 198). Due to the transfer to the “age of economics,” Scheler (1924/1980: 60) believes that Marx was right to stress economic conditioning of knowledge, but that this insight cannot be universalized to other periods (Meyerhoff 1961: xxii; Hamilton 1974: 81f.).

  9. Yet there are stark similarities between Scheler’s critique of scientism and technology and the works of Western Marxists, where science as a worldview is conceptualized as, “the product of a bourgeois class interested in the creation of the means of control of both natural and social world [sic] by technically rational methods” (Hamilton 1974: 75–76; e.g., Horkheimer 1947; Marcuse 1964). Further, although Horkheimer was critical of Scheler and the other new metaphysicians (e.g., Bergson), he sided with them, against their positivist critics, for keeping open problems that were deemed “unscientific” by the positivists (for review, see Slater 1977: 48–50).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Gerontology, Miami University, 375 Upham Hall, Oxford, OH, 45046, USA

    Ryan Gunderson

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Gunderson, R. Environmental Knowledge, Technology, and Values: Reconstructing Max Scheler’s Phenomenological Environmental Sociology. Hum Stud 40, 401–419 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9439-3

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