Abstract
Max Scheler was among Erich Przywara’s most important interlocutors, especially in Przywara’s early phase. Scheler pushes Przywara to make a number of judgments about early phenomenology, about the relationship between love and knowledge, value and being, person-as-spirit and person-as-body, intuitive knowledge and abstractive knowledge, immediate and mediated experience of God, scholastic thought and modern philosophy, the deification of the creature and the humble nothingness of the creature. This chapter traces some of these many judgments provoked by Scheler, and it does so by tracing Przywara’s critique of Scheler’s ‘primacy of love’—his notion of phenomenology as a reduction to a being-less horizon of the person, who is a kind of pre- or extra-ontological love-act. Przywara’s main response is that Scheler’s talk of the love-act ‘before’ or ‘without’ being is really only speaking of being by other means; rather than a metaphysics of being as being, Scheler holds a metaphysics of being as love-act. And this metaphysics has troubling consequences for Przywara. If the ‘love-act’ comes to mean something like ‘(primordial or authentic or personal) being’, then it stands in a dark, Manichaean suspicion over-against matter and knowledge as forms of thingly and servile ‘being’. If the person is a ‘being-less’ love-act which is an ‘immediate co-enactment of the divine love-act’ (as Scheler says), then intentional consciousness seems to become a kind of self-deifying affective enclosure—or else, as in Scheler’s late anthropology, the love- and feeling-acts of the person become the site of God’s progressive self-deification in history. Against a Manichaeism of personal-being versus thing-being, Przywara holds to the unity of being and value, and of loving and knowing. Against the religious posture of human affectivity as God’s self-realization, Przywara insists on loving and knowing as the creature’s humble and endless becoming into God, in an attitude of service.
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Notes
- 1.
The principle texts for Przywara’s engagement with Scheler are Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J.H. Newman (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1923), abbreviated here as RB; Gottgeheimnis der Welt (1923), collected in Schriften, vol. II: Religionsphilosophische Schriften (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), pp. 123–242; Gott: Fünf Vorträge über das religionsphilosophische Problem (1925), in Schriften II, pp. 243–372; Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1927) in Schriften II, pp. 374–512, abbreviated here as RkTh. Likewise important are the essays, ‘Tragische Welt?’ (1926) in Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927, vol. 1 (Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1929), and ‘Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie’, Stimmen der Zeit 115 (1928): 252–264. The translated volume, Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. David Bentley Hart and John Betz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), collects the essay, ‘Phenomenology, Realogy, and Relationology’ (1957), which contains an important, though later, treatment of Scheler. I abbreviate citations to this volume as AE I and II, referring to the two parts of the work. For overviews of Przywara’s engagement with Scheler and early phenomenology, see Martha Zechmeister, Gottes-Nacht. Erich Przywaras Weg negativer Theologie (Münster: Lit, 1997), pp. 94–107; and Bernhard Gertz, Glaubenswelt als Analogie. Die theologische Analogie-Lehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in der Auseindersetzung um die analogia fidei (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1969), pp. 152–161. There is an out-of-print English translation of RkTh, but it was not available to me while writing this essay. See Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. Alan Coates Bouquet (London: Oxford UP, 1935).
- 2.
In RkTh’s terminology, the tension of subject-object is constitutive of consciousness as such, and the entire scheme of all possible metaphysics of religion issues from it, as different ‘moments’ or ‘postures’ within that tension are conjugated both with each other, as well as with the polar tensions of concrete human existence (the polarities of body-spirit and individual-community). An analysis of the fundamental tension of consciousness towards world, or truth, or the infinite—i.e., towards a possible transcendent ‘exterior infinity’—implicitly contains a complete metaphysics, including a religious metaphysics of the creature-God relation, and a corresponding religiosity (RkTh, pp. 405–6). Likewise, in AE, the ineluctable interpenetration of meta-ontics and meta-noetics (AE I, §1) is ab initio indwelt, in a relationship of ‘in-and-beyond’, by the problem of theology in-and-beyond philosophy, and ultimately by the analogical relation of ‘God beyond-and-in the creature’ as its ultimate ‘formal ground’ (AE I, §4.1).
- 3.
AE I, §8.2, p. 312.
- 4.
AE, preface to the 1932 edition, pp. xxi–xxii.
- 5.
For a succinct account of Przywara’s vision in Gottgeheimnis, and its context within the German Catholic intellectual movements of the teens and 20s, see Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, ‘Die Newman-Rezeption in den 20er Jahren in Deutschland: Edith Stein im Umkreis von Maria Knoepfler, Romano Guardini und Erich Przywara’, in ‘Herz spricht zum Herzen.’ John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in seiner Bedeutung für das deutsche Christentum, Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, ed. (Annweiler: Plöger, 2002), especially pp. 51–3 and 59–70.
- 6.
Gottgeheimnis, p. 125; pp. 131–2, 137.
- 7.
See Gott, p. 248; RB, pp. 15–18; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 128, 218.
- 8.
Gottgeheimnis, p. 137.
- 9.
RB, pp. 133–4, 162.
- 10.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 138–156.
- 11.
RB, p. 9–10.
- 12.
Przywara, In und Gegen. Stellungnahmen zur Zeit (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955), p. 47.
- 13.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 132–3; 218–21.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 131–2, 137.
- 15.
RB, pp. 35, 222–4. Religionsbegründung, then, is ‘a furthering’ of Przywara’s ‘reconstruction of the patristic, and especially, Augustinian foundation of ethical-religious life in … Himmelreich der Seele (1922–3),’ a patristic-scholastic vision which is finds its modern culmination in Newman’s philosophy of religion and subjective life (p. x).
- 16.
RB, p. 95. Przywara’s word here (Klärung) means both ‘clarification’ and ‘cleansing’.
- 17.
In und Gegen, p. 51; RB, p. 242.
- 18.
In und Gegen, p. 54. In December 1923, Scheler wrote: ‘At no time of his life and development could the author call himself a “believing Catholic” according to the strict standards of the theology of the Roman Church’. Cited in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Kluwer, 1982), p. 303, footnote 14.
- 19.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Late in life, Przywara sorrowfully remarked that the ‘embittered’ attacks on Scheler from Catholic thinkers around 1922–3 (above all ‘the miserably bitter Josef Geyser’) only ‘drove the great religious philosopher of Christianity out of the Church. When, in 1923, I published my Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J. H. Newman and sent it to him, only a few wistful lines came back in reply. Geyser’s book on Scheler had already dealt the last blow’ (In und Gegen, p. 54). Przywara’s treatment in In und Gegen shows real sorrow for ‘the personal tragedy’ of ‘Scheler’s catastrophe’ (pp. 53–4).
- 20.
The idea has a significantly different meaning for Scheler than it has for Jean-Luc Marion, who develops it in The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 6, 71–2, 87–88. Marion does say ‘love without being’ is ‘univocal’, said in only ‘one way’, but adds that ‘God loves in the same way we do. Except for an infinite difference’ (Erotic Phenomenon, pp. 215–222; cf. p. 5; I thank Prof. William Desmond for pointing me to these passages). Love is finally, in a formulation which shows affinity with Przywara’s metaphysics, ‘receiving the unthinkable, as the sign and the seal of the measureless origin of the distance that gives us our measure.’ See his The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham UP, 2001), p. 155; cited in R. Horner, ‘The Weight of Love’, in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 237–8. One can hear some resonance with Przywara, for whom the creature’s analogical relation to God is a ‘self-ordering within a being-ordered’ by an ‘above that orders’ (AE §1.5, pp. 195–7). See also Claude Romano’s reading, where what Marion finally means by love’s univocity is something like love’s analogicity or equivocity (Romano, ‘Love in its Concept’, in Counter-Experiences, pp. 320–327). In view of the resonances, we might say with Joachim Negel that the core Christian experience for both Przywara and Marion is Deus interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, the ‘experience of ever greater distance within ever greater nearness’: ‘Here we see that the classical conception of being in the sense of the analogia entis, and iconoclastic phenomenology as above all the early Marion pursued it, not only need not mutually exclude one another, but can each fill one another out superbly.’ Przywara’s approach is similar: by engaging Scheler closely, he intended to show that phenomenology and metaphysics mutually enlarge and ground one another. See Negel, Welt als Gabe. Hermeneutische Grenzgänge zwischen Theologie und Phänomenologie (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), p. 147, footnote 125. My thanks to John Betz for this citation.
- 21.
David Bentley Hart remarks that the disadvantage of Marion’s philosophy of idol and icon lies in ‘mak[ing] it sound as if the icon contravenes being itself, rather than our idolatrous ontologies … When fallen vision—the victim of despair, anger, envy, anxiety, rapacity, avarice—ascends from these inessential moods to the perspicacity of charity’s oculus simplex, it sees being’. See his The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 237–41, here p. 239–40. Amidst appreciation of Marion, he laments Marion’s ‘surrendering being to Heideggerian poverty, stripping it of its infinitely actual splendor and power and grace … [and so] failing to see that love is in fact ontological’ (pp. 240–1).
- 22.
Gottgeheimnis der Welt, pp. 229–30.
- 23.
Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (1913/16), in Gesammelte Werke (GW) II, p.83. I abbreviate Formalismus as F. Scheler posits as a ‘fundamental law of mental acts’ (Aktfundierungsgesetz) that value-apprehension always and necessarily precedes any knowledge, ‘that originarily no existing being [Daseiendes] can be knowable by any consciousness (whether through intuition or thought), unless it has first been intended as a value-object of determinate value-quality in interest-taking acts (whether it be loved or hated), according to the sequence of acts that bring [phenomena] into givenness [der gebenden Akte].’ See Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921), in GW V (henceforward, E), pp. 306–7; and p. 219. For E and F in English translation, see On the Eternal in Man, Bernard Noble, trans. (London: SCM Press, 1960); and Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). The translations of Scheler in this paper are my own, though I have occasionally consulted Noble’s, and Frings’ and Funk’s translations.
- 24.
E, p. 81.
- 25.
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart (2nd ed., 1923), in GW VII (henceforward, Sy), pp. 151; cf. E, p. 79. ‘I have attempted [in Formalism] … to demonstrate the fact of true and originary intentional feelings—intentional, as opposed to mere feelings conditioned by presentation. There, I refuted the theory that in these intentional feelings it is thingly, ideative knowledge of beings [eine sachliche Ideenerkentnis des Daseienden] which reveals itself to us in a “dark” or “confused” way’ (Sy, p. 68).
- 26.
E, pp. 79–80.
- 27.
F, pp. 265–6; emphasis added.
- 28.
E, pp. 82, 80; cf. 306–7.
- 29.
E, p. 220 (‘Und da wir Nichts seinserkennend erfassen können, was nicht ursprünglich als Werteinheit gegeben war …’).
- 30.
E, p. 83.
- 31.
E, p. 259. For more texts supporting this analysis, see Przywara, RB, p. 163.
- 32.
E, pp. 78–9; F, pp. 176–177.
- 33.
F, pp. 267–8. Przywara thinks Scheler has misunderstood scholastic thought on this matter: ‘Scholasticism does not, as Scheler argues, in any sense analytically derive the essence of moral goods, nor of the goods of salvation, nor (most importantly) of the bonum as such from the essence of being ... “Value” is … in no sense merely a “gradient of being”’ (RB, pp. 83, 91; cf. pp. 87–95).
- 34.
F, pp. 82–4.
- 35.
As I note below, the irony of Scheler’s anti-Kantianism, in Przywara’s view, is that it is ferociously Kantian. Scheler, in an anti-Kantian move, claims that Fühlen has a kind of noetic value (albeit a non-intellectual one) which is as a priori and objective as rational knowledge. Value-feeling has all the dignity of an objective organ for perceiving reality, and therewith Scheler’s work represents a watershed moment in overcoming the Kantian syndrome which ‘assigns the ethical and religious to the emotional sphere (in the broad sense)’ and opposes it to thought, which is ‘restricted to purely mathematical-analytic and reflexive’ thinking (RB, p. 9). On the other hand, by insisting (against Kant) that the ‘noetic’ value of feeling is absolutely irreducible to rational knowledge, he ultimately radicalizes the opposition between practical and theoretical reason, between feeling and intellect. In Przywara’s analysis, this basic ‘Kantian remainder’ in Scheler’s thought betrays a metaphysical severance of being from value, and laid the groundwork for Scheler’s catastrophic fall into ‘the old gnostic’ dualism (RB, pp. 25, 159; ‘Tragische Welt’, in Ringen der Gegenwart I, p. 354). Scheler’s thought is not an actual overcoming of the ‘post-scholastic either/or between analytical-mathematical thinking and emotionality’, but simply one extreme pole within the same either/or. Still, Scheler’s attempt had, in Przywara’s 1923 appraisal, come ‘the closest’ of all (RB, p. 133).
- 36.
Sy, pp. 165–6.
- 37.
E, pp. 135–6.
- 38.
E, pp. 82–3.
- 39.
To anticipate one of Przywara’s arguments: Przywara counters that if Scheler wishes to found a ‘real unity’ of being and value, then he must also allow that value gives itself to us as an expression of being. He must affirm the (in Przywara’s view) authentic scholastic doctrine of value, where the value of a being is an expression of the degree of actuality of its nature—the degree to which a real nature has made actual its own ‘immanent ideal’ (RB, p. 133; cf. pp. 83–95). Value is ontological, inseparable from being, yet not in such a way that value is simply identical with a ‘degree of being’, as if a being’s placement on the hierarchy of being determined its value (the view Scheler attributes to ‘scholasticism’, and rejects).
- 40.
F, pp. 69–70.
- 41.
E, p. 307.
- 42.
E, pp. 70–72. Scheler’s view here, if divested of its voluntarist tendency, could clearly be understood in a way compatible with much of Catholic spirituality and metaphysics, ‘since,’ as Thomas writes, ‘loving God is something greater than knowing God’ (quia dilectio Dei est maius aliquid quam eius cognitio) (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 27, a. 4, ad 2).
- 43.
See E, pp. 219–221. For Scheler, the ‘being’ of God is primary only qua unknowable love-act (i.e., qua act-being / value-being), not qua intelligible being.
- 44.
See John Crosby, ‘The Individuality of Human Persons: A Study in the Ethical Personalism of Max Scheler’, The Review of Metaphysics 52:1 (1998): pp. 34–5, where Crosby notes how ‘Balthasar [in Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele, vol. III] speaks again and again of a certain “worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit) of the Schelerian person’, a result of Scheler’s ‘excessively separat[ing] vital life and spiritual person.’
- 45.
‘[T]he Person must never be considered a thing or a substance with faculties and powers, among which the ‘faculty’ or ‘power’ of reason, etc., is one’ (F, p. 371). Nor can this Person be an object of any knowledge- or feeling-act. The Person is, rather, ‘the immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing [die unmittelbar miterlebte Einheit des Er-lebens]; the Person is not a merely thought thing behind and outside what is immediately experienced ... [T]he Person only enacts [vollzieht] his existence in the experiencing of his possible experiences’ (F, p. 371; p. 385; cf. pp. 379, 382–386).
- 46.
Haskamp’s study, Spekulativer und phänomenologischer Personalismus: Einflüsse J.G. Fichtes und Rudolf Euckens auf Max Schelers Philosophie der Person (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1966), amply documents the sources of Scheler’s doctrine of the Person in Fichte’s ‘idealism of the act’ (Tatidealismus), which Scheler first imbibed through his Jena Doktorvater, Rudolf Eucken. Scheler still wished to reject the anti-personalist ‘Logonomie’ of the Fichtean absolutes Ich (F, 372). Haskamp shows that the Fichtean elements of Scheler’s thought, however, are fundamental commitments, not simple holdovers from his early idealist stage under Eucken. Scheler shares in the Fichtean dualism of act-being / object-being (Aktussein / Gegenstandsein or gegenstandfähiges Sein), where personal being is act-being (Haskamp, p. 165; cf. E, pp. 70–71). This metaphysical dualism founds Scheler’s anthropological dualism, which defines the Geistperson as the ‘spontaneous’, self-constituting love-act (Haskamp, p. 76). The ‘mere human organism’ belongs to the vitalistic realm of object-being, and has nothing to do with the Person. Przywara also sees a Fichtean lineage in Scheler (RkTh, pp. 383–4).
- 47.
Haskamp, pp. 176–7.
- 48.
Scheler, ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’ (1914), in Vom Umsturz der Werte (GW III), p. 186. ‘“The human being” [Mensch] in this entirely new sense is the intention and the gesture of “transcendence” itself, the being that prays and seeks God. It is not, however, that “the human being prays;” rather, he is the prayer of Life passing above and beyond itself. It is not that “he seeks God” [as one act among others]; the human being is the living X that seeks God!’ (ibid., p. 186; see pp. 189).
- 49.
‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’, in Vom Umsturz der Werte (GW III), pp. 90–1; F, p. 293. See Sy, p. 169: ‘All values which inhere in the thing-body [Körper], the lived-body [Leib], or the soul can be given to us as objects … Not so with pure Person-values, that is, the value of the Person himself. Whenever we in some way “objectivize” a human being, his Person slips out of our hand, and only his mere husk [i.e., the values of his body and soul which can be given as objects of an act] remains.’
- 50.
F, p. 294.
- 51.
Sy, p. 86; Crosby, ‘The Individuality of Human Persons’, pp. 30–36.
- 52.
F, pp. 292–296; cf. Haskamp, p. 185.
- 53.
F, p. 294.
- 54.
F, p. 293; cf. ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’, pp. 189–90. For Scheler, this human-as-animal / human-as-Geistperson division is identical to the division between fallen ‘natural man’ and divine ‘child of God’ or ‘member of the Kingdom of Heaven’. That is, the absolute value-Person in her ‘spiritual kernel’ is identical to supernature, to human-as-divine (Gottmensch und Übermensch [‘Zur Idee’, 190]). And nature is identical with fallen humanity, in a sense Scheler associates with Luther (‘Das Ressentiment’, p. 110): ‘Everything points to the fact that ... there is a division within humankind which is infinitely greater than that between human and animal in the naturalistic sense. For this division is, next to the strict continuity between human and animal in blood and organization always arbitrary ... Between the “born again” and the “old Adam”, between the “child of God” and the maker of tools and machines (“homo faber”) exists an unbridgeable division of essence; between animals and homo faber there exists a division of degree’ (‘Zur Idee’, pp. 190–1; cf. ‘Das Ressentiment’, pp. 108–9). (Biological) nature as such is un-spiritual, valueless, and identical with fallen humanity. See Przywara, RB, pp. 172–3.
- 55.
Ibid. See Haskamp, pp. 61, 181–6, 14, 77, etc. Scheler’s texts are rife with phrases like ‘Person’ vs. ‘organism’ (F, p. 294), ‘spiritual being’ vs. ‘bodily being’ (Geistwesen / Lebewesen; ibid.), ‘mere human’ vs. ‘God-man’/‘Super-man’ (bloßer Mensch vs. ‘Gottmensch’ / ‘Übermensch;’ ‘Zur Idee’, p. 190), ‘human as natural species’ (Mensch als Naturgattung; see ‘Absolutsphäre und Realsetzung der Gottesidee’, in GW X, p. 233), or ‘human animal’ (ibid.) to distinguish the psychophysical organism from the Person—the act-center which transcends the vital sphere and intends the Divine.
- 56.
From the beginning, Scheler was attracted to phenomenology and the reduction primarily as a ‘mental technique’ (geistige Technik) that could be coopted for the reconstruction of European Weltanschauung: ‘I subordinate the specific problems [of phenomenology] to the question of Weltanschauung’ (Spiegelberg, p. 271; cf. ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’, in GW III, p. 339). The early Scheler of the Abhandlungen und Aufsätze found the promise of phenomenology not in its application to Husserlian problems of pure logic, but precisely in its potential to make ‘full use of the great impulses which Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson’ had imparted to his thought (ibid., p. 339). For this reading of Scheler primarily as practitioner of an absolutized Lebensphilosophie under inspiration from Bergson and Nietzsche, rather than primarily as Husserlian phenomenologist, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, vol. III (Salzburg: Anton Pustet Verlag, 1937–39), pp. 84–85, 100–105, and 126.
- 57.
Scheler’s ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’ announces ‘a philosophy setting out from the experience [Er-leben] of the essential content of the world’ (‘Versuche’, p. 339). For Scheler’s rejection of Nietzschean-Bergsonian biologism, see Eugen Kelly, ‘Vom Ursprung des Menschen bei Max Scheler’, in Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’—Perspektiven und Wirkungen, ed. Christian Bermes, Wolfhart Henckmann, and Heinz Leonardy (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), pp. 254–5.
- 58.
Sy, pp. 85–6; cf. F, pp. 113; and ‘Zur Idee’, 185–6.
- 59.
For all his anti-Kantianism, Scheler agreed with Kant’s critique of material ethics that any ethics which defines goods as empirical things (Dinge / Güter) or states of affairs is at base either a crude hedonism aimed at fulfilling biological drives, or else a historical relativism (where what are presented as unchanging ‘values’ are actually the historically contingent values of a particular community). In any event, an ethics which presumes the existence of an empirical-sensual Dingwelt of really existing (wirklich) goods will fail to arrive at a priori, unchanging values (F, pp. 39–45). Scheler differs from Kant simply in affirming the existence of material value-content which is a priori and absolute, where Kant presumes that the only apriorism is formalism (F, pp. 44–5). Material, a priori values are non-empirical, apprehended in total independence of their empirical bearers, and in total abstraction ‘from the reality or unreality of the objects’ of intention, as well of any world (F, pp. 39–40, 380–381; cf. p. 265–6; see Henckmann, Max Scheler [München: C.H. Beck, 1998], pp. 43–4). Contra Kant, there do exist for Scheler a class of a priori emotional acts, which like rational acts are ‘equally independent from the psychophysical organization of our human species’, and equally ‘governed by eternal and absolute laws’ (F, pp. 259–260; cf. 259–66).
- 60.
Balthasar, Apokalypse III, p. 101. Scheler deeply internalized Nietzsche’s critique of Christian/bourgeois pseudo-values, which portrayed themselves as absolute, but were only strategies of ressentiment motivated by biological drives. For Scheler, if there were to be absolute values and essences, they must be of an order entirely unrelated to, and transcendent of, the human being as mere organism (as the mere ‘sick animal’, or ‘tool-animal’), an order that thus remains untouched by the Nietzschean critique of biological pseudo-values (‘Zur Idee’, pp. 185–6; ‘Das Ressentiment’, 109, 90–1; cf. F, pp. 289–90).
- 61.
‘Love’ for Scheler is the absolute form of ‘life’ which comes to appearance only in ‘giving up one’s life, indeed, offering up as sacrifice life in its essential existence itself (not merely individual life for collective life, one’s own life for another’s, lower life for higher life).’ Only in renouncing and immolating life itself, and all life as such, does the absolute value-realm of ‘the Kingdom of God, whose mystical bond and spiritual current is love, experience growth in value’ (‘Das Ressentiment’, pp. 90–1; cf. pp. 75–77.).
- 62.
Vom Ewigen im Menschen references this Husserlian epoche (this ‘“Absehen”, resp. “Dahingestelltseinlassen”, “Eingeklammertwerden” der Daseinsmodi’) as insufficiently radical. Scheler says it is subsequent to, and itself dependent upon, the moral upsurge (E, p. 86, footnote 1)
- 63.
As Balthasar summarizes, ‘what is abolished in the reduction is not, as for Husserl, the world as such, but rather the biological environment [nicht ... die Welt überhaupt, sondern die biologische Umwelt]. This reduction is the indispensable precondition which allows “the world as such” to emerge as the objective space of the person [geistigen Person], just as the environment corresponds to the biological, bodily creature’ (Apokalypse III, p. 129). Cf. Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, in GW VIII, p. 362.
- 64.
See F, p. 71: ‘The contrast between the a priori and a posteriori is concerned ... with two kinds of experience: pure and immediate experience, and experience conditioned and mediated by positing the natural organization of a real bearer of acts.’
- 65.
Henckmann, Max Scheler, p. 51.
- 66.
E, pp. 86–87. Emphasis added.
- 67.
The essay towards the beginning of Vom Ewigen im Menschen, ‘Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedingung des philosophischen Erkennens’ (E, pp. 61–99), was intended as the introduction to a never-finished volume with the title Phänomenologische Reduktion und voluntativer Realismus—eine Einleitung in die Theorie der Erkenntnis (see Henckmann, Max Scheler, pp. 29–30).
- 68.
E, p. 90 (partially following Noble’s translation, p. 95).
- 69.
Sy, pp. 137, 166, 169–70; F, pp. 395–6.
- 70.
E, p. 220.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, in GW VIII, p. 362 and p. 111; Philosophische Weltanschauung, in GW IX, pp. 78–9, 82–4.
- 73.
Die Wissensformen, p. 360.
- 74.
Philosophische Weltanschauung, pp. 82–3. The phrase ‘“nature” in God’ comes from Schelling. See Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in Sämmtliche Werke, erste Abteilung, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860), pp. 357–8.
- 75.
Ibid., pp. 83–4.
- 76.
Ibid., p. 81; Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60; Henckmann, Max Scheler, pp. 32–8.
- 77.
Die Wissensformen, p. 360.
- 78.
Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 80.
RkTh, p. 377.
- 81.
For immanence, see RkTh, pp. 377–80.
- 82.
For the transcendence type, see RkTh, pp. 377–381, 391–2, 409, 413.
- 83.
Thus Przywara—in a compelling world-play—designates immanence, transcendence, and transcendentality as absolutized (1) Zuständlichkeit, (2) Gegenständlichkeit, and (3) Tatständlichkeit, respectively. Zuständlichkeit: here, the inner ‘state / condition’ (Zustand) of consciousness—its resting in its own infinite interiority-feeling—is absolutized; Gegenständlichkeit: here, the radically transcendent ‘object’ (Gegenstand) of consciousness is absolutized; Tatständlichkeit: here, finally, the striving of consciousness itself is absolutized. In Tatständlichkeit, consciousness’ relation to the infinite unity of being is given ‘in that essential “in-between” of the “act” [Tat] which springs from a “condition” [Zustand] and is ordered towards an “object” [Gegenstand]’. The problematic of religion thus oscillates between an absolutization of immanent state, transcendent object, or immanent principle of striving towards transcendent object: the ‘infinity of feeling’, the ‘knowledge of infinity’, or the ‘infinity of striving’ (RkTh, pp. 386–7).
- 84.
From the survey of Scheler above, which identified Scheler’s significant inheritance from Fichte’s Tatidealismus, it is not surprising that Przywara will assign Scheler (along with Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Nicolai Hartmann, and Bergson) to the type of transcendentality, in which consciousness-as-Tat is absolutized.
- 85.
RkTh, pp. 382–3. Here Przywara indicates the difference between an overemphasized transcendentality, and the creaturely nature of genuine metaphysics: ‘Indeed, true metaphysics believes in an “essence”, and determination of the “essence” is its goal. Yet this is not a goal that we are forever only seeking after purely asymptotically, but rather one which we step-by-step realize [verwirklichen], even if we never fully realize it, since fundamentally only the all-penetrating eye of God measures the depths of the creature’ (Gottgeheimnis der Welt, p. 224).
- 86.
RkTh, p. 397. For this appraisal of Cohen and Marburg Kantianism, see Gott, in Schriften II, p. 337. Przywara often speaks of the Kantian transcendental subject and the Sollen as ‘beingless’ (seinslos) and beinglessly ‘suspended within itself’. E.g., ‘Kantischer und katholischer Geistestypus’, in Ringen der Gegenwart II, pp. 734–6.
- 87.
For these passages on the ‘transcendentality type’, see RkTh, pp. 388, 377–383, 397. One can already make out the ‘transcendental’ tilt of Scheler, who sees himself primarily as an ‘ethically’ oriented—and in some phases, ‘voluntaristic’—thinker. See the reference to ‘voluntative realism’ above.
- 88.
RkTh, p. 407. ‘For the type of the “infinity of striving”, to which there corresponds, in the philosophy of religion, the transcendentalism of the “God-idea”, God is the essence of creation, which its existence ceaselessly struggles upward to attain’ (ibid., p. 387).
- 89.
RkTh, p. 420.
- 90.
RkTh, pp. 408–9.
- 91.
RkTh, p. 388; pp. 392–4. Przywara gives the formal basis of this argument in AE II, §5–6, esp. §5.3 (pp. 194–5) and §6.3 (pp. 201–3). Hegel and Heidegger are the primary cases in point. In Przywara’s terms, to negate pure logic (grounded in the principle of identity) into pure dialectic is merely to transmute dialectic into a ‘yet more unconditional’ form of the pure logic of the principle of identity (p. 195). The creaturely metaphysics of the analogia entis, on the other hand, flows from the principle of non-contradiction. And when this principium contradictionis is ‘decommissioned’ and replaced with the principle of dialectic (the absolute ‘contradiction-identity’ which is equivalent to identity) ‘the ground of God is usurped’ (p. 202). The principle of non-contradiction gives both the ‘minimum’ and the ‘maximum of the (ontic-noetic) “ground” of the creature’: because the creature is defined within finite, determinate limits (creature A cannot be φ and ~φ at one and the same time), the transcendence of God who alone is the self-identity of ‘I am who am’ is preserved (p. 202). To define the creature as pure indeterminacy, or ‘absolute contradiction’ is covertly to define the creature as a potential self-identity with the entirety of its essence and with all things. For a discussion of Przywara’s deployment of the principle of non-contradiction in this section of AE, including what is in my view a salutary critique, see Ragnar M. Bergem, ‘Transgressions: Erich Przywara, G.W.F. Hegel and the Principle of Non-Contradiction’, Forum Philosophicum 21:1 (Spring 2016).
- 92.
RkTh, p. 408.
- 93.
RkTh, p. 420.
- 94.
RkTh, p. 408. These philosophies have no genuine conception of God, but merely give the name ‘God’ to an absolutized facet of human consciousness.
- 95.
RkTh, p. 409.
- 96.
Correspondingly, there also exist the ‘structural laws’ of oscillation ‘towards and away from’ transcendence, and oscillation ‘towards and away from’ transcendentality (RkTh, pp. 384–5).
- 97.
RkTh, p. 383.
- 98.
RkTh, p. 384. Or, as in RB, Przywara sees Scheler as a blending of the Schopenhauer-Nietzsche-Bergson lineage (transcendentality) with the ‘platonizing lineage of Brentano-Eucken-Husserl’ (immanence) (RB, p. 53).
- 99.
Scheler often denies that his ‘primacy of love and feeling’ is a ‘voluntarism’, since he distinguishes loving and feeling from willing (Wollen). Przywara, though, is intending ‘voluntarism’ more generally to mean a philosophy which takes a non-intellectual force (be it willing, loving, feeling, struggling, suffering, etc.) as the ground of reality. Scheler is unquestionably voluntarist in this sense.
- 100.
‘Drei Richtungen in Phänomenologie’, p. 258.
- 101.
RkTh, p. 482.
- 102.
Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83.
- 103.
Ibid., p. 82. Cf. Przywara, In und Gegen, p. 53.
- 104.
Scheler, F, 396. See Przywara, RB, pp. 43–4, 53–4, 99. Ultimately, Scheler conceives of ‘an essentially personalistic world’, which, as personal, can only be known in the ‘love-acts ... which are thus ‘founded’ in the ‘amare Deum in Deo’, that is, in the spiritual co-enactment of the uncreated love-act (RB, p. 99). ‘In this way, then … the objectivity of our knowledge in its entire scope (knowledge of being and knowledge of value) is given through participation in the source from which objective things have flowed out, that is, the ‘love’ which God is. And for that reason, all things become illuminated in their actual essence only in love as the co-enactment of that love which God is’ (ibid., p. 54). ‘Scheler first arrives at the unity of the “world” through “God”, so that “God” is almost its “immanent” unity’ (ibid., p. 173). See Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83; and Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60.
- 105.
Scheler projects this creaturely dialectic upwards into God, and enshrines the rhythms of nature as an intradivine dynamic (‘the godlike Drive of “nature” in God’ [Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83]).
- 106.
Emphasis added. This is the summation of Martha Zechmeister, quoting Przywara in Humanitas. Der Mensch gestern und morgen (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952), p. 30; and Augustinus. Die Gestalt als Gefüge (Leipzig: Hegner, 1934), p. 81. See Zechmeister, Gottes-Nacht, p. 105.
- 107.
The important passages on ‘world’ (Welt) in Formalism are indicative (F, pp. 392–395). The ‘world’ is only objective and absolute precisely as the world ‘of’ a person, as the realm of the essential interrelations immediately self-given ‘for the pure and formless act of the person’ (F, p. 393). All other forms of objectivity or ‘universal validity’ (Allgemeingültigkeit) which could exist without being given in the formless, spontaneous acts of the person, ‘must either be falsehood or merely truth about daseins-relative objects’ (ibid.). Phenomenological (i.e., absolute) validity is ‘personal validity’. Likewise, the ‘realm of the things themselves [der Sache an sich]’ is such insofar as it belongs to ‘the world in which [the person] experiences herself’—so much so that ‘absolute being’ is person and world in their essential conjunction. Likewise, ‘absolute truth can only be personal [truth]’, just as ‘the absolute good’ can only be ‘a personal good’ (F, pp. 392–394). Cf. Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 84.
- 108.
E, pp. 86–7.
- 109.
Chief among these moves, for Przywara, is Scheler’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a rational, metaphysical (as opposed to a phenomenological-affective) account of the God-creature difference.
- 110.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Wolfhart Henckmann’s commentary speaks of Scheler’s ‘value-theory’ (Werttheorie) as ultimately a ‘valuation-theory’ (Wertungtheorie), in which the objectivity of values is not conceived of in terms of the independent existence of values, but rather on the basis of ‘valuation-feelings’ (Wertungsgefühle). See Wolfhart Henckmann, ‘Person und Wert. Zur Genesis einer Problemstellung’, in Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’—Perspektiven und Wirkungen, Christian Bermes et al. (Verlag Karl Alber: Freiburg, 2000), pp. 16–21.
- 111.
RkTh, pp. 408–9.
- 112.
RkTh, pp. 409, 400–1.
- 113.
For Przywara’s evaluation of Scheler’s late anthropology as ‘gnostic’, see ‘Tragische Welt’, p. 354 and In und Gegen, p. 53.
- 114.
RB, pp. 7–8. Przywara often emphasizes the central place in a creaturely metaphysics of the Thomistic doctrine ‘of body and spirit as unum ens’, and the essentially creaturely theory of knowledge as abstraction per sensibilium which issues from it (RkTh, pp. 479–80). Scheler’s anti-naturalism is irreconcilable with this empirical sensibility. Phenomenology’s immediate, intuitive Wesensschau, which usually rejects any notion of ‘scholastic abstraction’ from the senses, is, in Przywara’s view, ‘the way that leads to the usurpation of the divine gaze [des göttlichen Schauens]’ (‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262).
- 115.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Haskamp observes: ‘Scheler alternately names love, preferring, and feeling in one complex so that it remains unclear whether he intends to transfer to all, or only to certain mental-spiritual “functions”, the character of spontaneity’ (Haskamp, p. 75). Henckmann, too, notes that in the phenomenological and post-phenomenological period, Scheler leaves it unclear ‘in how far love and hate are still to be understood as feeling-states [Gefühle]’ (Henckmann, ‘Person und Wert’, p. 17). There is, then, both an attempt to mark out certain feelings as belonging to the absolute, personal sphere (Fühlen), as well as an equivocation between this absolutized region and the lower, psychophysical ‘feeling-states’ (Gefühle / Gefühlszustände).
- 116.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Far from a science of essences, ‘[i]nterpretation of life (Nietzsche), interpretation of history (Eucken), [and] interpretation of society (Weber) are, in reality, the concrete form of the Schelerian “pure gaze”’ (ibid.).
- 117.
In Przywara’s view, Scheler’s category of ‘value-being’ accomplishes just this reduction of being to intentionality, since value-being functions as a kind of being-as-not-being (see Haskamp, pp. 176–7). Przywara especially sees the Parmenidian ‘identity of thinking and being’ operative in Husserl, insofar as intentional consciousness itself becomes ‘the highest form of being’ (Gottgeheimnis, pp. 163–5). Despite Scheler’s pushing beyond Husserl in key respects, he too lapses into this Parmenidian identity (Gott, p. 248).
- 118.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262. This identification is easily visible in Scheler. The true essences of things and persons are ideas in God. God is pure ‘act-being’, or pure ‘love-act’. Apprehension of those essences comes about through my immediate co-enactment of the divine act which knows or loves them. The essences of things are thus immediately immanent to my act of knowing and loving them as the participated (divine) principle of my love- or knowledge-act. The being of objects is thus in large measure reduced to the innermost principle of my acts.
- 119.
For Przywara, this core problem reveals ‘the whole unresolved, liminal, transitional character [of phenomenology]: at once the high point of I-enclosed “objectivation”, and simultaneously the root of the opened-up I of “objectivity”—both in one.’ For Przywara, the Husserl-Scheler division in phenomenology is, then, is an oscillation within ‘the essential dialectic of the systematic Kant—admittedly within this [phenomenological] orientation so distant from the Kantian standpoint, and thereby so close to actual “objectivity” (as opposed to ... “objectivation”)’ (Gott, p. 259). The phenomenological attitudes which herald a breaking out of the subjective stance also stand in danger of sealing philosophy within a final subjectivism.
- 120.
Przywara, Gott, p. 258.
- 121.
Gott, p. 248.
- 122.
Ibid. As noted above: cf. RB, pp. 15–18; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 128, 218.
- 123.
Gott, p. 259.
- 124.
RB, pp. 25–6. ‘Drei Richtungen’, footnote to p. 258: ‘An diesem Punkte [des Kongruenzsystems zwischen Wert und Sein (Leben)] ist denn auch die Philosophie Schelers zusammengebrochen.’
- 125.
Gott, p. 258.
- 126.
RB, p. 65; cf. pp. 219, 182.
- 127.
Again, see RB, pp. 65, 219.
- 128.
RB, p. 133.
- 129.
RB, p. 105.
- 130.
RkTh, p. 483.
- 131.
RB, p. 65.
- 132.
See ‘Tragische Welt’, p. 353: Scheler’s thought is the union of two aspects, ‘[the] tragicistic (world and man as the Fall of God) and [the] humanistic (world and man as God)’—two aspects which are ‘not a contradiction, but a unity. Both are grounded in “man as the meaning [Sinn] of God”. Since God is the inmost essence of man, the concrete human being is necessarily the Fall of God. Tragicism is only the other side of humanitarianism ... Certainly the Abhandlungen und Aufsätze of Max Scheler already betray that his vision of the human being somehow bears divine traits. And if we inquire into the ultimate ground of why, in his investigations into ressentiment, the positive type appears almost as a self-lowering God, and the negative type as a personified Satan, surely his clear and final teaching on the human being as the site of encounter between an absolute good and an absolute evil furnishes the answer: the good-evil rift [Zwiespalt] of God torn asunder in the human being and asymptotically resolved through the human being: Deus in homine et per hominem [Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60].’
- 133.
Zechmeister, p. 105.
- 134.
See ‘Philosophies of Essence and Existence’, AE II §1, pp. 333–347, where Przywara develops further the fundamental difference separating ‘originally-sinful tragedy’ (erbsündige Tragik) from ‘Christian tragedy’—which is, ultimately, the spirituality of ‘fearing love and loving fear’ discussed below.
- 135.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 258.
- 136.
It ‘ought not be’. See RkTh, pp. 223–4, below.
- 137.
RkTh, pp. 483–4.
- 138.
RB, p. 220. As Przywara says, his final ‘clarification’ of Scheler requires that ‘the concept of Platonic participation [be] filled out by the Aristotelian concept of a true inner being of things.’
- 139.
RkTh, p. 483.
- 140.
RkTh, pp. 423–4; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 227–8 develops this principle in relation to ‘the misleading immediacy doctrine of Scheler (or better, of Scheler’s disciples)’.
- 141.
Gottgeheimnis, p. 228; Gott, pp. 335–6; cf. Ringen I, p. 256. For ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’, see RkTh, p. 403.
- 142.
RkTh, p. 426.
- 143.
RkTh, pp. 484–6.
- 144.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218, 223.
- 145.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218–220.
- 146.
Gottgeheimnis, p. 218. ‘And such is the blessed, little known communal mystery of knowing [Gemeinschaftsmysterium des Erkennens], that the world of objects offers itself in greater breadth and height and depth to every form of loving communal thinking and communal living [Miteinanderdenken und Miteinanderleben], because it is no longer the single, solitary subject that gazes on “his” world through the eyes of his enclosed, personal solitude, but rather the oneness of love, which fuses two souls—as much as the abyss between human being and human being allows—into one seeing. With the growth of the personal life of subjects, so also grows the fullness and depth of the world. And if something like a knowing-together of all humanity were possible—only to this glimpse would the true inexhaustible “in itself” of the world in some small measure disclose itself’ (ibid., p. 220–1). In a passage like this we see the profound and beautiful influence Scheler’s personalism had on Przywara’s early thought—especially those Schelerian notions of humanity’s spiritual solidarity, and the world’s truly disclosing itself only to the loving eyes of deep personal life.
- 147.
See RB, p. 73 and passim for Scheler’s rejection of this scholastic-Aristotelian epistemology.
- 148.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262.
- 149.
See Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009), pp. 28.
- 150.
‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 263; cf. RB, pp. 12–13. For this reason, Przywara’s central project in RB is to modify Schelerian phenomenology until it becomes fruitfully compatible with scholastic (Aristotelian-empirical) metaphysics, with its focus on exteriority and sense knowledge. To that end, RB puts Scheler’s personalism into dialogue with Newman’s, a Catholic personalism of feeling and love Przywara sees as compatible with scholastic metaphysics. For this Newmanian-Augustinian reshaping of Scheler’s system, see esp. RB, 33–5, 61–7, 92–5, 130–7, 149–68, 217–24.
- 151.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218.
- 152.
AE I, §8.2, p. 312. On this basis, Przywara argues throughout RB for the compatibility of ‘scholastic’ metaphysics and phenomenology as but two rhythmic moments in the same and single creaturely (‘back-and-forth’) science of being.
- 153.
It is difficult to capture the German here: ‘Wann sind wir fertig mit diesem unendlichen Progreß des Schauens und Ausschauens Gottes in allen Dingen?’
- 154.
The German auschöpfen means both ‘to exhaust’, and ‘to pour out’, and is related to schöpfen (to create; to ladle out; to draw forth).
- 155.
Gottgeheimnis, pp. 231–2.
- 156.
RkTh, p. 406; Gottgeheimnis, p. 232; RB, p. 220.
- 157.
RkTh, p. 463 cites Enarrationes in Psalmos on Psalm 118 (sermo 22, no. 6) as the source of this all-important Augustinian formula. See, for example, RB, pp. 220, 61–2; ‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus’ in Ringen der Gegenwart II, pp. 860–1; RkTh, pp. 406, 412, 467–8, 480, 485–7; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 193, 154; The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), pp. 91, 184–5, 234, 236; and J.H. Kardinal Newman. Christenum: Ein Aufbau, vol. 4, Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk (Freiburg: Herder, 1922), pp. 14, 79–80. See John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), p. 206: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; till you see Him to be a consuming fire, and approach Him with reverence and godly fear, as being sinners, you are not even in sight of the strait gate. I do not wish you to be able to point to any particular time when you renounced the world (as it is called), and were converted; this is a deceit. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.’ For a discussion of ‘loving fear and fearing love’, see Kenneth R. Oakes, ‘Three Themes in Przywara’s Early Theology’, The Thomist 74.2 (2010): pp. 283–4, 302–08; as well as Przywara, ‘Weg zu Gott’, in Schriften II, p. 22 (cited in Oakes, p. 283).
- 158.
Gottgehimenis, p. 232.
- 159.
Przywara remarks that there always was a ‘true kernel of the misleading immediacy doctrine of Scheler—or better, of his disciples’ (Gottgeheimnis, pp. 227–8). RB insists that Scheler’s phenomenology of religious experience is already implicitly an experience of the analogia entis, despite Scheler’s insistence on ‘immediacy’. Scheler’s phenomenological immediacy of God is in reality the ‘mediatedness’—the distance—of God as that distance gives itself ‘immediately’ to consciousness (RB, p. 25). Authentic phenomenology accepts this fact, which, Przywara underscores, is not a fact borrowed from or imposed by metaphysics, but one internal to phenomenological experience (RB, 109). As Przywara later wrote of the middle Scheler, ‘Indwelling this brilliant schematic—unbeknowst to Scheler—was the ur-Catholic element of the transcendent-immanent God, the “God beyond us and God in us”, the God of the analogia entis’ (In und Gegen, p. 51).
- 160.
RkTh, p. 406.
- 161.
Ibid.
- 162.
‘Transzendentalität vor Gott’: RkTh, p. 482. As the early Scheler himself says, knowledge requires a posture of ‘humility’: ‘a true transformation under the eye of the Lord’ (RB, p. 64; quoting Scheler, ‘Zur Rehabilitierung der Tugend’, in GW III, pp. 20–1.
- 163.
True creaturely becoming is, however not a ‘pure’, boundless becoming (which would resolve into an intra-creaturely absolute ground), but an irresolvable tension of being in-and-beyond becoming (RkTh, p. 403). Creaturely becoming images the creator only in this irresolvability (this ‘being vertically open’): the Catholic faith believes in ‘an infinite God, who reveals himself in the “becoming into infinity” of the creature, and who therefore does not (as in a platonic-mystical-Reformation ethos) condemn this becoming, but who precisely in this becoming allows His infinity to be felt’ (‘Paul Natorp—Clemens Bäumker’, in Ringen I, p. 256; emphasis added. Cf. RkTh, p. 409; and ‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus in der Kontinuität katholischer Aszese und Mystik’, in Ringen II, pp. 858–9).
- 164.
Himmelreich der Seele, pp. 48, 43; cf. 53, 79. I have translated Przywara’s German, rather than citing an English translation of this passage in Irenaeus.
- 165.
Newman’s famous words appear more than once in Przywara’s writings: in the epigraph to Wandlung: ein Christenweg, in Schriften I, p. 381; in Gott, p. 336; and in The Heart of Newman, pp. 217–18.
- 166.
RkTh, p. 422.
- 167.
Spiegelberg, pp. 299–30 (citing Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, in GW IX, 71). See Philosophische Weltanschauung, pp. 83–4, cited above.
- 168.
‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus’, in Ringen II, p. 861.
- 169.
AE II §1, pp. 346–7. For the Ignatian dimension of Przywara’s spiritual works, see Brian P. Dunkle, S.J., ‘Service in the Analogia Entis and Spiritual Works of Erich Przywara’, Theological Studies 73.2 (2012): pp. 339–362.
- 170.
AE II §1, p. 339. This creaturely vision of love within servant-like becoming is what Przywara in the passage above called ‘the Catholic liberation of unending striving’ (RkTh, pp. 423–4). Perhaps this ‘patient’ striving is the theological fulfillment of what William Desmond calls ‘the twinning of patience and striving’ in our mindfulness to the porosity of being; see his essay above, sec. 2.
Bibliography
Abbreviations and Texts from Scheler’s Gesammelte Werke (Bern and München: Francke Verlag, 1954–1982. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1986–1997):
GW II: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus [1913/1916]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 5th ed. 1954 [abbreviated F].
GW III: ‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’ [1912], ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’ [1914], and ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens. Nietzsche-Dilthey-Bergson’ [1913]. In Vom Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1955 [abbr. U].
GW V: Vom Ewigen im Menschen [1921]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1955 [abbr. E].
GW VII: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart [2nd ed.: 1923]. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. 1973 [abbr. Sy].
GW VIII: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft [1926]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1960.
GW IX: Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [1928] and Philosophische Weltanschauung [1928]. In Späte Schriften. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. 1979.
GW X: ‘Absolutsphäre und Realsetzung der Gottesidee’ [1915–1916]. In Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 1. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1957.
Texts Cited from Pryzwara, Schriften, vols. I–III (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962):
In Schriften I, Frühe Religiöse Schriften: Wandlung. Ein Christenweg [1925].
In Schriften II, Religionsphilosophische Schriften: Gottgeheimnis der Welt. Drei Vorträge über die geistige Krise der Gegenwart [1923]; Gott. Fünf Vorträge über das religionsphilosophische Problem [1925]; Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie [1927; abbr. RkTh] / Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion. Translated by Alan Coates Bouquet. London: Oxford UP, 1935 [not referenced or consulted here].
Schriften III, Analogia entis [part I, 1932; part II, 1939–1959] / Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by David Bentley Hart and John Betz. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014 [abbr. AE I and II].
Other Writings of Przywara
Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J.H. Newman. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1923 [abbr. RB].
Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927. 2 vols. Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1929.
Augustinus. Die Gestalt als Gefüge. Leipzig: Hegner, 1934.
In und Gegen. Stellungnahmen zur Zeit. Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955.
Humanitas. Der Mensch gestern und morgen. Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952.
Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk. Vol. 4 of J.H. Kardinal Newman. Christentum: Ein Aufbau. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1922. Published in English (yet with Przywara’s commentary and all of vol. 4 excised) as The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010.
Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie. Stimmen der Zeit 115 (July 1928): 252–264.
Other Authors
Bergem, Ragnar M. Transgressions: Erich Przywara, G.W.F. Hegel and the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Forum Philosophicum 21(1) (Spring 2016).
Bermes, Christian, and Wolfhart Henckmann, eds. 2000. Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’—Perspektiven und Wirkungen. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber.
Crosby, John. 1998. The Individuality of Human Persons: A Study in the Ethical Personalism of Max Scheler. The Review of Metaphysics 52 (1): 21–50.
Dunkle, Brian P. 2012. Service in the Analogia Entis and Spiritual Works of Erich Przywara. Theological Studies 73 (2): 339–362.
Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara. 2002. Die Newman-Rezeption in den 20er Jahren in Deutschland: Edith Stein im Umkreis von Maria Knoepfler, Romano Guardini und Erich Przywara. In ‘Herz spricht zum Herzen.’ John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in seiner Bedeutung für das deutsche Christentum, ed. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, 51–70. Annweiler: Plöger.
Gertz, Bernhard. 1969. Glaubenswelt als Analogie. Die theologische Analogie-Lehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in der Auseindersetzung um die analogia fidei. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag.
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Vale, M.Z. (2019). Loving Being: Erich Przywara’s Engagement with Max Scheler. In: Mezei, B., Vale, M. (eds) Philosophies of Christianity. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_13
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